Mal Jones, illustrator for the National Zoo's ARG, Save the Pygmy Dragon Panda, was kind enough to talk with the ARGs in Education team about his work. Mal described the ARG as an "activity that gets the kid through the zoo and gets them to understand how research happens and how exhibits are made--from beginning to end, how a zoo works". You can look at some of Mal's ARG illustrations here, and here are some of his quotations we'd like to share:

1. The importance of good stories to ARGs
"The story's what carries it all. And if you don't do that, if you don't have a through-line, then if it's not some new fantastical thing, like AI, it will won't work. AI had some story to it that carried people through these very difficult processes all over the world where they came together with the internet and through computers. But the thing is now, I can't remember what the story was. I just remember that AI did it, as opposed to Nine Inch Nails, the one who did the end of the world; people were talking about that and the album, game be darned, who cared? The successful ones that we'll see from now, I guarantee, are these really cool stories. That's why the Lost ARG was cool, but then people were like, “Well, at the end of the day it's still Lost”. But they all got invested in it because it was right after that first season of Lost, where everyone was like, “oh, holy crap, what's going on?”

2. ARG illustration as narrative through-line
"With ARG through-lines, the idea is that you have a connective tissue. You have cartilage from A to B. And as an illustrator, my job is to visualize and strengthen that connective tissue. If I haven't done that, then I've failed."

3. Educational ARGs: Write the story or the learning outcome first?
"You have to write the story and the learning outcomes at the same time. It is not impossible to do one and then the other, because boy howdy can you tell. I've seen many examples of games that will never see the light of day because we say, 'No, you took that really ridiculous Sponge-Bob-Squarepants-like story and tried to shoehorn some random learning objective into it, and it sucks'. Kids will catch onto that within minutes. They will call you out worse than any adult; it's amazing. You have to build the learning outcines in at the same time, and you almost have to say, 'What do I want someone to learn that isn't being learned? How can I make that entertaining?' So you almost have to start with education first."

4. Creating conceptual learning objectives
"You've got to even take it away from the idea of learning is 2 plus 2 equals 4 and focus instead on conceptual learning. For example: what is learning from the broader scope of 'I need you to learn how to make a bridge'? Instead of saying, 'How do you make a bridge? That's your end goal for this', you want to learn the idea behind an engineering concept. How do you make something that can make this really heavy car go across the water? Who says it has to be a bridge? It can be a boat. Then you start guiding them and can say things like that the best way to do this is to build giant pillars, so how do you build a pillar? Or if you want to do this as suspension, how do you do that? Here's all the times people have failed. Here's that crazy video of a bridge going up and down. And then the story finds it way."

5. Making use of educational opportunities
"If your goal is to be educational, it needs to come first, and it leads itself to really creative solutions. Curious George, the most popular show on PBS Kids right now, is about a monkey that screws stuff up all the time. Someone could come in with that and say, 'I've got this great cartoon about a monkey that screws stuff up all day, and he's followed around by this really tall guy with a giant yellow hat'. And you could think of about thirty stories that comes out of that that could not be educational, but instead the writer of Curious George has said, wait, there's educational opportunities. One of the huge educational goals of Curious George is engineering; he breaks everything, but they make him fix it. So kids are sitting there learning how balloons fly in the air, how an airplane works, how a kite works (it seems to be lots of aerodynamic episodes in that show...). But they just don't see it like that. They see it as Curious George showed me how to fly a kite, because the stories are so engaging. And if you don't have that engagement, you don't have anything really."

Sean Stewart, ARG-writer extraordinaire (The Beast, ilovebees, Last Call Poker, the Cathy's Book series, and most recently of Fourth Wall Studios), was kind enough to talk with the ARGs in Education team in December. Here are some of his quotations we'd like to share:

1. Audience-Driven Preservation If you have a sufficiently large audience, they will filter and do quality control. Like on the AI project, on The Beast, we didn't keep documents. The players do it for you, and they do it better, and god knows they have more time. There's just absolutely no point in trying to do it yourself because they are infinitely more painstaking and careful assembling and documenting how well the pieces go together.

2. Building on "Mistakes" Here’s an example of why this art form is different from any other. One of our characters worked as an environmental engineer at a company that had a company website. Then way over on another part of the game, there was a site called Bella Derma that was an Italian manufacturer of high-end geisha robots. Now, it turns out that someone on the art staff pulled the same piece of stock art to be one of the coworkers at the environmental company and one of the geisha robots, and so the players said, “Oh, look, they used the same piece of stock art”. So between that update and the next update I wrote--actually it's one of the best science fiction stories I've ever written in this sort of vein--was called “The Step-Self”, all about a women whose husband was having an affair with a model of herself, and how she's slowly losing grip of her own sense that she was the author of her life and slowly feeling it slide over into the artificial intelligences until that was the real life, and she was sort of chucked. So, it was actually a really nice piece of science fiction... In our house, we have a thing called the Star Trek Game--rationalizing things like "How do starships make that SWOOSH noise as they go by in the vacuum of space?" It's no fun to say they screwed up. You come up with the in-world reasons why something fits. Over the course of the Beast, players came to realize that we were playing this game together--that they would address a question and it was our job to give back the most beautiful possible answer to that question, regardless of the fact that it started as a mistake.

3. Media and Extended Play If you're going to do something serial that doesn't have a beginning, middle, and end right now, but rather plays out over time, you've got to find ways to define islands of stuff that you're sure of. You can use video on them, and then for things that you want to allow greater degree of flexibility you use websites and text, other assets that you can create and destroy very, very fast.

4. Defining Transmedia Traditionally, what we think of as an entertainment experience is that we go to it: I go to a movie theater and I see a movie. I get a book down from the shelf and open it and then the book happens in my mind. I sit down in front of the television, or I go to my XBox. All we are doing is, instead, saying, “let's let the story come to you”. And all the different other things I'm going to say and all the experiments that we've tried and that other people have tried--when you're floundering in “what does transmedia mean today?”, it is more true to take the basic starting line and just reverse that directionality. Instead of you go to it, how does it come to you?

5. One-Time ARGs and Replayability If you want a comparison, one that's useful is The Beast was Woodstock. Everyone who was there understood, if you read the comments at the end of the game, everyone knew that the world had changed. That something incredibly important and new and exciting had happened. But it's really difficult to work having a giant rock concert all the time, and part of the point of view of Fourth Wall Studios was to say, “Okay, what's the album?” If the concert is multiplayer, takes place in real time, and if you miss it you missed it, what's the album? It's the experience you can have by yourself, and you can have it even six months later. Cathy's Book is a first attempt at bridging that gap. How can we make a product that is not ephemeral in time? The Beast was both a serial living in time and multiplayer and cross-platform. So how about we strip out the time-elapsing thing and make a replayable single player cross-platform thing?

At the October 2010 Meaningful Play conference, the ARGs in Education team spoke with Drew Davidson, director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Below is a highlight of our interview we'd like to share (full transcripts are available upon request!).

On Teaching Game Design "It's really about rapid prototyping. We teach a class first semester where they're put on teams of four and they have two weeks to make something go. Shuffle new teams, go, shuffle, go, shuffle go. So crazy crunchy time lines, the roles are specific, there is a modeler for the 3D, there is a texture artist to wrap the models, there is a sound designer which usually is sometime we get people who are interdisciplinary degrees, we do have sound designers, but often that's the person who can't do anything else. You have somebody who's got a business background. You can get a person with a business background to open up sound program, with libraries and sound effects and music, to score something. And then, a programmer. "And so we make it explicit that nobody's the designer, so you're sharing that idea but then in the two weeks, it's like "man, you better go". And we give them crazy, crunchy constraints. Mostly it's like it’s all about being out of their comfort zone, they've never done stuff like this before, they're working with three people they haven't worked with before and we do things like they're making these virtual world experiences and they can't use standard input devices, no mice, no acoustics, no keyboards. So you have to use the weird stuff we have around, like neg-motion tracking, infrared motion tracking, big huge installation things they can work with or make their own, if they have industrial designers and mechanical engineers. Then we give 'em even weirder constraints like, this world has to have two characters in it or this world has no pixels, watch 'em go."

In September 2010, the ARGs in Education team spoke with librarian Heather Owings, who has run two summer-reading-program ARGs (Find Chesia and The Mystery Guest in collaboration with a team of young adult designers. Below are some highlights of our interview we'd like to share (full transcripts are available upon request!).

Differences between Adult and Teen ARG Players Jane McGonigal demonstrated her World without Oil game to us, and then the other one that she talked about was the one that she built around the Olympics, The Lost Ring. What I noticed in her games (and what she was talking about) is that, first of all, adults were willing to take on character roles and were willing to jump into this game playing a character, whereas with the teens we had almost a resistance--they didn't want you to think that they didn't know it wasn't really happening.

Confusion over ARG Expectations I pulled four volunteers--actually, we had six to begin with, but two dropped out throughout the process. They anticipated it to be more like a video game with a beginning and an ending; the openness of the ARG unsettled them, so they dropped out fairly early on... In fact, that was one of the things that we did ask this year’s game players: if the alternate reality game or ARG turned them off from playing. And a lot of them admitted that they weren't sure what it was, and in that respect they were like, “I don't know if I want to do it”. But if you just say “an interactive online game”, they were much more open to that.

Teen ARG Players Want More Direction than Adult Players In an adult-player game, if there's not clear directions, the adults might take the initiative to meet the need however they see best to do it, but teens are in a culture of education, and they are looking for directions on how to do this. Once they know the structure, they are more than happy to interact and respond.