Haley Talks About Developing Swag and Props for Alternate Reality Games

Haley talks about making swag and props for Alternate Reality Games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/arg-swagmaker-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the ARG Fest and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Haley: I’m Haley Moore. I was a swag developer, prop maker for Chasing A Wish 2 and the Alias ARG.

Interviewer: When you say, prop maker, what exactly does a prop maker do?

Haley: What we do is what I call artifacts, which are basically little items that sort of indicate the realness of the world that we are creating. Basically, what we do is take, for instance, from inside the game and sort of make them real. We’ve done this a lot of ways and a lot of different ARGs. People have gotten little stones from the original Chasing A Wish and for my one I did masks that represented different aspects of the reality that we were creating in the game.

Interviewer: When you go about designing these things, is it just mainly you look at the ARG itself and then just make props based on that, or do you have to actually work with the designer to make specific props? How does it work?

Haley: Well, a lot of the stuff that we did was symbolic because I worked with Dave Szulborski and he’s very much into the symbolism and being very mystical and sort of out there in the stratosphere which is absolutely wonderful.

Basically, what we did before Catching A Wish was he had six phases to the game and each one was represented. There were history, nature, knowledge, the spirit, man and technology. Those were sort of phases of the game, but each one was encapsulated in the mask. So, what we had was…

For example, we did a whole thing about… For knowledge, with Lauren a public library was being torn down. They were going to digitize it and we had to save the library, and the mask for that was this tree growing out a book that represented that. I was going to say, also in the world of chase the wish there are ways that architects get crystallized.

In the original one they were stones. In the second one they were masks. It’s all symbolic, but in the world part of the story telling is that symbolism is sort of the coming of the wheel.

Interviewer: When you design these, do you make just one of these for the game, or do you have to make one for each player? How does that work?

Haley: It depends. All the ones that I’ve done… Well, actually, scratch that. Sometimes, you’ll make one artifact that’s more of a trigger hunt aspect, and it’s done a lot with other things that are non-ARGs, like treasure hunts where you are supposed to find a treasure, and that represents winning the game.

It sort of depends on how complicated things want to be. If you’re making something really intricate like the master, you would glue one and everybody’s looking. If you’re making something smaller like for the Alias ARG we made these little coins, and then we got them out to as many players as we possibly can. Whoever wanted one, we’d give one.

Interviewer: When you are designing for that, then do send it out through the normal mail, or do people have to find them in some geographic location, for the things that get out to all the players?

Haley: For the things that get out to all the players, we’ve done mail. We’ve distributed them at ARG Fests which is what we did with the coins. I’m trying to think if there’s… We’ve had people find caches of multiple swag and sort of hope that they’d give them to other people, too. But, mostly we try to give the players the swag in their hands from the creators as much as possible. We try to avoid mailings.

Interviewer: Can you talk about, I guess, some of the experiences the players have had once they receive these items. Do they become collector items? Do people do something different with them? How do the players actually treat these items that they get, and what are some of the design constraints that you have as you develop it?

Haley: There are no design constraints at all. I’ll tell you, people treasure the things that they get because that’s a physical manifestation of the experience that they’ve had. So, they keep them, and actually they have what’s called The ARG Museum here at ARG Fest where people bring back all of the treasures, their swag, that they’ve gotten from previous games. But, yeah, there are no design constraints.

Interviewer: OK. Before I let you get to speed dating, the one question is: you talk about the designer giving stuff to the players. Is there anything where you have to design stuff for players to give to other players, or how does that work?

Haley: I’m trying to think if we’ve ever done that in one of our games. I know that we’ve given something to one player to give to another player to get it to them. Sometimes, when you have something that needs to get from one in-game to another location, so you will give it to them sort of as a courier. A lot of the times we try to make the drop on our own so that they get their swag [laughs].

Interviewer: What’s in store then for the future of prop design? Are you looking at new ways of designing stuff? Are you experimenting with new material or new types of context for why people should get props?

Haley: I really like props in games. I won’t say a whole lot because I want to keep this short, but I will say that I am experimenting with a couple of new things. One of them is resin casting so that you can actually make more than one of a very complicated prop. Even now, I’m working on ways to make an artifact and make a couple of it just in case somebody doesn’t find it or you want it to be copied. Then, you can do that.

Interviewer: What about customization so, maybe, a prop that’s dependent on the name of a player or something else like that? Is that something that you guys have experimented with or seen watching an ARG?

Haley: Really, you can do anything. I haven’t customized any swag to the player that was getting it in the past, but it’s not out of the question.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.