Design an ARG for Cancer Research

This has big, big potential: Adrian Hon launches a new project together with Cancer Research UK: And Let's Change the Game is exciting on 2 levels. Firstly, the main goal is to employ an immersive game to encourage awareness of cancer research. Secondly, the competition, or challenge, perhaps, is to design this game.

On the whole, I think, using games for "serious purposes" is probably a good thing, even if it highlights the notion that it's difficult to take things seriously in modern culture. People put way more effort into games and communities than into, say, politics which they feel disengaged from. Adrian says the main challenge of designing the ARG will be to raise funds. In a way, this isn't so different from what PXC was doing - at the end of the day, the ARG relied on a private company which relied on cash income, so generating revenue from interest (and intrigue) basically = success! It's not hard, then, to look at the success/failure of PXC and take some lessons from it.

If I were designing an ARG for this (which, hey, I might well do yet ;), I'd be looking at ways to piggyback these ideas - interest and funding - on to the back of something which people can a) get into quickly/"loosely" and b) enjoy without feeling it's "for a cause". If you know you're involved in something primarily because they want your cash, you're more likely to not do it in the first place, no matter how good the story is.

So storytelling is an imperative, and if we go down that route then having some kind of personal run-in with cancer will be a huge advantage. ARGs rely on building emotions, and being able to draw on real ones is a big boon. Any team designing something should make sure they have at least 1 such person on board.

The interesting question, for me, in this is: how much emphasis on building a community should there be? Community breeds "stickiness" and - as Adrian says in his post - opens up huge new opportunities for what challenges can be set. But it can also act to put people off, as with big communities come big social investments - either you have both feet in, so to speak, or none at all. (That's not to say a multi-tiered approach isn't possible, but it does contribute to more work, and work which is nothing to do with planning the story such as possible community resources and moderation.)

I don't gots an answer to that one right now, and I'm not sure there's a particularly 'right' one anyway. Getting people hooked is important in this case, and it may be better to go down a more loosely-connected path. Or it may be better to get a viral campaign going and get more people hooked without necessarily spending your own marketing budget. One thing's for sure - the judges will be wanting to see some fresh ideas.

Addendum: CRUK have some useful pages on what they want/inspiration, an example submission, and their own forum.

Update: The Guardian have an interview with Adrian who has more advice for those entering. Some useful tips, including greater emphasis on what people will be doing, rather than just what the story is. Sounds like researching both cancer and CRUK, and merging that into everything, may be a good ploy.

Games/Puzzles vs the "Real World"?

So a post over on 'The Frontal Context' on Puzzles, Mysteries and the nature of Science explores the link between information, discovery and the unknown. But (for me) it also sparks another question: what links are there between puzzles/games, and the 'wider world'? How applicable are gaming aand puzzling skills to real, every day life?



There's a lot of discussion, for instance, over the effectiveness of 'Brain Training" style games, especially for the young, the old and, um, Carol Vorderman. But the more sceptical of us are wary of such a "straightforward" link between simple mental "exercises", and how quickly/deeply one's brain may be able to think. (I must admit here that while I'm sure there may be plenty of research into the area, I haven't had the time (or, indeed, inclination) to look any of it up.)



Experience suggests to me that puzzles offer a drastically diverse range of mental "exercise". Many Japanese logic puzzles, for example, are attractive because this logic offers us an extremely linear solution. "If A, then B. If B, then C." - There is little need to choose anything subjectively, or for guesswork. At any stage, you should know if you are right or wrong. This is one, very specific kind of exercise.



Other types of puzzle - random sums, and timed puzzles, for example - naturally lead to slightly different skills. But the issue of everyday applicability is still questionable.



By contrast, I offer an anecdote. Go is considered by many to be the greatest game around - greater than Chess, due to its simplicity, and the complexity that arises from this. Still, the same principle applies to Chess, nonetheless. After heading home from my 4th or 5th session of getting into Go, something clicked in my head and I realised that of the various traits needed to get off the ground, the ability to sacrifice was a hugely important one. The complexity of Go led to very important, but equally very basic strategy such as this, and the basicness of it, I find, makes it also very "transferable" into real life situations - sacrifice and compromise need to be considered at all times, whatever the aim.



This is, perhaps, an extreme, but it hopefully highlights the very real role that games and puzzles can have within a much wider existence. If life is one big puzzle/mystery, then what ideas and revelations can we take forth from "trivial" pursuits? What types of game and riddle do you find to have a much bigger impact on your train of thought than you ever expected? Do you notice the difference that games like Brain Training make in other activities at all? Do you even find that experience in life changes how you play games or solve puzzles?



TINAG.