Alternate Reality Games:

Composition, Collaboration, and Real Community Play

• Abstract
• Introduction
• World Without Oil
• Composition
• Collaboration
• Community Play
• Writing Prompts
• ARG Resources
• References
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• 

 

Composition

Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe (2007) begin their introductory chapter to Multimodal composition:  Resources for teachers by asking the question: “Why multimodal composition?”  In response, they point out that “the texts that students have produced in response to composition assignments have remained essentially the same for the past 150 years. They consist primarily of words on a page, arranged into paragraphs” (p. 1).  While most academic writing is bound to this age-old standard of print text on a white, A4 sized page, composition in the “real world” outside of the academy has changed markedly during that timeframe.  Takayoshi, Selfe, and many others argue that this asymmetrical relationship undermines the stated goals of most composition and rhetoric pedagogy: to equip students with the skills and literacies necessary to contribute meaningfully to an ongoing (usually academic) discourse.

Some of today’s most compelling and effective arguments are composed not on the static white page, but in text boxes on web pages, in instant messenger chat windows, and via SMS text messaging.  Instead of writing a letter to the editor of a publication, students are more likely to contribute to a public debate by using their cellular telephones to record video and post it to the Internet or to “blog” about their point of view on an issue.  Many students are more experienced with posting comments to online social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook than they are with writing their thoughts in offline diaries or journals.  These are the forms of an emerging Web 2.0 media landscape that will continually challenge those trying to ensure that their voices will be heard above the cacophony. 

“To be responsible teachers,” Anne Wysocki (2003) states, “we need to help our students (as well as ourselves) learn how different choices in visual arrangement in all texts (on screen and off) encourage different kinds of meaning making and encourage us to take up (overtly or not) various values” (p.186). James Paul Gee (2007) echoes this in the introduction to What Videogames Have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy:

In the modern world, print literacy is not enough.  People need to be literate in a great variety of different semiotic domains.  If these domains involve print, people often need the print bits, of course.  However, the vast majority of domains involve semiotic (symbolic, representational) resources besides print and some don’t involve print as a resource at all.  Furthermore, and more important, people need to be able to learn to be literate in new semiotic domains throughout their lives.  If our modern, global, high-tech, and science-driven world does anything, it certainly gives rise to new semiotic domains and transforms old ones at an ever faster rate.  (p. 20)

Videogames are the “semiotic domain,” or “set of practices that recruits one or more modalities…to communicate distinctive types of meanings” that form the core of Gee’s study (p. 19).  ARG players and creators are careful to distinguish the form from videogames that are framed by the television screen or computer monitor and require the player to take on a specific role and/or avatar; however, if video gaming, as Gee contends, “is a multimodal literacy par excellence,” then ARGs’ “frameless” presentation and ubiquitous interface makes them even more so (p. 18).  Multimodal presentation and active audience engagement with the game make for important connections between the two.  Simulations such as videogames and ARGs use images, sound, navigation, and text to construct rich and vibrant “alternate realities,” to tell stories, and to convey meaningful messages.

Like stories told in books, films, and videogames, most ARGs provide players with the core texts that construct the narrative (World Without Oil, a game I introduce elsewhere, presents an interesting departure from this approach).  ARG designers (or, “Puppetmasters”), as Stewart notes, use nearly all available means to tell their story.  Players don’t encounter characters through mere descriptions; they get to know them through the same technologies they use to learn about their friends and colleagues: players read the characters’ blogs and email messages, listen to their voicemail messages, see the items they link to, mine characters’ pages on social networking sites for associations, and talk to them in real-time via instant messaging. Date book entries, comments on tourism websites, messages to “friends,” and found maps tell us where they’ve been and, in many cases, where they plan to go. These media allow us to “know” the characters in the same way we know real people.  In many ways, we don’t get to know about the characters, we get to know them.

Stewart highlights these points in his introduction to The Beast when he describes the experience of authoring content for such a project as a “pop culture inferno” which includes nearly every available genre of writing in its development.

So there was the project: create an entire self-contained world on the web, say a thousand pages deep, and then tell a story through it, advancing the plot with weekly updates, concealing each new piece of narrative in such a way that it would take clever teamwork to dig it out. Create a vast array of assets--custom photos, movies, audio recordings, scripts, corporate blurbage, logos, graphic treatments, web sites, flash movies--and deploy them through a net of (untraceable) web sites, phone calls, fax systems, leaks, press releases, phony newspaper ads, and so on ad infinitum.

Composing in such a wide variety of genres and forms invites students to not only explore the craft of writing but also to examine multiple approaches to problem solving and argumentation. ARG production and play allow students an opportunity to experiment with both form and content, exploring new media and methods for communication.

Furthermore, the multimodal presentations that characterize ARGs require players to tap a range of skills and knowledge—to deploy what Gee calls “multiple literacies”—in the interest of uncovering and navigating the story.  Some specific examples of these literacies are as follows:

What these three literacies have in common is their reliance on pattern recognition, close reading, and synthesis to be effective—all skills we hope to equip our student with to become both responsible scholars and citizens.

Collaboration >

 

J. James Bono, University of Pittsburgh