Lately I’ve been getting more and more interested in the idea of ARG’s. My interest primarily comes from trying to think up new and interesting challenges for the Discord community. I kind of ran a small ARG a couple of months ago and it was really cool to see the community try and unravel the clues. They came up with the solution pretty quickly to be fair, in about a week, but it was one of the better received challenges. It’s gotten me thinking about doing another one…
However I want to be really careful about how I go about setting future ones up. If you’ve read some of my previous posts about storytelling and world setting you’ll know that I’m a big fan of everything having a purpose and ultimately being canonically correct and tying into the same lore. Some of my favourite franchises, like Metal Gear Solid, have very strong lore where most things connect and have a meaning. I’m pretty sure that when Hideo Kojima first came up with some of the ideas he set out in Metal Gear he wasn’t aware of where the story would be leading 10 – 20 years later. A lot of the lore has probably had to be developed as the franchise evolved and carefully woven into what already exists. Stephen King managed to achieve this with his Dark Tower series. He openly admits that he didn’t really know what was going to be happening from one book to the next. He had a string idea of the world he wanted to build but the stories kind of just came to him as he began to write them. This indicates one thing. The key is having a strong concept of the world you want to build; then you can pretty much weave it as you go along as long as you stay true to the world you have built.
The issue is if in the early life of that world building you are not entirely sure of where you want to end up. Then you may have “information” that doesn’t tie in nicely with the overall world and breaks the story. They then either become loose ends, ignored from the lore or awkwardly tied into the lore with workarounds like alternate dimensions/time travel type stuff.
So why am I so bothered about future ARGs I might create? Well I have two options; just create some fun ARGs that exist in their own right for people to enjoy or design the ARGs around a larger concept which ties them all together, ties them to my games or even ties everything together in a world which encompasses the world of everything created by Chronik Spartan.
Hmmmm… Well I’m not sure yet which route I’m going to take or even if the option to tie everything together would even workout. But watch this space…
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