Nov 20 2007
We Create Our Own Rabbit Holes
Two stories today show us how, even when they are not provided for us (as they are in Alternate Reality Games), we find ways to create our own rabbit holes:
The first story, from the blog Save The Robot, chronicles the author’s recent fascination with a minor player on an yet another MTV Networks reality show. The girl, Ellie, barely gets a paragraph on her MTV bio; probably because she gets axed pretty early in the game. But Chris is intrigued. There’s something about her; she’s different than the others. She was the “rocker” and they were (mostly), well, strippers lunging for the bright lights.
The rabbit hole was deep:
I keep Googling. Is Heagney a model? (Scroll down on the page - no seriously, keep scrolling you perv, we’re making a point here.) Is she in this photo of an all-girls swimming pool party, being held by a girl who looks a hell of a lot nicer than Tila Tequila? Is this where she went to high school? And whoa - is this her, SPC Ellie Heagney on a skiing trip in Korea? It looks like her, shy Maggie Gyllenhaal smile and all. Was she in the military?
Eventually, all of this access starts to squick him out. Even beyond the creepy stalker vibe it gives off, the impulse to fill in untold parts in the stories that interest us is a powerful one. Writers turn to fanfic to fill in the fictional blanks themselves; but when the characters are real people the shift seems to be away from writing, towards research.
But when it’s a real person, two things get in the way: 1. They’re real, and probably creeped out. And 2. there’s a nagging feeling that, even if I became obsessed with Ellie Heagney, even if I wanted to write fan fic about her and wiki her and do all the other kinds of things that say, obsessive Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans do with their favorite marginal characters, well, at the end of the day - shouldn’t she be telling us all that stuff? Characters are characters because we get to project stuff onto them. We learn about ourselves by watching what they do and letting them press our buttons. But in this case, we don’t have much right.
The second story, from the newly-added-to-my-RSS-reader NYT column The Medium, takes up a similar impulse and applies it to transmedia storytelling. With access to paratexts of all kinds, from IMDB to Wikipedia, research is becoming an increasing component of casual viewing.
Every visitor to the Internet, or even user of e-mail, is greeted by insidious questions, seductive links and tantalizing chances to click. These rabbit holes — the kind Alice fell down, the kind that tempt Neo in “The Matrix” — provide microportals into what can only be described as new worlds. There’s a blog, Stolen Vermeer, where you can trade tips with people searching for the Vermeer boosted during the $300 million art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990; Flickr pages where you can scrutinize and discuss photos of what people around the world are wearing today; and a vast message board, prisontalk.com, where in addition to advice for the incarcerated and those who love them you can find poetry and letters by people currently in prison.
Say I get e-mail that mentions Nasdijj. Is that an amp manufacturer, I hazily wonder, picturing a logo? Two minutes later I’ve read the Wikipedia entry, and I’m onto source material. Turns out he’s one of those fraud memoirists whom everyone adored until they found out he wasn’t who he claimed to be.
Such research and close attention to textual cues are key elements of the ARG experience. And this reminds me why the ARGs that I enjoy most have been ones that draw very closely on real world events, using reality as a diagetic element and then layering gameplay over that. One of the best moments in Metacortechs a few years ago was when we figured out that one of the characters had “caused” the 2003 northeastern US blackout.
These ARGs are rare, however, most likely because they not only have to deal with the unpredictabilities of player communities, but with an even more unpredictable reality.
