[vpisteve]

...or be made to LOOK like they're turned off.

[ScarpeGrosse]

Jas0n wrote:

PMs often do their job in the nude or near-nude - the curtain protects our sanity!

Thank goodness webcams can be turned off...

[Jas0n]

My logic is somewhat different regarding the absolute need for a curtain, and my answer is much shorter than most of the above responses:

PMs often do their job in the nude or near-nude - the curtain protects our sanity!

[FLmutant]

However individual players choose to view their desire for the curtain is great, but that isn't really going to influence what companies do, just take a look at the games happening now (not a one of which has anything close to a traditional curtain in the way most people have described it here.) Sadly, what you are arguing for is also, in many cases, the definition of a hoax, and I think hoaxing is essentially incompatible with the trust mechanisms necessary to make a good ARG work.

In my perspective, if I was forced to work with the curtain metaphor, the curtain is about protecting humans from characters. It has nothing to do with the PMs. UF is a place that my characters can't see. In the same way, my production environment is a place my characters can't see. All of that is out of game, behind the curtain. It seems a horrible convolution to try to define if the player's OOG space is separate from the PM's OOG space.

So whether or not I exist in an OOG space, for example posting here, even though in the IG space new content actually went up, is really immaterial to the concept of "curtain". Similarly, whether I choose to let you as players peek a little more into my chunk of OOG space (in the same way you hope I peek a little bit here in your OOG space) is a design decision, certainly not any kind of hard fast requirement, and certainly not an intrinsic part of the definition.

My only concern is if my OOG communication has a negative impact on the play experience. As long as it doesn't, it isn't an issue ... it might even be an advantage, say over being viewed as a hoax. Sadly, the guiding rules of a good production are geared only to your expectations, but also to the expectations of people ranging from law enforcement to journalists to people who think your "ARG" is a "hoax site" (like Wired seems to think about Dark Knight.)

All the rest is just semantics and doesn't really make any developer or player have a better experience -- it reduces down to the arguments of one design philosophy over another. Much of which, I think, also produces an oversteerage from the real time feedback of too small a segment of the player base, because you're forced to apply psychotherapy to feedback source you supposedly can't directly query.

Fewer absolute declarations might produce more new insights, instead of (like this thread shows) just more dramatic blow ups. If PMs are told they can't talk to their fans except through the most of subtle of mechanisms, you can expect all but the most subtle of new PMs to screw it up at some point ... and, looking at the genre, the curtain might well add to the spectacular implosions.

The definition curtain is less important than good sense of timing and showmanship. The curtain won't save you from a lack of those things.

[ScarpeGrosse]

But... but... if you take away the curtain, you also take away the fun of PM stalking! :O

also,

Dante wrote:

there are times (particularly when frustrations arise) when I'd like to sit down and discuss what's going on in the game with the creators of the game -- not because I want to know secrets or how things were done, but because I want to know that they understand how decisions they made fostered certain reactions.

This statement seems to assume that you think PMs are stupid and don't realize mistakes when they're made and/or need them pointed out to them by someone as wise as yourself.

As a PM, I have realized 95% of the mistakes I or the teams I've been on have made, usually long before the players recognize them, and or get bent out of shape over them (if they ever do. Usually I'm more bent out of shape than anyone, due to my painful issue with perfectionism). There have been numerous times when my forehead has met a hard surface and been repeatedly beaten for being a stupid PM and not noticing something was wrong prior to an element or story portion going live. As a PM, sometimes you just don't have the luxury of immediately fixing a problem or alleviating player strife and anxiety, and that's just part of the game, in my opinion. An ARG, to me, involves as much unspoken meta communication as it does actual game play. Both the players and the PMs are in a constant process of fine tuning and rule learning, regardless of team, game, content, etc. That's part of the game and what makes each permutation and new ARG a new challenge. New rulesets, new boundaries, new meta communcations to learn, new dance steps to master. It's more than just a navigation through the story for me - part of the game is learning the game itself (if that makes sense).

Anyhow, having sat in a number of different player chatrooms I've watched positive, fruitful, fun discussion dissolve into a puddle of "what fuckheads these PMs are because...
I didn't get a phone call/t-shirt/live event/the answer to the puzzle
they spelled something wrong
this puzzle is screwed up
I hate this character
this game is too slow
this game is too fast
this game has too much information
this game has too little stuff
they didn't use my contribution
are not the Wachowski brothers but some unknown pooheads
etc etc ad infinitum."

Though I fully understand these frustrations, and fully admit fault when one of the above problems is a result of a decision I made, once this conversation in the chatroom starts happening, I can usually figure out the feelings of the players quite clearly, as well as what went wrong. 'Cause, you know, I can read and the players are quite good at expressing themselves, almost to the point of making me cry (only a couple of times ).

At that point, my best move is to begin to plan and do better next time. I don't think any amount of apology or further discussion would add enjoyment to the experience, but turn it more into a classroom exercise in psychology or a group therapy session.

Shudder.

Furthermore, the second half of this post would be a reversal of the above, and would go into how often the players do stupid shit and make mistakes and how the PM team, equally, struggles with the moves and decisions of the players.

But that would be boring, and my fingers are tired of typing and would much prefer to be wrapped around a glass of scotch.

To sum up: I trust the players to make the best decision they can make at any given time, and I expect the players to trust me to make the best decision I can make at any given time. The knowledge of what was a good or bad decision can only occur after the fact, as we never beta test this stuff. At the same time, I also trust PMs and players to recognize mistakes and learn from them, much as I would expect a dog to learn that it shouldn't pee on the carpet.

You can't suck the pee back up into the bladder, man. You have to learn what to do with it and when. Some of that comes by study, some by trial and error (and spankings).

[natas]

coincidence????

[danteIL]

There seems to be at least two aspects to the 'curtain as immersion' argument:

The first appears to concern primarily the willing suspension of disbelief. That is, some people state that they would find games less fun if they were to have interactions with the PMs that were not mediated solely by in-game mechanics, because that would shatter the internal illusion of the game world. I can understand that, although at some level I think 'YMMV' applies. For me personally, I don't feel that having access to meta- aspects of the game hinders my enjoyment of ARGs at all. Indeed, I like those aspects very much, and I also feel like I can pretty successfully slip in and out of the game world pretty easily when I need to. Note, however, that this issue of 'suspension of disbelief' seems orthogonal to the more specific question concerning access to the PMs. Indeed, if one were to take the immersion stance to its limit, then this would suggest that players shouldn't congregate on IRC or even on UF, because this is not what your 'in-game' self would do. Clearly, that's not a serious position, but it explains why I don't really buy the simple (and possibly strawman) version of the immersion argument. If interacting with other players out of the game doesn't impair one's ability to enjoy experiences in-game, then I don't see, on that level alone, why interacting with the PMs would be any worse.

Second, however, is the more specific (and more relevant) issue that people seem to feel that interacting with the PMs somehow makes one needlessly aware of the messy underbelly of the game and that a curtain (of whatever material) helps preserve the 'magic.' Part of this comes down to, again, YMMV. Different people have different feelings about knowing what's going on behind the scenes, and I understand that the more conservative position is to have a curtain rather than not have a curtain. I just think that it's a very weird situation where everyone agrees that the PMs and the players are collaborating together to create this wonderful shared experience, but the only generally accepted means of communicating about that experience is through the experience itself. My discomfort is that player communication to the PMs (that is, when they mean to communicate directly to the PMs and not to characters in-game) becomes, by necessity, very passive-agressive -- tapping on the magic mirror and hoping for a response. There are times (particularly when frustrations arise) when I'd like to sit down and discuss what's going on in the game with the creators of the game -- not because I want to know secrets or how things were done, but because I want to know that they understand how decisions they made fostered certain reactions. Most ARGs are structured in a way that thwart that second-order level of mutual knowledge. PMs reading fora obsessively is not communication.

Note that this is written from the player perspective. I appreciate that a few PM-types have responded with their own good reasons for having a curtain.

[labfly]

i LOVE the curtain as a pm and as a player.

as a player for many of the reason you guys have listed above. for me, it's like reading a book or watching a movie.. i don't want the author or director/writer popping out in the middle of the story to chat about the hows or the whys.

as a pm i want to concentrate on one thing, telling the story. not that i don't obsessively check in with the forums for feedback. i am always snooping. i just feel that stepping out as the pm to comment would really break up the storytelling process for me. i would rather address issues as best i can within the story world. and i don't know what other pms do when they're orchestrating a game but i really fall into my story and characters. my actor friends say i'm a "method" pm. someone else said it's more of a jan the mad scientist mode. who knows what breaking out of my mad scientist mode might do?

i love what spacebass said about how the curtain creates a space where the magic can happen between the players and pm. that's lovely.

...that said, it's been interesting to watch the eldritch errors crew move back and forth with the curtain. their process seems to work very nicely for them. and the fans seem very happy with it.

so, i guess it really is a pm preference/design question.

[vpisteve]

Re: Why a curtain?

[krystyn]

natas, you just made me laugh.

Space, I think you have some competition in the ARG erudition arena.

[natas]

Why a curtain?

[SpaceBass]

Short Answer:
Because that's the way it works best. Note: this is not intended to be a cop-out along the lines of "It's always been done that way." As Rekidk pointed out above, Jeromy Barber has managed to relearn the lesson empirically.

Medium Answer:
There are at least two ideas behind the concept of a curtain in the context of Alternate Reality Gaming. First, the curtain can be used to hide the identity of the Puppetmasters from the Players. This is an optional usage, as seen above but which when exercised counter-intuitively facilitates the meta-communication between the Architects and the Audience because (again, example above), it creates an artificial tension that is required to sustain the meta-communication in the first place (if communication by other routes is easier or more efficient, they will be used instead).

The second idea is that the curtain is the game space. You said your focus was not on the division of in-game from out-of-game elements but this is the core purpose of the curtain and it is integral to how an ARG functions. The label is misleading in a meta-fashion because it implies a mere boundary line between two elements but it works well in a metaphorical way because it incites at least a certain level of expectation based on past experience.

There are in fact three elements: The Puppetmaster side of the curtain, which is out-of-game; the Player side of the curtain, which is also out-of-game but (ideally) unconnected to the Puppetmaster side (yet observable by them); and then there is inside the curtain, which contains uncertainty and possibility, and which is the only boundary-definable game-space that is entirely in-game.

ARGs as a system and a process contain more than a single communication dynamic. Magic happens behind the scenes on the Puppetmaster teams, the Players work their wizardry on their own, but inside the curtain is where we make the magic happen together.

Long Answer aka "My god, it's full of stars.":
Stay tuned. See here.

[mapmaker]

On the other hand, I don't think there's much of a problem with communicating with PMs about non-game stuff. The curtain is a funny shape in that way.

[imbri]

I think a curtain is a necessity. However, I do not believe that one must have an "iron curtain."

We started Metacortechs with an "iron curtain" and it worked very well for us. However, I don't think that the experience was harmed in when someone(s) found their way around the iron curtain and word got out that it was not an official experience and was being created by a grassroots team. I do, however, wonder if the experience would have suffered if we had been open from the start - my gut tells me we would have had few players and that may have had some impact.

We have your standard living room curtain in Eldritch Errors which works very well for the experience. There are a number of benefits that come with this approach, but what I love most is that it allows us to open the curtain on occasion in order to document the experience for others interested in the genre from a PM perspective.

Most games, however, have a more stage curtain - they're big and heavy and you rarely see a toe sticking out from underneath. However, when you walk into the theater you know you're going to see a production on a specific topic and it's produced by a certain company. You might not have gotten that information from the game but from the article that pointed you to the game. I like this approach as it lets you email the producers of the game if there you have reason to inquire about the game, but if, say, there's a problem with the website you can email the webmaster about it, or want to tell a character something you can email them. It lets you keep out of game stuff out of game and in game stuff in game. The danger with this approach is that once you've come out from behind the curtain to fix a minor detail, you might fumble a bit as you try to get back behind it. Any breach is much more noticeable.

It's all a matter of degree and depends on the needs of the experience. Hopefully, however, whatever curtain is chosen, the game is designed with that curtain in miind. I think, for the most part, that's usually what happens.

[Rekidk]

You may find it interesting to read about Jeromy Barber's ARG, RedEarth88. Since the end of the first chapter (Maddison Atkins) back in late April, Jeromy has not had much of a curtain. Recently, he made the decision to go 'back behind the curtain,' because the players were spending too much time trying to get information out of him instead of exploring his universe and solving the puzzles in-game. He found that the lack of a curtain damaged his game.

Read his blog post about it here.