Chimaeralogue

Just over a year has passed since I discovered Alternate Reality Gaming, a genre of gaming and storytelling that allows me to not just read great tales but to live them. January 4th was my first anniversary as a member of unFiction, and I wanted to make a post to commemorate it, since unFiction and the ARG community has had such a strong influence on the changing direction of my life.

Waiting for The Moment

As a little girl, I always had an emergency bag beside my bed, packed with a change of clothes, a pair of old shoes, matches, a flashlight, a granola bar or something of the sort, string, and other things I thought might need if a portal to another world opened up for me while I was in my pajamas. I don’t remember when I started keeping this bag near my bed; it might have started in my Saturday morning fantasy cartoons phase. I loved shows like “Wildfire” and “Dungeons and Dragons”; and Nickolodean’s “The Third Eye”; and “The Tomorrow People”. I firmly believed in the existence of other worlds, and just as firmly I believed that one day, if I just watched closely enough, a door would open, or a space ship would swoop out of the sky, and off I’d go to explore some Other Place and maybe even become the heroine of a great adventure.

I don’t remember when I stopped keeping that bag by my bed, but I know that it was long after Santa Claus was shuffled into the Myth category, and I believe I was well into my teen years before I gave up hope on finding that door.

Searching for Other Worlds

Those magic years of wonder and watching and waiting deeply influenced my adult psyche. Space exploration fascinates me, as does theoretical physics such as string theory and M-theory and related topics. My favorite fantasy novels - A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, anything by Charles de Lint, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Guardians of the Flame, The Neverending Story and many others - all center around the theme of “crossing over”, stepping out of the mundane world into a magical or fantastic realm.

I discovered video games very early - Atari games didn’t provide much of a story, but it wasn’t very many years after I got my first Atari that Nintendo came out with The Legend of Zelda. Much later, in my college years, the first computer I ever bought with my own money was purchased just so I could play Myst.

Role-Playing Games, too, I discovered in my very early teens (my mom actually gave me a copy of the Star Trek Role-Playing Game, and I still have those lovingly-worn books tucked away somewhere safe), and these games put me in touch with other people like myself who loved to imagine themselves in another world as another person.

The Door to Another Reality

My first encounter with Alternate Reality Gaming came in a chance mention of LonelyGirl15 in a commentary on how young women in the media eye were ruining normal teenage girls by being bad influences, how this lonelygirl15 had been revealed as a lying phoney, blah blah blah. It was a lousy commentary column. But I seized on “lonelygirl15″ and took my curiosity to the Oracle that is Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is sort of like that palace of doors in The Neverending Story - the one Bastian has to go through to get out of the Desert of Colors. You pick one door. That leads to a room with two more doors. You pick another. And you get two more. Except Wikipedia leads you through rooms with hundreds of doors… and you always end up in some other place after a trip through it.

So, looking up LonelyGirl15 in Wikipedia led me inevitably (and maybe because I was looking for it without even knowing it, just like Bastian) to the entry on Alternate Reality Games. I read it.

That door I was waiting for, all through my childhood and even in my teen years? I could see it, right there, on my computer screen.

Oddly enough, earlier that year I’d read a little tale called The Dionaea House, which piqued my interest in distributed narrative and interactive fiction. I’d planned for my NaNo-novel that year to be something of the kind, only with pictures and blogs and a main website cataloguing evidence of the story I was planning to tell. Sadly, I didn’t have the time to put together something so immense, and I discovered the ARG world not long after November.

As a writer, the idea of taking a story and deconstructing it into parts, then making readers work for the pieces, appealed to me. One of my favorite novels is The Woman in White by Wilke Collins. It’s written in a modified epistolary style, with each character contributing a piece of the narrative through journals, testimonies, letters, even the rubbing of a gravestone. It is one of the most suspenseful novels I have ever read, and the structure of the tale heightens the suspense by asking the reader to act as judge. ARGs take that same sort of structure and add to it the immediacy of character interaction for the reader/experiencer.

The most appealing aspect of this new genre of game/story, to me, was the community of people, the kind of people the games attracted. People from all over our vast-yet-tiny world, with different skills, different ideologies, all dedicated to solving the mysteries and participating in the experience of each game. After reading through game guides for The Beast and ilovebees, I found that the players and the way they shaped the story by their actions and interactions with one another as well as the story-world, fascinated me as much as the story itself. The community experience created a second, shadow-story that followed alongside the same path as the game’s narrative. I’d seen this same effect in my role-playing groups, but never to this extent - hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, all deeply affected by playing the game and by their associations with each other.

The Door Opens

Each Alternate Reality Game creates its own unique experience as the story is revealed. These are not games that you can go back and replay over and over again - they happen once. For some of the games, players have gone to great lengths to chronicle and preserve the experience as much as possible, creating game guides or summaries. For other games, the preservation extends only to a string of posts in a forum, or perhaps a lingering blog, now silent, or a trail of emails in the inbox. Some puppetmasters for larger games now create a “meta-site” to help new players catch up and join in, and to create a place where the game can be looked over and appreciated after the end.

One of the first grassroots games I read through on unFiction was Sammeeeees, which had been carefully chronicled by Konamouse in the Story So Far which was created to help new players catch up with the game. The story was whimsical, dark and serious yet oddly tongue-in-cheek - a name like Spoocheeeee could seem ridiculous and horrifying both at the same time. Mr. Alan Johnson seemed the archetypical cackling black hat villain, but no less frightening for all that. A ritual involving an axe and a block of cheese (among other things) seemed not silly but essential; even though I laugh every time I see Konamouse circling the disk backward, waving her arms, my heart also clenches in a fierce triumph, for on that day, the Sammeeeees defeated Spoocheeeee for all time. I wasn’t there, but I tell you, I got into the story just reading through all the stuff that happened!

Reading the experience, visiting the websites and blogs that players discovered, watching the videos, attempting to live the story as the players and the characters must have lived it together, was magical for me. If I regretted missing The Beast or ilovebees or Metacortechs, I regretted missing Sammeeeees ten times over. I think I loved the game as much because of the small yet deeply devoted (one might say fanatically devoted) player base that the game attracted as for the beautiful story that Jan Libby told in Sammeeeees. I wanted so badly to be a Sammeeeee, too!!

My chance came in the spring of 2007. I saw the name Sammeeeees appear in the “News and Rumors” forum of unFiction. Peeps was having a garden party! The characters were stirring - the world of Sammeeeees, which had only narrowly escaped the clutches of the evil Spoocheeeee and then destroyed it forever, was becoming visible again. Through spring, I watched, waited, chatted with the Sammeeeees; in summer, Mr. Alan Johnson’s ghost rose from the grave to wreak revenge on his destroyers. The game had begun, but it felt indeed like “play for mortal stakes” - would we be able to save our friends?

The part of the game (it didn’t feel like a game AT ALL, mind you) I most enjoyed was the plot twist that had us players committing our souls to a dark temple in order to foil Mr. Alan Johnson’s (now known as The Eidolon) plans. The way Jan worked this part of the story let us all pretend that we were, in fact, IN the dark temple, or some part of us was, anyway. Even when I was at work, I would smile and think to myself, “My soul is really locked away in my Raven Cell, conspiring against the Eidolon.” To advance in the temple and in the Eidolon’s trust, we created audio files, videos, and photos to add to our Raven Cells - player-created content.

For the entire summer, I lived in that Other World, the world of Sammeeeees, inhabiting the Dark Temple, finding secret passages and doorways, decoding evil plots, praying to a god named Mithras, and working to protect our friends’ souls that the Eidolon had stolen away. In the end, we triumphed, and the moments of the final rescue - a (virtual) run from the temple through a portal into a motel room in El Portal, Nevada, were thrilling. When the game ended, I, too, was finally a Sammeeeee.

Only after the game was done and my first year in the world of Alternate Reality Gaming was 3/4ths over did I realize that my childhood dream had come true - I’d stepped through a door into another world and become part of an amazing story. The hardest thing about crossing into another world is that one always has to return to the mundane world when the task is complete. But I’m always on the lookout these days for another door, another portal that might open at a moment’s notice and sweep me off to another adventure.

Work has been very busy for me the last couple of weeks as we rush toward yet another quarterly earnings period. All I feel like doing at the end of the day is coming home to collapse and… play World of Warcraft. I don’t get to do much of that, but even 30-45 minutes of playing makes me happy.

My highest level character is Saira, Lvl 20 Night Elf Druid, but she is coming along nicely. In order to not have her stop and return to a major city while she’s out running around killing stuff, I created an “auction house alt” character on the same server, in the human city (more people to buy stuff.) Saira mails her stuff to Noani, Noani sells it, and sends Saira the money. But… I kind of like Noani, too. So I’ve been running her every now and then. She’s a straight-up fighter, and nothing is more relaxing after a long workday than being able to bash things over the head.

Because I’m a writer, and everything must have a story, I made up a little tale for Noani and Saira in which lofty lvl 20 Saira offers to pay for Noani’s training in exchange for her services as merchant. I even wrote notes through the in-game postal service between the two characters as they finalized their business relationship. Saira will pay for training, not for gear, Noani can keep 10% of sales, etc. Noani is still wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, and Saira occasionally sends her snippets of advice.

David’s reaction to all of this was, “You are really sick, you know that?”

What can I say? Everything MUST HAVE A STORY. Even my WoW characters. I’ve started taking screencaps of sites in the game that I find particularly beautiful, like the sunset over the ocean as seen from Auberdine, in Darkshore - with my characters posing for their glamour shots, of course. As soon as I have more than ten screencaps for each character, I’m going to put a WoW photo album up.

I haven’t told David this yet. Maybe he won’t find out.

I said last year would be my last year participating in NaNoWriMo. After the first two or three years, NaNoWriMo’s purpose for me became less about writing and more about networking, connecting and re-connecting with friends and fellow writers in the Houston and Texas areas. I loved getting together and pounding out words with someone, or just chatting about writing and stories and plots and characters. Most of my friends have stopped doing NaNoWriMo at this point, and I decided last year it was time for me to leave the madness to the new batch of writing enthusiasts.

The value of NaNoWriMo, to me, is in no way diminished. It’s something I think every novice writer should do once or twice, and experienced writers can benefit from a turn or two at fast-paced novel writing, as well. I learned a lot from my participation with NaNo - that I can write, that I can write fast and still have useful material, I discovered a little bit of my style, I learned how to set writing goals, how to scrape up time to write, how to discipline myself to sit my butt in a chair and write, and finally, I learned that writing 50K in 30 days is way too fast for me.

I still think of November as a “creative month”, and I think I always will. I don’t want to write 50K in 30 days anymore, ever again, but I do want to write. I have two new writing projects that I very much want to complete. One is a fantasy adventure story (if I ever finish it, it will be dedicated to James Oliver Rigney, in memorium, because he inspired it), and the other centers on a young woman stepping into the pro video gaming world. That one was inspired by meeting one of the the Frag Dolls, an all-women team of pro video gamers sponsored by UbiSoft.

I’d like to document the progress of the novel and blog about some of the stuff I learn about the inner workings of the pro video gaming industry, so I thought, why not repurpose NaNoWriMo, or at least the month of November to my own ends? Sure, I can shoot for 50K, but the upper limit of my productivity usually results in about 1K words per day. I want to concentrate on quality, and also on documentation of my writing process (useful to me, useful to others), rather than the number of words in my master doc file.

In a sense, I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo, but I won’t be attending any local events. Now that I have a laptop, I often enjoy going out to write, and I’ll make it a point to do that more often once the writing starts. I’ll follow all of the NaNoWriMo rules (I won’t have enough research to start until November anyway), but I’ll have other goals besides the 50K - those goals might include procuring an interview for research purposes, or they might involve attending a game event. My focus will be the novel, not NaNoWriMo. And who knows? Maybe this will lead to the first novel I ever finish.

I’m in, but I’m not. In the sandbox, building my own damn castle. I’m not even using my old NaNoWriMo account - I made a new one. OctoberDreaming. Because I’m feeling more and more like an “October” and less and less like a “Moonsong”. As an aside, people in chat actually call me October and refer to me as October - when I was “Moonsong”, everyone called me Brandie unless they didn’t know me at all. Isn’t that interesting? No? Well, it is to me.

Without further ado:
NaNoWriMo 2007: Gamer Girl (working title) (REMOVED, ’cause it didn’t happen - too many other projects!!)

My husband is starting to pick up on the idea that alternate reality games can and will invade a person’s “real” life. He has a tendency to rampage through the mail and throw away things he doesn’t recognize, so I’ve instructed him NOT to throw away anything with my name on it (or the names “October”, “OctoberDreaming”, “Darkstar October”, and variations thereof.) Since the only address I’ve given out in the ARG world is my P.O. address, I only expect ARGish stuff to come through that particular portal. However, I forgot to mention this to David, so he’s been saving (and examining) all the junk mail to our street address with a little too much enthusiasm.

Our conversation today went something like this:

David: This might be for an ARG.
Me: *stares at an envelope bearing the unlikely crest of “Ducks Unlimited” and emblazoned with “You Are Pre-Qualified!” in big red letters* It’s a credit card offer.
David: It’s from Ducks Unlimited.
Me: It’s… a credit card offer. Shred it.
David: *holds out the envelope with a hopeful look* At least open it.
Me: Why?
David: *desperately* Because who would send a credit card offer from bloody Ducks Unlimited??? It’s gotta be a… rabbit… thingy.

Heh. No one can say he’s not super-supportive.

Ever since I discovered ARGs, I’ve spent more than a few moments lamenting that I wasn’t on board from the beginning. There’s a super-strong, rich history to this genre, and it makes me sad that I missed such a huge, ground-breaking chunk of it. I could almost kill myself for not paying attention and completely missing i love bees - I saw that trailer!!! I can’t remember what movie we subjected ourselves to in order to see it - it was obviously forgettably crappy - but I saw the trailer for Halo 2, and I missed the most vital part of it. I missed the game entirely. Sometimes I wake up at night and squirm over it.

I know that there will be lots of cool experiences and games to play, and that I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to the community (I’m volunteering for a BUNCH of stuff, like the newsletter, and the database project, etc.), but I still wish I’d been perceptive enough to catch on to ILB when it was happening. ARGs are now very close to being well-known mainstream entertainment, and that’s great, but I would have liked to have known and played the historic games.

Anyway. Trying to “immerse” myself in the culture and language of ARGs, I’ve been putting a lot of time into reading through the history of past games, and I’m almost finished reading Dave Szulborski’s This Is Not A Game. And I ordered a copy of The Project MU Archives, because it’s a hugely important piece of history relating to independent (non-corporate/advertising) games.

Project MU, also known as Metacortechs, was an independent game based on The Matrix and put into play just before the release of Matrix: Revolutions in 2003. It was not sponsored by a corporation as a viral marketing campaign; rather, it was designed by a team of non-professional Puppetmasters who also happened to be fans of the Matrix universe. The original website is still in existence, and you can follow the trail of discovery in the unForums archives, if you’re interested.

Last year, the Metaurchins, as the Metacortechs players named themselves, put together a printed copy of the Metacortechs experience, complete with commentary from both PMs and players, photos, the rabbit hole and puzzle trail, character bios, and much more. They designed the print and page layouts themselves, put it all together, and they used Lulu as the POD vehicle to turn a virtual experience into a real-life artifact. The became available in November of last year, and of course I learned about it last month while hanging around the unFiction forums.

As a piece of ARG history, I had to have it. One of the elements of ARGs that draws me and fascinates me is the strong community that has formed around these ephemeral experiences. Although I’m still barely on the fringes, I can feel it - these are passionate people. And their passion is not about winning or dominating or being first or having the highest score in the game. No, their passion is collaboration, teamwork, problem solving, and reaching out to help even the most fictional characters. To the people of this community, nothing is unreal. And therefore, nothing is impossible.

Together, they create a compelling and awe-inspiring reality of their own.

As drawn to the community as I am, naturally I wanted to see this book for myself, this labor of love, a tangible representation of the Metaurchins’ accomplishments. The book arrived today.

It is gorgeous. Every line of it, every page, reflects on glossy paper the dedication this community has to its art. The Metaurchins’ attention to detail is as careful as that of the Puppetmasters themselves when they created a game. It’s almost a physical metaphor for ARGs. There’s an unspoken accord that whatever you give to the game will come back to you manyfold. The give and take between the PMs and the players, the community spirit and the teamwork, all of that and more, is captured in this book.

And, now that I’m finished gushing over it, I think I’ll go read it.

(X-Posted to my LJ and my MySpace, because I doubt anyone looks here… yet…)

‘Round about the tail end of 1994, a college freshman who had neither grown up with computers or even so much as taken a computer science course in high school found herself wandering aimlessly all over the Internet - and loving it. From the very first moment I discovered that the computer I’d received as a graduation present (a 386DX with Windows 3.1 - yeah, yeah, so I was a little late) could link me up with the entire world, I was fascinated. I bought a ginourmous book (bigger than the biggest WoT novel) about the Internet and read it from cover to cover. I explored. I emailed. I discovered BBS and MUD and Usenet. I taught myself rudimentary HTML. I absorbed Internet culture and “netiquette” through my fingertips and learned to type like the wind.

The Internet evolved, and I evolved with it as it became more popular and more useful. Keeping up with the ‘Net helped me to become comfortable and conversant with computers, and that gave me an edge in many ways. I joined Elfwood in 2000. I signed up for LiveJournal in 2002. I learned CSS in 2003 and am still teaching myself PHP and Perl. I found NaNoWriMo. In some ways, I began to feel more at home in virtual space than in real life. No, I realized; it’s the illusion of a home, but that’s OK. I can exist in multiple dimensions, virtually and really. We’re designed with that capability, we human beings. I believe in virtual unicorns, and so they exist. Now, the Internet is inextricably entwined in my life, as friends have stepped out of virtual space and into reality, and other “real-life” friends continue being real across thousands of miles of fiber optics and wires.

I always wanted my own place on the ‘Net. And here it is… my virtual “home”. It’s a lot easier to find a home here than in the “real world” - virtual real estate is, thankfully, still affordable for the average user.

Choosing a name for the site proved to be a much more difficult task than acquiring the domain name, picking out my layout from WordPress Themes or figuring out how to tweak this theme to my liking. Names are so important. I didn’t want to just call it “Brandie Minchew” - I hear and see my own name enough from day to day. I wanted to name my new home something on par with Pemberley or Mansfield Park or Thornfield. In a non-English-country-house or gloomy-gothic-novel kind of way. So David and I sat in front of my computer and tossed around words, dug through Thesaurus.com, and found a bunch of random word generators, none of which helped me to find the perfect name. I wanted something that sounded like me, like the way I see the world. Everything sounded too angsty or too trite or too contrived. Or too copycat.

Despite my claim of being “a writer”, I suffer from a lack of invention. I confess, I can’t write a bio for myself, either. (I take comfort in the fact that Anton Chekhov wasn’t much into writing bios, either, apparently - even geniuses have some limits. Sadly, I don’t have genius to balance out my lackwittedness.) I even thought about calling my entire site “UnWitty” and very nearly did. But I think Chimaeralogue, an elusive, many-colored thing, for lack of a better term, gives the best description of what I hope to accomplish with the website.

I see this website as a cloudy portrait of myself, my very own patchwork, asymetrical, multifaceted monologue of thoughts, dreams, wishes, rages, moments of whimsy and wonder; and yet, all me. Or how I want you to see me. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Names adapt themselves to the object that receives them, and vice versa. One of my favorite bits of poetry says: “And what we said of it became / A part of what it was…” Just as my life online has shaped the person I am today, so this website will be shaped by how I choose to use it and who chooses to connect with me through it.Welcome to Chimaeralogue. Welcome to my home.