To provide a little context, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are fiction that happens in the real world, generally without rules or guidelines on how to participate. Because it’s in the real world, people can interact with it in the same way they interact with anything else. Phones, websites, emails, regular mail, and anything else the designers want to use. The defining aspect is that you don’t need special hardware or software to join in the fun.

In my own experience, I started with Ares Station (which a lot of players mistook for Orbital Colony. Oops!), where I mostly worked on audio. After that, the other designers and I started Studio Cypher, where we’ve been experimenting with the form ever since. The ARG community might know us best for the Cyphers Episodes, which were a series of short, for-pay ARGs that lasted about a month each. Our latest effort is the flash game MILO, which has a sizable metagame element (at happyautomata.com and ticktockcleaning.com).

I ended up in ARG web design by luck/coincidence, really. When I started working in ARGs, my main focus was in sound design. But we all wear many hats, and our programmer was so busy working on back end code (what makes programs work, even if the user never actually sees it) that I took up working on the front end (the stuff the user does see). I’m also the lead puzzle designer. Variety keeps my days interesting, which you can definitely find in ARGs.

A great deal of ARG web design is very much like conventional design, because we have the task of taking fictional people or companies, and giving them websites that look like any other site you might find. On the other hand, there are the websites that were made by murderous psychopaths, or ghosts, or have portals to demonic realms in them, or have a webcam looking into a prison cell, or have been infected by insane AIs, or anything else that would never happen in the real world. Those are the fun ones, because you get to be very cinematic with them. The sites still have to be usable, of course, but you can ignore a lot of standard web conventions in the design.

However, you sometimes end up making websites that look amateur, and websites that have been “broken.” Don’t get me wrong–this isn’t a bad thing. The main goal of ARG web design is to help the suspension of disbelief, and the main way to do that is to make web pages look appropriate to their creators. Not every character is going to be able to hire a graphic designer to make their page, so it would affect continuity if a 60 year old archeology professor had a beautiful website with perfect AJAX, or other things he has no way of knowing how to implement. So instead, he gets a page that looks like it was coded in 1997, because that’s the kind of page he would know how to make.

Broken pages, on the other hand, don’t have much to do with continuity. Instead, they help kick off the plot by providing a “What happened here?” feeling for the player, helping them to care about the person who made the site.

So aside from your basic design/coding skills, some acting skills might come in handy. As I said, you’re making these pages as if you were somebody else, so it can be pretty helpful if you can get in their head. In the same vein, you have to be willing to give up some of your design knowledge on occasion. Would this character use Comic Sans on their website? Then buckle down and do it, even though you’ll hate every second of it. But even when you’re making good looking websites, you have to remember who it is that’s making it. While being able to work in different styles is a useful skill, being able to work in different personalities is what’s essential.

Resources
If you’re interested in more, there’s always ARGn for ARG news along with a good netcast, you can find both puppet masters and players at Unfiction, and you can chat with a lot of the game makers on the IGDA ARG SIG mailing list. And for web designers specifically, I’d recommend keeping a list of all the little wacky utilities that you find around the Internet, because you never know when you’re going to need a utility that takes a bitmap, and converts it to text that displays that image when highlighted.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Design, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.