Schmeldritch

Dog Houses, RPGs and Pudding

2008-04-16T15:43:11Z

I'm in the doghouse, and I deserve to be. I'm not sure I'll make the dog collar a permanent fashion accessory (we're pretty casual around here for such elaborate bling), but it is appropriate in the short term. When clients ask me why I'm wearing a dog collar with a tag labeled "Providence," I'll explain to them that some really important people wanted to remind me that my clients are taking me away from what I'm supposed to be doing.

One day, I'll tell you the story about how the Poet snagged the Puppetmaster, the Sculptor and the Cultist up into a mad scientist project, all while Sploit got sucked into some kind of psychological testing project. Lesson: even a deep team bench can be devestated by the realities of people chasing a living (the flip side being, of course, it is so much easier if someone is paying you a wage and telling you it is your job.)

Solutions: an even deeper team bench and a recontemplation of what it means to provision them. Armchair quarterbacking yourself mid-recovery is gauche, though, and I'm already in the Lovecraftian doghouse. Why bring a knife to a rocket propelled grenade launcher fight?

Your outpouring of friendly support is amazing, and has barely felt like stalking at all! I'm humbled by it and don't take any of you for granted. I've missed you too. The pre-production wheels are already in motion of making sure we earned that support, although the proof will be in the pudding.

Creating a Monster

2008-03-07T16:31:58Z

As any scientist will tell you, it is the unexpected result that is the most intriguing. Unfortunately, for us, the unexpected came in the form of what we call the Eldritch Curse. We can't say for sure that it's a curse. Maybe one is just not meant to play with the dark, weird, and otherworldly. Whatever the case, we've known for a year now that there is something strange and magical about working on Eldritch Errors and, with every Book, we brace ourselves for the unpredictable. From death to birth and with gunshots or car accidents, we have learned to be prepared for whatever the universe throws our way. With Book Three, easily the most intense and complex chapter to date, we knew that whatever happened, it would be big.

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Unfortunately, the universe demanded choices in return. Time, sanity, and passion were thrown on the table and, before we knew it, we lost time and our lives became chaotic and unpredictable as we struggled to hold on to the rest.

With every setting sun, we believe that tomorrow is the day that we will triumph against this universe and win back time. The fact that we have come to accept, though, is that we just don't know that tomorrow will be the day and, as the days pass, our desire to regroup and rebuild grows stronger. For as much as we love the world we are playing with, it pales to our feelings for those playing in it with us. So, even if tomorrow is the day that time is, once again, ours, we ask for your continued patience as we use that time to gather what we have and figure out not how to make it work but how to bring it back to life and how to do that in a way that will immerse you, terrify you, and fulfill you in ways that will blow your mind. For you and the monster we all are playing with deserve nothing less.

See You After Book Three

2008-01-23T02:43:37Z

When I saw the full moon in the sky during the pre-dawn drive to work, I knew it was time to shutter up Schmeldritch. Otherwise, people might wonder if Book Three has started or not, and you might as well say it has: once the interludes are over, we tend to get pretty quiet here in favor of EldritchErrors.com to help new players jump in. It is always so hard to avoid indulging in one brief William Castle moment before shuttering this place up, though. It will be the first Schmeldritch post new participants stumble into for a while. This time, I might even indulge and give myself two brief moments to set that stage.

It goes without saying that the Eldritch crew thinks I'm insane, they've grown used to the mad scientist cackle coming from my office from time to time. My expectations for "Red Moon Rising" are obviously higher than they were even for "Scream in the Mountains," and after that many of us were going "holy crap!" May I recommend that experienced participants change their tin foil hats daily during Book Three and leave it at that?

For new participants, welcome to the party, you're still fashionably early. Don't worry that Eldritch Errors has been going since last April, Book Three was developed with you in mind. It was also developed with Book One participants in mind, as well, so you'll have lots to discover together. You might even argue that new participants only missed the confusing, complicated setup to the real action.

Until we see each other again, I leave you with a quote from Lovecraft: "I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous."

Blame the New Staffer

2008-01-23T02:16:45Z

It all started when that strange, short new staff member reported in for duty just before the holidays. It claimed it came from the "home office" and that it was paid for out of someone else's budget, but it refused to give us a picture of when it was 12 years old for our staff page (claims that was before photography was invented) and didn't want a phone extention. Mike tried to distract him with the "origami-a-day" calendar, but he was more interested in our production plans for Book Three.

I think we've managed to keep his creepy tentacles out of the storyline, but I totally blame him for falling behind on the meta materials, including the amazing stories you've been telling. I'm told they are calling it the Cthecret Cthanta Worm. We call it Worst Intern Ever, but only when we think it isn't watching us.

Based On Actual Events

2007-12-28T18:16:43Z

There was a moment when I could have killed the comment: the moment I confirmed it again for the fact checker. We knew we'd start talking about it more explicitly in 2008, but was a minor detail in an unreviewed article the right place to let such a critical detail about our baby first appear, after only hinting at it before? How would I write this very post, to frame the same information in our own voice? I could even imagine the hypothetical Unfiction thread to go with the hypothetical article. Then I confirmed for Wired's fact checker that yes, we do intend both graphic novels and a television show as part of the revenue generating plans for Eldritch Errors. Participants in Eldritch deserve at least a little more detail to go with that unexpected revelation, as we've kept a few critical concepts under wrap for a year now. ]]> Patience & Product Development

I'd hinted in the past that one of the differences between our business model and some of the self-sustaining ARG attempts in the past could be described as patience: a willingness to deploy the revenue models later rather make the immersive experience itself bear that burden from the beginning. In truth, we've all understood that was a gentle dodge of the question, and most of the team members who've worked on Eldritch Errors knew the more nuanced truth and why obscuring that for a while was a strategic necessity for the experiment. We instead tried to nudge you in more oblique ways. We described you as the collective protagonist instead of the sidekick, and how the story was yours as much as ours. Characters implied how the choices you were making had huge ramifications.

Among the storytellers, we sometimes even describe the immersive experience in terms of how it will appear in later incarnations ("I can picture that in the graphic novel") and I cackle secretly in delight at how Eldritch Errors films/graphic novels/television shows can be labeled "BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS" with complete honesty and only the smallest of winks. I can imagine that new audience's delight in discovering the story didn't stop with that last page or frame or scene, and that in fact many of those Sentries are real and have continued their efforts. Imagine their delight when they can jump in and immerse in something they first experienced through a media product that they purchased or tuned into.

This also gives us a flexibility as storytellers. If you were a participant in Book One, think about how you would have described DC and B.A. at the end of "The Providence Prophecies" and how you might describe them with what you know now after "Scream in the Mountains." If I had been selling a graphic novel of "The Providence Prophecies" before Book Two, there are details I might have needed to obscure (like who mailed the packages) that now I might no longer need to obscure. Imagine how I might construct a graphic novel that wasn't available for purchase until next summer, more than a year after the events that made up the immersive Book One. The immersive experience might already be up to Book Five by then. It is the knowledge available inside the immersive experience at the time the product is released that helps define how we can or can't tell the story that's already happened.

Who Buys? Who Creates? Who Stars?

Do I imagine that that those of you participating in Eldritch Errors right now might be among those who buy a graphic novel, or tune into a television show, or buy the DVD of a movie? Yes, but you are more the stars of the product and the collaborators in that story development behind it, with the product intended for graphic novel buyers and television show viewers and DVD purchasers. What we didn't want participants to do, though, was to feel a sense of stage fright, especially not unnecessarily, and especially not early.

By intention, none of the above gives you a specific glimpse into exactly what we have up our sleeves, but it does tell you the process by which we plan on cracking the nut. Since this is new terrain, it also seemed worth establishing what we wouldn't do or might do, as it is tied implictly to the trust we build with you. To understand it, though, you have to divide the kinds of novels/films/shows we could potentially make into at least two categories.

We could call the first division "Documentary Products": we went into "Scream in the Mountains" thinking about post morteming the question "could we have shot a short or a feature?" That would have been a documentary product, and for us the rules of engagement would have been "whatever we shoot at live events is fair game as long as the lens is explicit and we get a release form before we create a derivative product from the immersive experience itself." You won't ever be surprised that we were shooting, and if you are in it you'll never be surprised about how it gets used. We're not out to "Punk'd" anyone.

We could call the second division "Dramatic License Products". These products stem from retellings of the events, but nothing says the author of that work didn't introduce their own biases into their retellings and recreations (which might be clouded in unwitnessed uncertainty in the true documentation of the story.) Imagine the difference between how a certain camper with an axe might tell his story versus the way a Weekly World News writer might have penned the story. The rules of engagement here are fuzzier, but the need to make rush judgements is far reduced because we have less need to capture things as they are happening or lose the opportunity forever.

Our plans for Eldritch Errors involve both documentary and dramatic license products. Each of those products could spin off derivative products of their own of either type. I could imagine both a documentary product in television (a "reverse reality show" of a sort) as well a television product based upon a dramatic license graphic novel retelling of the same story. They might even live at different phases of the life of the Eldritch Errors Universe measured by years. Because the quality of the immersive experience you are engaged in is part of the ultimate "engine of authorship quality" that makes each subsequent retelling work, you can assume that we'll always err on the side of being the most protective of the immersive experience over any of those other products, even though they must ultimately reach a far larger audience for them to be viable long-term business model revenue sources.

Wesley Sizemore & The Quiet Zone

2007-12-28T12:10:07Z

The Quiet Zone is one of the strangest chunks of real estate in North America, and an "alternate history" of how it came to be lies at the heart of the tale we're asking participants to dive into with Eldritch Errors. If Book One was in part inspired by real Sentries, then Book Two was inspired at least in part by the Guardian of the Quiet, Wesley Sizemore, an eye witness to the 1988 telescope collapse in Green Bank. This recent PBS & Wired Science segment on the Quiet Zone (noticed by Varin) explores the Zone further.

Calling On Inner Natural Storytelling

2007-12-11T18:25:07Z

In Book One, we asked you to show us your creativity. For Book Two, we want to encourage something a bit more in the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft -- we want you to tap the Eldritch storyteller in you and share it with everyone else. As storytellers we believe we can use anything under the Sun to tell our story, and so we believe you can too. No messy self-addressed envelopes this time around, just a quick email to inquiry at this blog's domain with a link to where we can enjoy your EE creation and the address where we should send your participatory commemoration. Those of you who have already been telling stories can count yourself a step ahead of crowd.

We've got a mystery to share with you, too. We don't want to show you the back yet, even though there isn't anything on the back you haven't already experienced. Sometimes, though, what you choose to focus on from a Book makes a detail suddenly more significant. We owe it to you let that discovery come first from inside the narrative rather than from a commemoration of it. You'll have an opportunity early in Book 3 to clarify your understanding of something you already know, and when that happens what's on the back will seem more natural and less like a reveal.

Open Source Literary Game Design in the 1920s

2007-12-09T16:36:05Z

I've been writing for the last month about H.P. Lovecraft, meandering from talking about his work to his scientific leanings to his letter writing. It has made me look like such a tremendous geek (or at least that's what my commercial clients tell me.) Part of that was certainly to help illuminate what I mean when I say that Eldritch Errors is inspired more by the author than his works, but I also want to set up a more radical proposition. Lovecraft was working with ideas from the 21st century, but he was forced to explore them with 19th and 20th century technologies (such as letter writing instead of email.)

Lovecraft was an alternate reality game designer, a writer who believed his stories must be "devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax," stories that he unfolded like forensic investigations. He was also an Open Source advocate and loved implied share alike licensing (although I suspect the license I linked too is more restrictive than what he believed in.) He delighted when others lifted references from his work and equally delighted incorporating their references back into his work. He had an intimate relationship with his readers, because he was frequently the one mailing them the manuscript to read. It shouldn't be surprising that tabletop gaming and non-tabletop gaming have so embraced his work (now public domain) and played such a key role in preserving and extending it.

]]> Marvel for a moment with me that the combination of traits Lovecraft played with (game design, open source, letter writing, weird fiction) has produced a 70 year legacy of "fan art" richer and more diverse than his own writings ever really were. Yes, much of that fan art has been created by young gamers and writers and filmmakers playing with the most obvious and surface of Lovecraft's themes. Some of that fan art, though, has been from people like Neil Gaimen and Stephen King. In the introduction King wrote to another book, he described the story that was too scary for even him to write and offered it up to other writers who might want to take a stab at it, in the finest tradition of Lovecraft's Open Source perspective.

Stephen King was in Providence strolling past a pawn shop when he had a flash of inspiration. He imagined a stained ordinary pillow in the shop window, and imagined himself wandering into the store to inquire about it, only to be told that it was the pillow of H.P. Lovecraft himself. Imagine the horrible nightmares Lovecraft had on that pillow, and what residue it might have left if you bought it and took it home to rest your own sleeping head. He decided, after much effort, that he couldn't bring himself to go there, that to do the concept justice was too scary of a proposition, even for Stephen King. Last year, a short filmmaker made "Lovecraft's Pillow" and happily explained it was a "Stephen King concept". Viva la Open Source!

Some will argue that in my desire to look for artistic antecedents I'm stretching the definitions of some of these concepts too far for them to remain meaningful. Those critics might give me a push on "Open Source," as Lovecraft legacy is a massively impressive example of the long-term effects of a "share alike" mentality. They might even grudgingly give me the "alternate reality" argument as well ... Stephen King was certainly in an alternate reality that day in Providence. The argument will come down, I suspect, to the definition of "game design," and the criticisms of that perspective will be remarkably close to the critiques of my own work as well. People who like the more explicit end of gameplay sometimes find my work "more like a story" than like a game, while those who enjoy my work are more likely to also accept a less explicit definition of game.

Ponder What a Game Is

My view of game design is heavily shaped by one particular experience: trying to describe to really bright filmmakers in 2002 how the structures of game and narrative work together. Fortunately, I was able to play second fiddle in that heavy lifting to the immensely brilliant Zach Booth Simpson (doing amazing work at Mine-Control). Zach focused on "game" as being "a set of rules designed to reproduce particular narrative experiences." Basketball games getting a lttle slow? Institute a possession timeclock. Why? Because the designers of the reproducible experience of basketball want it to be fast paced and have a high incidence of ties until late in the game: that is a more satisfying narrative experience whether you're sitting in the stands or watching at home on television.

Narrativists have these same kind of rules. We can talk about three act structures, conflict resolution, the hero myth cycle and hundreds of other rules for writing good narratives. The difference between a narrativist and a game designer is often (but not always) whether or not you make those rules exposed to the audience. In a game, the rules and the players are very apparant, and the narrative frequently seems like a complete surprise to the audience even though it is self evident in an analysis of the rules (and our general concept of "fairness of rules".)

Others will have more stringent definitions of what constitutes a game. I find this particular construct useful primarily for those places where narrative and game must tango in unison. With those eyes, I look back at Lovecraft -- especially his letters -- and see an artist inventing new rules, pondering the new kinds of experiences that ruleset ("weird fiction") can create, and teaching those rules to other artists and fans. The size of this audience, while Lovecraft was alive, was exceptionally small. The proportion of people who learned the rules from Lovecraft to those who read his work was unusually high, especially from the viewpoint of "mass produced 20th century art". Because we have so many of his letters preserved and published, I can even the learn the rules directly from Lovecraft's informal coorespondence with his own fans and peers more than 70 years later.

Chickenthulhu!

I'm not sure I can effectively argue against someone who wanted to prove "this isn't game design," but I suspect my snarky answer might be something like, "this is not a game" or "all game design is a subset of reader response theory." We're in a chicken-and-egg argument about something that is really integrated. I concede that the more interesting question is, "If Lovecraft lived today, and had email instead of letters, and a website instead of being unpublished, and could have read modern dialog about game and modern narrative theory, what would he have done?"

A part of me likes to imagine he would have been mailing out bas-relief sculptures of unspeakable gods, accompanied by notes from the artist describing their horrible nightmares that lead to this work, all as rabbit holes for his new ARG called "The Call of Cthulhu." He probably would have argued vehemently in Unfiction META that he wasn't making ARGs at all, but was making "weird reality fiction" (WRF?!?) or some such, as Lovecraft loved him some good META.

Not many artists have played with this concept yet outside of the RPG universe (such as Delta Green); there's a surprisingly good very-short story about a Miskatonic Electronics modem that turns everything someone posts to flamewar material (Lawrence Watt-Evans' punnily-titled "Pickman's Modem"), but it was published in 1992 before the real age of the Internet had dawned. Eldritch Errors is an attempt to explore the question further, to experiment with the rules of "weird fiction" (as H.P. Lovecraft practiced and explained them) with the new tools of 21st century platformless storytelling, where the world and everything in it can be both part of the story and the delivery vehicle of the story.

Experiencing Alternate Realities

2007-12-05T16:40:09Z

Explaining what Eldritch Errors is presents challenges, both for those of us crafting the experience and for the participants involved in it. It is similar to a number of things: you can talk about how it is both like and unlike an alternate reality game, or how it is both like and unlike live action roleplaying games. Each of those labels works on some level for setting your expectations on the kinds of experiences you might have participating in Eldritch Errors, but they might also suggest things that aren't as true.

Describing what Eldritch Errors is should frankly be the job of the other site; I'm cheating if I have to do it here. However, there is no client whose ultimate needs must drive this production, so the intentions of what we hope to craft stem from the experiments that we want to explore, not from a marketing need. Eldritch Errors didn't appear from a vacuum; it is the continuation of past experiments that also shed a light on the kinds of experiences participants have already had ... and what you might expect from Eldritch Errors in the future.

]]> Alternate Reality Productions

Production for the feature film Nothing So Strange began in late 1999; it finally started reaching an audience at festivals in January 2001 and we ended up self-releasing in 2003. Like many of the independent films I love, it isn't a perfect film, but it received warm critical praise instead of financial success. We used the phrase "documentary from an alternate reality" to describe the film, in great part to separate it from the excellent (but more comedic) work of Christopher Guest that gets labeled as mockumentary. People still call it a mockumentary anyway.

Long before the websites for Nothing So Strange served any promotional purpose, they were an intimate part of making the film during 2000. They were a repository of props and essays by performers. They were a meticulous assembly of conspiracy references by the producers. They were an immersive exchange between people who stumbled upon our bizarre experiment and those participating in it. Most of the performers in the film didn't even know what they were getting into, and our antagonist and victim are both public figures who didn't even get asked if they would like to participate.

So, for example, the cast might receive an email, telling them to show up at a certain place and time and hold a meeting where they draft a constitution and mission statement. When they arrived, Brian Flemming the director would already be setup and filming. During that experience, there is no cut or scene or script - the action is improvised, sometimes in ways that end up defining the most interesting moments of the film. The first rule was verite: it must be real. The cast was able to do this in part by keeping track of what was happening at the Citizens for Truth websites. Most of the participants weren't even professional actors, only a few experienced cast members were scattered through the mix. Flemming liked to pride himself on the fact you couldn't pick the professionals out from the non-professionals by their performances. He was on to something.

It was a natural extension to then take those people and drop them into real situations that are far more public, while also having some actors (like David James and Laurie Pike) act as much as producers as actors in the classic film production sense. There was a lot of inspiration drawn from Medium Cool by Haskell Wexler (including shooting at the Democratic National Convention among protestors 32 years after Wexler shot at another DNC in a different city.) The mixing of the fictive and the real, and their reactions to each other, was at the heart of both films. Sometimes the real even called me and asked me to make my fiction less realistic!

Even if we had never encountered alternate reality gaming, what we're doing with Eldritch Errors would have still been the next phase of that same experiment in Nothing So Strange. Now many of you are among that cast, and the experiences that people have in Eldritch as protagonists greatly resembles the way Flemming engineered the experiences of the cast in an unconventional film production dedicated to verite. Welcome to the new experiment.

Are You Experienced?

In 2002, Sean C. Stacey coined a little phrase, alternate reality game, to describe a grassroots game called Lockjaw, created by the players-turned-developers from a game (The Beast) for Spielberg's movie A.I. in the summer of 2001. Brooke Thompson should really tell you more about that period of time, since she was one of the developers of Lockjaw. I didn't really pay more than passing attention to that particular development (and the wonderful world of Unfiction and ARGN) until 2004 when a project we were running for Sharp Electronics started getting called an ARG by some of the participants. I remember those early conversations with Michael Monello, one of the producers of The Blair Witch Project and another of the developers of Legend of the Sacred Urns. The ARG community had come to many of the same conclusions that we had about what was fun, but had invented a new lexicon to try describe it that was confusing to outsiders.

It wasn't until the same core team (part of which would go on to become Campfire NYC) worked together again for Audi that some of ideas expressed by the ARG community were part of the design concepts, and The Art of the Heist could thus be called "our first alternate reality game" in 2005 (at the least, it was the first that was intended to meet those expectations.) GMD Studios did one more classical ARG in 2006 with, in fact, the aforementioned Brooke Thompson. There are some things about the ARG metaphor that are fascinating after drinking deeply from that well (earning all of three sentences in Wikipedia history of ARGing.)

The most interesting of those ARGish perspectives is the gamic design principles of agency, and the subtle difference that creates in design when it replaces the broader category of interactivity. It isn't enough to let the audience wade into the story, they must be left with the feeling it wouldn't haven't happened if they hadn't waded into it. That intersection between game and narrative has always been one of my biggest fascinations, as I was technically a game developer before I was a web artist or online brand builder. We were big in Europe in the 1990s, natch!

I'll leave it to others to debate whether Eldritch Errors is or isn't an alternate reality game; it probably is at least a chaotic fiction (a slightly broader umbrella term that includes ARGs also coined by Stacey.) Either phrase does a good enough job of setting up the expectations of participants, even if neither definition fully explains what we're experimenting with. If I had to pick a label, though, I'd call Eldritch Errors an "immersive narrative experience" and draw part of that definition from Nathan Shedroff's work in experience design, especially some of his work in 1995 while at vivid studios, because we're all at least slightly influenced by what we play:

"The most important concept to grasp is that all experiences are important and that we can learn from them whether they are traditional, physical, offline experiences or whether they are digital, online, or other technological experiences. In fact, we know a great deal about experiences and their creation through these other established disciplines that can-and must-be used to develop new solutions. Most technological experiences-including digital and, especially, online experiences-have paled in comparison to real-world experiences and have been relatively unsuccessful as a result. What these solutions require is for their developers to understand what makes a good experience first, and then to translate these principles, as well as possible, into the desired media without the technology dictating the form of the experience."

Experience design is broad, so putting "narrative" before it lets you know it isn't a work of truth like our community experiences for PBS Online, while tacking "immersive" at the beginning helps make it clear that this isn't just a mediated experience (media is a part of it, but not the totality of it.) It still doesn't quite convey that there is still a game in there too, but then it also doesn't convey we want to scare you and make you learn something about computer security as well. You have to unbundle those concepts by realizing what makes up an experience ... or by becoming experienced.

Lovecraft: "Nobody Expects Anything of a Letter"

2007-11-22T12:41:25Z

H.P. Lovecraft wrote more letters than it is easy to imagine, unless of course you live in the Age of Email. Scholars conservatively estimate that he wrote over 100,000 letters in his life: they have about 10,000 preserved, and to publish even those unabridged would take 100 volumes each 400 pages long. About a thousand of them are in print across a few handfulls of volumes. For me, his letters are both his towering artistic achievement, and his towering creative achievement in developing his relationship with the fans he did have, fans who would end up preserving his work for all of us. Lovecraft tries to disavow the power of his letters in a paragraph that sound suspiciously like the way many emailers and bloggers would describe writing today:

"Nobody expects anything of a letter, or judges any man's style by one. Even when I write one by hand I pay no attention to rhetorick, but just sail along at a mile-a-minute pace ... If you were to analyse the language of this letter you would find it shot all to hell with solecisms and bad rhythms."

I can't let that stop me: there seems to be so much power in his letters, an easy elegence of style that smells suspiciously 21st century. In an essay that Lovecraft wrote defending his work "Dagon," for example, he penned a line that I think is among the most revealing glimpses into his soul as an artist: "There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression." Here's the story of one of those "seven persons" and a few of the tidbits from those letters that have shaped my view of Lovecraft.

]]> In 1924, a 16-year-old young man wrote a letter to author Clark Ashton Smith in which he expressed admiration for Lovecraft's work. Smith, who was exchanging letters with Lovecraft at the time, mentioned the boy to Lovecraft -- Lovecraft told Smith to send his two unpublished manuscripts to the boy with instructions to return them directly to Lovecraft when he was finished. This began a coorespondence between Lovecraft and this young man, Donald Wandrei, that would continue until Lovecraft's death and, in a way, beyond. Wandrei, who by this point had written short stories and novels with Lovecraft's encouragement, would then found Arkham House, a publisher dedicated to getting Lovecraft's work back in print. With his co-founder, August Derleth, they succeeded, and also managed a massive 30-year effort to collect the letters Lovecraft sent to coorespondants to go along with the ones they had from Lovecraft's estate. Because of that, I can read them today and draw inspiration, including nearly every letter in the Wandrei/Lovecraft exchange over that decade of time (collected in the volume Mysteries of Time and Spirit, The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei edited by Joshi & Schultz.)

Lovecraft might have had more than seven people who actually liked his work, but however small the number was Lovecraft was right: they were enough to create a legacy. Not just the legacy of preserving his works, but also of collecting and preserving his letters, in which we find some of the keys to what Lovecraft was articulating about story during his "major fiction" phase of 1931-1935. These passages -- from the letters, not from the fiction -- are my key to understanding what Lovecraft intended, and also what we've taken as some of our core principles regarding "what it means to be faithful to Lovecraft's vision." I can think of no better way to share them with you then as they are, sans commentary -- and if you're interested in more, I'd recommend to you A Subtler Magick, The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi as springboard:

"Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form -- and the local human passions and conditions and standards -- are depicted as native to other worlds and universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all." (Selected Letters, 1925-1929)

"The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality -- when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt -- as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?" (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)

"The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen ... If any unexpected advance in physics, chemistry, or biology were to indicate the possibility of any phenomena related by the weird tale, that particular set of phenomena would cease to be weird in the ultimate sense because it would become surrounded by a different set of emotions. It would no longer represent imaginative liberation, because it would no longer indicate a suspension or violation of the natural laws against whose universal dominance our fancies rebel." (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)

"No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax." (Selected Letters, 1929-1931)

Lovecraft was a creature of his letter writing, and deliciously so for all of us. What he gained from that experience was something he could even articulate. I wonder how many of us receive some similar benefit from our Internet existences:

"As to letters, my case is peculiar. I write such things exactly as easily and rapidly as I would utter the same topics in conversation; indeed, epistolary expression is with me largely replacing conversation, as my condition of nervous prostration becomes more and more acute. I cannot bear to talk much now, and am becoming as silent as the Spectator himself! My loquacity extends itself on paper." (Selected Letters, 1911-1924)

"As a person of very retired life, I met very few different sorts of people in youth -- and was therefore exceedingly narrow and provincial. Later on, when literary activities brought me into touch with widely diverse types by mail -- Texans like Robert E. Howard, men in Australia, New Zealand, &c., Westerners, Southerners, Canadians, people in old England, and assorted kinds of folk nearer at hand -- I found myself opened up to dozens of points of view which would otherwise never have occurred to me. My understanding and sympathies were enlarged, and many of my social, political, and economic views were modified as a consequence of increased knowledge. Only correspondence could have effected this broadening; for it would have been impossible to have visited all the regions and met all the various types involved, while books can never talk back or discuss." (Selected Letters, 1911-1924)

Through his letters, it becomes easy for me to imagine what Lovecraft might have been like if he had lived today. The Internet might very well have combined a few of the things he was passionate about -- including correspondence, amateur journalism and literary community -- and turned him into a great model for what the rest of us could do with those same tools. I imagine he'd be a frequent and fiery participant in all kinds of online communities as well as one heck of a blogger. I imagine he'd be a defender of the Open Source movement and be Creative Commons licensing his work as "Share Alike". I also imagine that his interest in stories with the "care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax" would have also led him to be fascinated with alternate reality gaming and immersive narrative. Basically, the kind of guy I probably would have learned a lot from.

Books, Bangs, Bucks & Budgets

2007-11-20T16:04:07Z

As a producer, I tend to think of Eldritch Errors as a machine with two modes: burn and coast. When the production is in burn mode during a Book, it costs more to keep Eldritch healthy. When we come into an Interlude, that cost goes down ... but if you coast too long you'll lose too much of your momentum. When Eldritch is in burn mode, I have budget goals for what I want to keep the expenses to each month in addition to GMD Studios' standing team. Budgets can be horribly boring, the mere mechanics of implementing ideas, but they can also be where you find the best "bang for the buck" approaches that make an idea a success.

What follows is intended primarily for other interactive storytellers or those really interested in the mechanics of what makes Eldritch work behind the scenes from a budget perspective as an independent production. It isn't intended as a tutorial or a comprehensive budget model. It is just one producer's notebook about ways to think about how budgets -- of live events, especially -- can become useful tools for both qualitative goal setting and for making small budgets look bigger than they are.

]]> The burn rate for Book One and for Book Two were almost identical: Book 2 was 4% more expensive on a straight "budget-to-duration" comparison to Book 1. I'm not saying we spent 4% more on Book 2 than Book 1, I'm saying we spent about 70% less than we did on Book 1 because Book 2 was also about a quarter of the length. These budgets might still be a little sizeable for a lone storyteller or grassroots team, but are tiny when compared to we work with in commercial projects. They all work on the same general planning principles anyway (at least if I have any control over the budgets!)

I spend alot of time of thinking about how to get the most bang for each of those bucks, bang that the audience sees and experiences. Getting that bang/buck ratio means looking at each element you spend money on in terms of the impact it creates on the experience with a critical eye. In a perfect world, your time is just as precious of a commodity as your money, so you could just as easily be measuring production labor against that same yardstick.

While I'm certainly flattered that "the boys" at the ARG Netcast thought it felt like a big commercial event, examples are useful. So, let's look at the Eldritch expenses associated with just the West Virginia live event. I'd make the first pile of expenses related to "providing the participants with the physical experience" in Cass and on Bald Knob. Pretty easy to account up:

Company house, $129/night x 3 days = $387
Wilderness cabin, $44/night x 1 day = $44
Historic train tickets, $20 x 5 participants = $100
BASIC EVENT EXPENSES: $531

At this point, I'm feeling pretty clever. $106.20 per person with them all car pooling to the destination. Seriously not a bad vacation value, the place was absolutely goregous and dramatic: you almost couldn't take a bad picture, I tried. However, I haven't started to add up the less visible expenses associated with making the story happen in addition to the "vacation":

5 airplane tickets for performers = $2,000
Snowshoe condo for team, $249/night x 3 days = $747
Two rental SUVs for 3 days = $650
Camping & surival equipment = $1,100
Food, pies, gas, misc. = $450
More historical train tickets, $20 x 5 cast = $100
HIDDEN EVENT EXPENSES: $5,047
TOTAL EVENT SO FAR: $5,578

You could think of this as a "per non-participant" cost average of $841.17 since there was a team of six of us there (Brooke drove in!) which is almost 850% more than the expenses "per participant". That team is also almost exactly half "on stage" and half "off stage" (if you excuse my brief uncredited appearance as Nodens Thug #55, "Psion Hat Man".) Miguel and Caroline were almost entirely "on stage" in activities, Brooke and I were almost entirely "off stage" in activities, and J.D. and Dee were some strange middle-ground between the two.

So let's look at that like a production budget for a moment, divided into three rough categories as an illustration:

Set & Setting (100% audience visible): $531.00 (9.5%)
"On Stage" (almost all audience visible): $2,523.50 (45.25%)
"Off Stage" (almost all invisible): $2,523.50 (45.25%)

This is just one slice of one particular budget, mind you, but it does let me as a producer start to conceptualize ideas like "more than half of the budget for the event was directly visible by the participants" and to ask questions like "would it be worth it if more people show up to rent a second company house?"

This isn't the same thing as getting to that "bang for buck" question, though: I can think of alot of ways we could have spent the same $5,578 that would have felt like less bang for that buck. Spending it all on pie comes to mind. For comparison, the similar expenses for the Altanta event were about $3,500, with more of it in props and less (none) in cast and somewhat less in travel (we all roadtripped that time.) Did the West Virginia event feel "159% cooler" than the Atlanta event? My gut says yeah, probably even better than that. I'll leave that up to the participants to judge, as the range of experiences in Book 2 was alot broader than in Book 1 and "your mileage may vary."

Ultimately, when the storyteller in me trumps the producer, I'll settle for each Book being better than the last, and work from the assumption that the next Book has to be even better to keep momentum on our side. The producer in me, though, wants to grow that momentum and top our previous high water mark on the same rough burn rate on expenses. That means looking for all those little ways to maximize the bang each buck gives me and constantly looking for ways to get more of the expenses directly in view of more of the participants ... which is what the bang is all about. Otherwise, I have to spend more each time to top the previous intensity level.

The same issues apply whether you're thinking about bucks by the hundreds, thousands or millions: you want to get the most out of that resource, and never more so than when you're spending your own money instead of someone else's.

Help Us Capture Speculation!

2007-11-16T16:45:55Z

In any unfolding mystery, speculation is at least as important as evidence. Now that I'm working on the new Evidence section for the Eldritch Errors main experience site, capturing that community speculation into pages about individual elements of the story is proving a challenge. After all, I don't want people to read into that speculation any "official status" but, at the same time, want to provide a springboard for new participants into the theories of their peers.

So I'm going to need your help. In the perfect world, we're writing all of each Evidence page except for the "speculation," where we're faithfully curating your various takes on the topics. This would be the place to help us do that, by posting your comments here with references on the best of that speculation. If you're feeling really froggy, start a Sentry Wiki page and submit that as your link!

We've got 28 different topics in 4 categories to take that first swipe at an Encyclopedia of Eldritch Errors, and our plan is to launch a handful of them each week. We might as well let you dump your speculation on the whole pile of them, though, so that you can imagine how they fit together as a set.

]]> So, first off, those 28 topics I'm hoping we'll hit together.

PEOPLE: Devon Conrad, Bryce Droher, Spukhafte Fernwirkung, Arthur Lydney, Howard Philips, Dr. Elizabeth Riley, B.A. Saint-Feline, Peter Severn, Dr. U / eXu
EVENTS: Telescope Collapse (11/88), Taylor Run Incident (10/99), Prophetic Packages (04/07), Alphabet City (05/07), Atlanta Ritual (08/07), Feast Before the Scream (10/07)
ARTIFACTS: The Finger of Hope, Lucky 5, the Nightmare, the Scream, Trussed Swan HD
GROUPS: Chorazos Cult, The Council, Dreamers, The Esoteric, Knights of Mars-Nodens, Miskatonic University, Providence, Sentries

Then, it's useful to illustrate what I think of as the difference between "what you know" and "what you have theorized" -- let's use B.A. Saint-Feline:

YOU KNOW: Since April 2007, she has documented many of her nightmare prophecies through an elaborate series of Craigslist personals.
YOU THEORIZE: She might suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity because she reports headaches around some kinds of technology.

Don't expect any of us storyteller-types to be chiming in on your speculation, but we might occassionally jump in and ask if you can pick one link that would let someone jump into the discussion on that particular theory.

Lovecraft: Science and Charlatanry

2007-11-16T14:16:35Z

Here at Eldritch, we sometimes talk about Lovecraft's fears of what science would eventually uncover and what terrible vistas it would unlock. That really sells the Old Man of Providence terribly short. Lovecraft's stories are very frequently the myth of Pandora updated to the scientific age in horrible new ways, but Lovecraft wasn't an occultist or a mystic. He might have been a social reactionary in some ways, but he was also a futurist and a man of reason if not of letters. Lovecraft saw life as a battle between science and charlatanry.

In fact, the oldest surviving writing of his -- in 1906, at age 16 -- was a scathing letter about an astrologist:

"To the Editor of The Sunday Journal: In the Journal for May 17, I notice among the letters to the editor a set of astrological predictions for 1906. Passing over the fact that astrology is but a pseudo science, not entitled to intelligent consideration, I wish to call attention to a striking inaccuracy in the aforementioned article. Its writer mentions a transit of Mars over the sun in July. Of course, as Mars is a superior planet, or one outside of earth's orbit, it cannot transit over the sun."

]]> His attacks on astrologers just got better and more outrageous the older he got. In 1914, he began a flame war in his local newspaper for which he also wrote a column, railing against a local astrologer's predictions:

"No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief."

In The Call of Cthulhu 12 years later, he flips that around -- suddenly it is "the sciences" that have harmed us little but will eventually make us "go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." On face value, they seem like different arguments, but Lovecraft is more subtle than that, and is making a finer point.

Eventually, Lovecraft got so frustrated in that particular letter war in 1914, he resorted to satire under a pseudonym borrowed from Swift to bash a famous astrologer. Suddenly, Isaac Bickerstaffe, Jr.'s letters to the same paper supported the astrologer and bashed Lovecraft, all while making even more outrageous predictions for the future than the real astrologist:

"Last and more terrible of all, the collusive quarternary trin of Mars, Mercury, Vulcan and Saturn, in the 13th progressed house of the sign Cancer on Feb. 26, 4954, stands out as plainly as the handwriting on the wall to shew us the awful day on which this earth will finally and infallibly perish through a sudden and unexpected explosion of volcanic gases in the interior."

Of course, less than two weeks later Isaac would announce in another letter he had solved that problem by considering a recently discovered comet:

"From all of which we may easily deduce that on June 29, 4898, or nearly 56 years before the great catastrophe, the comet XY4 will harmlessly encounter our terraqueous globe, safely taking away on its tail the entire human race!"

Lovecraft wasn't the only person of that era fighting superstition, spiritualism and charlatanry. In one example, Harry Houdini recruited Lovecraft to help formalize that effort in one of the stranger bits of Lovecraft biographical lore. No one could tell the story better than S.T. Joshi in Collected Essays Volume 3:

"In 1926 the magician Harry Houdini hired Lovecraft and his friend C. M. Eddy, Jr., to write an entire book combating superstition. This work -- perhaps analogous to Houdini's own previous work, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), a debunking of spiritualism -- was to be called The Cancer of Superstition. Houdini had earlier asked Lovecraft to write a rush article on astrology, for which he paid $75; this article apparently does not survive. A detailed synopsis prepared by Lovecraft for The Cancer of Superstition does survive, as do three chapters of the treatise written by Eddy; but Houdini's sudden death on 31 October 1926 derailed the plans, as his widow did not wish to pursue the project."

Joshi is being kind to Houdini's widow in the above, because Houdini's legacy is historically unclear. In might very well have been that his widow had been seduced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as part of a plot to convince the world that their spiritualist accomplice (the Reverand Arthur Ford) was bringing messages from Houdini back from beyond the grave. Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and champion of literary deduction, was also a firm believer in mediums and spirtualism and despised Houdini for his debunking activities (but that is a twisted tale of its own).

Lovecraft didn't really fear science, and his use of superstition in his stories is a key to his message about science. Sadly, he actually feared humanity and was convinced that the cosmic scale of reality, and our insignificance, would always be too mind-shattering to witness. People are all too infected by the cancer of superstition to save, but at least we have another 2,891 years to contemplate that shortcoming before we all need to catch that sweet comet out of here!

Lovecraft with Water Wings

2007-11-15T15:03:36Z

Most people think of H.P. Lovecraft as a "weird fiction" horror hack. Neil Gaimen described his prose as "clotty with adjectival froth." More people have probably seen a "Chthulhu for President" bumper sticker than have read any of his actual stories. Much of what you even think of as Lovecraft isn't the Old Man's work -- the Mythos is a composite of hundreds of authors, filmmakers, and game designers over three-quarters of a century, none of them working from anything more than a loose playbook of continuity. Eldritch Errors is an apostrophy now in that long legacy of collective creativity.

Explaining why Lovecraft -- the author, the storyteller, the social critic -- became such a central part of the way I was thinking about the story I wanted to tell is difficult. The issues of computer security and my feelings about the "politics of the day" lead me to think alot about hopelessness and what to do if you feel insignificant in the face of huge forces. That summoned up Lovecraft metaphors from some deep part of my brain, not because I was fascinated with monsters or cults, but because I was fascinated with the way Lovecraft channeled his feelings about that topic into an artistic legacy that continues to be frighteningly modern.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to start trying to explain that. My attempts will likely be messy, perhaps even clotty with adjectival froth, and probably not of much interest to more serious Lovecraft scholars. There's something deep and fascinating in Lovecraft himself that his work is but one wrinkle of, and I'm going to focus much more on Lovecraft the scientific critic, and Lovecraft the correspondant in the age of letter writing, and Lovecraft the Open Sourcer, and Lovecraft the ARG developer.

If you're an Eldritch participant, though, and are trying to figure out if you even want to dive into Lovecraft, you deserve some water wings. Here's my personal suggestions.

]]> Start by jumping into the deep end of the pool with some of his fiction. If I had to recommend one story that might be easiest to fall in love with, it might be "Pickman's Model" (1926). If I had to pick one that felt the most "ARGish," it might be the turns and twists of "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), considered part of the "canon". Lovecraft himself, late in life, claimed that he was only satisified with one of his stories -- "The Colour Out of Space" (1927) -- so that one always seems worth studying as well. Conversely, if you're looking to "fill in the holes" of what you already know from Eldritch Errors, there's a slightly different set of works we find ourselves talking about alot: "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", "The Lurker at the Threshold", "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", and "The Hound".

Lovecraft really comes alive, though, once you starting wading into the non-fiction. "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life" by S.T. Joshi is amazing, and Michel Houellebecq's "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" is provocative (as is the forward to that book by Stephen King), but they are just the tip of the iceberg of his letters and essays. I'd highly recommend "Lord of Visible World: Autobiography in Letters" (again by S.T. Joshi) before jumping into the volumes and volumes of his letters, estimated by Joshi to be only about a fifth of what he wrote (and yet still over 20,000 letters survive for scholars to pick through.) There is the more rambling and protean version of what later emerges in his fiction.

That pool goes pretty deep, and the more I read of his non-fiction the more complex my picture of Lovecraft -- and his artistic legacy -- becomes. Currently I'm enjoying "H.P. Lovecraft Collected Essays Volume 3: Science" -- a combination of his scathing letters to the editors of various publications correcting their science, his amateur astronomy columns from his local newspaper, and some famous "flame wars" he had with astrologists (frequently conducted via pseudonym allusions in the "letters to the editor" of famous publications.) At least Joshi is my guide on that journey, with tidbits like, "it was his discovery of astronomy in the winter of 1902-03 that gave perhaps the greatest impetus to both his literary aspirations and his philosophical outlook; for it imbued in him that sense of the 'cosmic' which would ultimately find potent expression in his weird tales."

In 1906, he wrote a letter to the editors of Scientific American, demanding to know why "no vigorous efforts are being made to discover planets beyond the orbit of Neptune" especially since he had personally "noticed that a great many comets cluster around a point 50 astronomical units out." He suggested that if "all the observatories that possess celestial camera should band together" they might find another planet. In 1908, two years after that letter, H.P. Lovecraft dropped out of high school from a nervous breakdown. In 1930, 24 years after that letter, the exact method he described as a high school student in his pithy letter to the editor led to the discovery of Pluto. That same year, Pluto played a key role in his story, "The Whisperer in the Darkness."

The Old Man of Providence was an unusual bird even when he was the Young Boy of Providence. I just know he'd be writing scathing letters again to Scientific American about Pluto being downgraded from a planet if he were living today.

On the Inside Looking In

2007-11-11T13:29:15Z

On October 3, I received an email from Brian Clark of GMD Studios entitled "A very strange introduction". In the email, Brian excitedly but tenatively pitched to me an offer to act in the tile role in the ARG he was currently writing/producing, Eldritch Errors. He mentioned that had he not read my myspace, which talks at length about what a geek I am, and my blog, which is a dream journal, he would've been more trepidatious about approaching someone in this manner. But am I ever glad that he did!

My first introduction to ARG's came in the form of research that I had done for a podcast [episode 29] that my husband, my friend, and myself put out. The concept was difficult to grasp, at first, mainly due to the fact that our gaming background has always been in roleplaying games. In RPG's, there is a clear line between "character" and "self", or at least clearer. When you are "in game" you are not you, but a character that you have created; and when the game is over, you go back to being you. ARG's are different, in this way, because while people maintain an "in game" and "out of game" understanding, their persona "in game" is really them, the actual person. Granted, in some cases it is an amplified version of themselves, but regardless, it makes the interactions complicated on a whole new level that is not touched upon often, and most times purposefully avoided, in RPG's. There is a whole set of philosophies that I won't even begin to get into that talk about the intricacies of the relationship between character and self, but they are well worth checking out for the interested reader.

]]> So now I had my first opportunity to delve into a living, breathing ARG. Better yet, it was an ARG based in something that I thoroughly enjoy: Lovecraftian Horror! Learning about the game was a strange and lengthy process. While being brought on as staff gave me an inside track to the story elements at play, I still felt as if I was peering into a completely foreign world. Hundreds of Craigslist Posts later, I was even more confused. My questions were all answered, though, in correspondence with Brooke Thompson, who is not only a brilliant writer but a giving, caring, and passionate person. Brooke not only listened to my ideas for the character I was to portray, but incorporated them with excitement and enthusiasm. As a story creator myself, I was impressed with her ability to give so much creative input to someone who just walked onto the scene.

My experience with everyone on staff was fantastic. Brian's enthusiasm and willingness to incorporate my ideas made me feel welcomed, and when the event was over and he said "I'm so proud of you guys!", I knew that the care and effort I was putting in was truly appreciated. It takes a lot of trust to let actors run away with your players into the woods for 28 hours with no way of contacting you! J.D. was amazing in every way, not to mention a great actor to boot! I really just can't say enough good about him. The other actors were fantastic to work with as well. Dee's positive attitude and laughter kept us all going (even when we feared the cart had defeated us). Miguel and I spent long hours figuring out the complex set of feelings and interactions between the characters we were portraying, and while on the trip any time we had a second or two without the players around, we squealed (in whispers) and gossiped like excited school children about all the unfolding drama.

The really rewarding thing, though, was seeing the players' reaction to my portrayal of this character.

I've been acting my whole life, really. Ever since I started playing pretend in my backyard when I was old enough to talk. Unlike most people, however, I never stopped playing pretend, I just changed the venue. To me, as an actor, there are degrees of importance. You owe a deep sense of integrity and understanding to your character, but you also owe an incredible experience to those who are involved with that character. In this way, a character has to give more of themselves than a regular person would. A character has to be willing to take small hits to their integrity in order to tell the story for everyone else. The true test of an actor is finding a way to do this while making it look seamless when held in contrast to the integrity of that character.

As an actor, I am aware of my audience. I'm aware of the effect that too much or too little eye contact will have on people. I'm aware of how allowing myself to be completely ingulfed in my character will look and feel to others, and how they will literally feel the change if I slip out of that character for even a moment. I know that by intensely feeling an emotion, I can make others around me feel that same emotion. All of these things were incredibly important in the West Virginia Camping Event.

The entire experience was, and continues to be, absolutely fascinating to me from a philosophical standpoint, as well. My background in gaming, as I mentioned, is heavily RPG based, but even moreso is specialized in Live Action Roleplaying (LARP). As to why we gamers have given such atrociously unappealing sounding names to our beloved hobbies like ARG and LARP, I really cannot say, but that's really besides the point. In LARP and ARG both, so many of the same issues are pertinent. I hadn't realized, in full, just to what extent this was, but it seems more and more to be the case the more I come to understand the ARGing community, and especially Eldritch Errors, which is a heavily story-based game.

I will talk about a couple of the issues that surface often in both ARG and LARP, and how they differ in each community, but first I wanted to offer a very simplified explanation about why I think the communities have so many commonalities.

First of all, ARGs and LARPs both are community-based games, in which you have a large and very mixed group of people. Any time that a group of a certain size is involved, communication becomes a key issue, as well as the need for feeling a sense of belonging and additionally a sense of being special. Contradictory feelings, yes, but still very present in any community, really. Also, the ARG and LARP communities draw pretty heavily from a similar demographic. Usually this is people who (proudly) label themselves as "geeks", but I would say in general most of them enjoy a good sci-fi or fantasy story, and have a great propensity for imagination and suspension of disbelief. And we all like Firefly. That's right. All of us.

There is also an interesting parallel in ARGs and LARPs when looking at "in game" and "out of game" information. Here also, interestingly, is where the divergence lies. For the most part, participants in an ARG represent themselves "in game". They are not roleplaying, but rather they themselves are reacting to the information and situations presented to them. There is a clear understanding, however, that the happenings are not "real", and they know that there is an Iron Curtain somewhere. They just hope not to find it, and if they do find it, it can become disappointing. Still, they employ suspension of disbelief, and keep their "in game" and "out of game" knowledge separate.

Participants in a LARP, too, have a separation between "in game" and "out of game" knowledge. They know that the situations they are being presented with are not real, and have a very clear understanding of where the curtain lies, because they themselves are on the "out of game" side of that curtain. The fictional characters that they create and portray, however, lie on the "in game" side of that curtain. They also maintain suspension of disbelief, perhaps to an even greater degree than is required in an ARG, because the entire scenario of being a different person in a different reality is that much more unbelievable.

It leads me to question, though, just how much are ARGers unwittingly roleplaying? Certainly, some people play up a divergent side or amplified version of themselves, so is that not a character, in a sense?

One of the major philosophical points that has come up in my understanding of LARP that also applies equally to ARG deals with methods and motivations behind play. In the podcast, we covered this in Episode 21, in a segment we called "Playing for yourself vs. playing for the game". This goes back to the age old question of doing what is best for oneself, or doing what is best for one's community. Sometimes, the two overlap, but often enough, they do not. I believe it to be within human nature to want to feel special or unique, and maintaining secrets can quickly lead to this feeling. This, in both ARG and LARP, can turn into a larger problem for the community in general, as game masters/puppet masters often hope for information sharing as a means of distributing plot. I find it interesting, though, that in LARP, people have the excuse of "It's what my character would do," to justify taking a selfish action or withholding information, where as in ARG it is simply "What I would do". The lack of a separation between self and character forces people into a role where they must decide for themselves what is better for them or the game. The question of compromising their character's integrity by sharing information when they don't feel that they otherwise would is no longer a point of consideration. They must choose between giving to the community or harboring the information in a very real sense. In life, it is necessary to be selfish in many situations, or you will end up getting walked on, so to what extent in these community-based games is that necessary or appropriate? In LARP, this becomes very different, because if someone hates your character, you don't take it personally. It is not you they dislike, simply an imaginary person that you play. In ARG, though, the repercussions of someone disliking you seem very real.

Another point that I wanted to address was covered in Episode 25 of the podcast, and that segment was entitled "Are the emotional experiences that you have in gaming 'real'?" On this topic I feel that ARGs have a particularly unique view. My own personal feelings on the proposed question are that yes, the emotional experiences that you have in a gaming enviroment are real, provided that you personally feel that they are, and that you take something away from the experience. They may not be as powerful as an emotional experience that you have in your "real" life, but they ceratinly can be! Due to the nature of ARGs having little separation between self and character, this goes doubly for ARGs. While the player knows that the happenings in an ARG are not "real", they still can become quite invested emotionally in the goings on, and especially with the non-player characters with which they develop friendships, rivalries, or even romantic interests. In that way, emotionally differentiating how one feels can become a complex challenge. A psychologist would have a field day with these situations. I offer, though, that games like ARGs are a healthy environment in which to explore the intracacies of emotional states. In my opinion, people like to feel. They like to be filled with joy, but they also like getting dragged over the coals. They like to feel gratified at accomplishing their goals, but they also like to be infuriated by someone who stands in their way. Logically, this dosen't make a whole lot of sense, but I believe that feeling any strong emotion of any kind is preferable to feeling nothing. In environments like ARGs or LARPs, people can safely explore their emotions, and if it becomes too overhelming, they can shelve it, simple as that. Personally, I am a big fan of allowing the emotional experiences in gaming to teach me about people, the world, and especially myself.

The West Virgina trip was a fantastic endeavor for me personally, not only as an actress and a creative person, but also in my everyday life. Every last one of the players touched me in one way or another, and the online community has also been of great impact. The experience was incredibly rewarding, not only for the progression of story, but for the emotional catharsis that comes in meeting someone and caring for them, wanting to befriend them or help them or protect them. It makes me look forward even more to the continuation of the story, and my further role in seeing it all unfold.