During development we encountered some obstacles, one of them was the diverse set of skills required for this project. This obstacle was not obvious going into the project. However, it quickly became apparent once development started. To create the ARG we needed to create enjoyable puzzles and accompanying websites that uses these puzzles. To create enjoyable puzzles requires deep knowledge of the target audience. When all of this is done, potential players have to be introduced to the game. All of this requires skills such as front- and back-end development experience, human resources abilities and marketing skills. Having such a broad range of requirements is not necessarily a negative, however everyone in the group wanted to be part of building a website because this was the main focus of the project. This led to other aspects of the project such as time management, testing, marketing and information gathering being underdeveloped.
Ethical Considerations
A central theme of ARGs is the concept of This Is Not A Game, where the purpose is to attempt to convince the participant of the game that they are not acting out a fake scenario but instead that what they are doing is real and grounded in reality.
This does present some ethical issues, in that the central idea of the game is to mislead people and deceive them. Some results have shown how ARGs have led to a ’Blurring of the line between reality and fantasy’ [6].
Due to the theme of the story involving a person in distress one has to consider whether it is ethical to convince people to believe someone is in distress:
• Would people put down more time than they can afford if they believe someone is in distress?
• Is there risk of us causing emotional distress to the players themselves if we make it seem like another player is in danger - or present others as being in distress over a disappearance.
Having the players communicate with the person seeking help relatively early helps mitigate that as the Puppetmasters can decide on the level of calm which the fictional character exudes. Furthermore the ending which clearly shows that the missing per-son wasn’t in actual danger but rather just taking precautions should alleviate those worries, together with the fact that the game ends with Difax facing consequences should bring a level of pride and accomplishment to the player.
’Ethics isn’t always about the risk and liability issue but also about the quality of your intention behind doing it.’
Giles Lane highlights the issues with ARGs used for marketing in a seminar about ethics of ARGs [31]. The issue being the risk of people feeling distress is bad as the players themselves have little reward for playing the game, as such one could argue that the risk in a sense outweighs the reward.
One could argue that our moral obligation to not risk making people feel emotional distress or stress is more important than our duty to attract players to the master’s programme. However, one must also take into account that most people play ARGs for fun and do realise that the characters are fictional even though the ARG is played by the This Is Not A Game principle.
As always when designing a game, especially one of skill, one has the risk of causing a divide in the players [31]. However, we will also have built in another divider into
the game simply due to us making the split of people local to Gothenburg being necessary to solve some of the puzzles, inherently giving them a ’higher value’ to the game. This could prove discouraging to the people playing from a distance.
Our intentions, however, is that the players will turn to each other for help once they have gathered the information. How players act will depend on their desire to win, either by finishing first or following the moral path of sharing information so everyone can complete it as quickly as possible. This is where the Puppetmasters could encourage the players to communicate with each other. Perhaps by starting their own discussion threads and asking about the players progress.
Continuing on the theme of Puppetmasters and their responsibilities, they must keep the game advancing in a reasonable pace since there can arise issues if players take too much control into their own hands. For example players might create their own chat rooms separate from the blog and our chat system after which we can not control how inclusive they are (of course the act itself of creating a separate room will make it harder for new players to join the community) [31]. This is of course bad not only because the vice that exclusion is but also because the excluded group are less likely to keep their interest in the game. Directly hindering the purpose of marketing the master’s programme. This is impossible to prevent completely but players could be encouraged to stay on the forums by the Puppetmasters claiming to not trust other messaging websites and wanting to remain on their own. This could sway the opinion of the public to stay on our website.
Other ethical aspects to consider are related to the design of our game, namely the risk of players violating other peoples privacy or even breaking and entering. This is a risk depending on the design of the game as some puzzles require them to walk around Gothenburg finding items. The risks of breaking and entering are minimal in our ARG as the local places we have chosen are located outside publicly accessible buildings such as museums or schools. As such the players should never run into the dilemma of choosing between being lawful and breaking and entering in order to possibly solve a puzzle.
Conclusion
In this project, we created an ARG to attract potential students to the game design and technology masters at the University of Gothenburg. The ARG involved solving puzzles in different websites to progress a story. The puzzles ranged from physical locations to decrypting secret codes hidden within images. The overarching story told a tale of a missing student hiding from a malicious company. The players set out on a journey to help the student and take down the company.
We conclude that our ARG would appear to be successful in making people inter-ested in our game. It is likely that the ARG could have had a more appropriate difficulty level but the lack of any full scale testing makes drawing conclusions chal-lenging. However, it remains clear through user-testing and information gathering that this ARG accomplishes what it sets out to do with consideration to the previ-ously mentioned user-testing bias.
7.1 Future work
As we created the ARG and learned more about how it works we found ideas to what could be done to make an even better product for future development. This section describes such possibilities.
The first example is the story. Currently, the story is structured linearly. The player starts at one website, continues to the next and then to the last one. Instead of having a single way to proceed, there could have been possibilities to take different paths toward the same goal. For example the blog could include side stories on how the characters met, or the company side story could be about a case where there is a break-in committed in a building Difax was supposedly protecting. While this will make the story more complicated and the ARG take longer to play, it could also result more complete fictional universe. There is also more possibilities for marketing in these side stories, such as a fictional research project at the University of Gothenburg that is eventually connected to Difax.
The second possibility is largely connected to the previously mentioned side stories.
The fictional universe could be made more believable by including different kinds of media. These could entail side stories involving YouTube or Reddit. For this project we avoided real world events as the Puppetmaster wished for minimal involvement.
However, branching out using various medias could be something to consider in the future.
The third prospect is related to the types of puzzles. Throughout testing it was noticed that interactive puzzles engaged players more than pure text-based puz-zles. Incorporating more of these interactive puzzles could result in a higher player interest.
The fourth area of improvement is related to research. It would have been valuable to conduct interviews and ask people that have played or created an ARG before, on what they enjoyed and disliked about their previous experiences. The reason for this is to get a better foundation on how to develop the ARG and puzzles before starting. Interviews with our target audience could have also helped improve the foundation.
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Template for testing puzzles
Testing of puzzle XXX
Creator(s):
Tester(s):
Documented by:
Date:
Was the puzzle entertaining to solve?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Not at all Very enjoyable
Comments:
What did you think of the puzzles difficulty level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Too easy Too hard
Comments:
Did you have previous knowledge that helped you solve the puzzle? If so, in what way?
Answer:
How many hours did it take you to solve the puzzle?
Answer:
Did you receive any clues when solving this puzzle? If so, were they helpful?
Answer:
How clearly explained was the puzzle?
Answer:
How can this puzzle be improved?
Answer:
Other comments:
Comments from the creator(s):
Tests
B.1 Tests for blog puzzles
Testing of Main puzzle (test 1)
Creator(s): Ludvig Lemner, Sara Stråhle Tester(s): Linus Lemner
Documented by: Ludvig Lemner Date: 2022-03-18
Was the puzzle entertaining to solve?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Not at all Very enjoyable
Comments:
What did you think of the puzzles difficulty level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Too easy Too hard
Comments:
Did you have previous knowledge that helped you solve the puzzle? If so, in what way?
Answer: Attending Chalmers and being familiar with the Course Page format was helpful.
How many hours did it take you to solve the puzzle?
Answer: 2.
Did you receive any clues when solving this puzzle? If so, were they helpful?
Answer: Yes. There were a few clues about where to look for more information.
This was something that either could have been found with more time or if more people were cooperating with the puzzle. But it saved a lot of effort and frustration.
There was also some hints in the line of just summarizing what information was already found. That helped tremendously.
How clearly explained was the puzzle?
Answer: Semi-clearly. It seems to be an appropriate level of obfuscation in accor-dance with the perceived goal of the puzzle.
How can this puzzle be improved?
Answer: Maybe make the red zero more prominent in the image.
Other comments:
Nothing else to add.
Comments from the creator(s):
The red zero issue is already being worked on at the time of writing this test report.
It seems that the puzzle had an appropriate level of difficulty seeing as only a few hints were required. Giving less hints but having more people participate would probably lead to good results.
Testing of Main puzzle (test 2)
Creator(s): Ludvig Lemner, Sara Stråhle Tester(s): Anonymous 1
Documented by: Sara Stråhle Date: 2022-04-17
Was the puzzle entertaining to solve?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Not at all Very enjoyable
Comments: Nothing in particular.
What did you think of the puzzles difficulty level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Too easy Too hard
Comments: Didn’t find the zero hidden in the picture of duros. This was instead solved by realizing that zero is the only number not present in the sudoku.
Did you have previous knowledge that helped you solve the puzzle? If so, in what way?
Answer: Has solved puzzles before and was already familiar with Sudoku and ci-phers.
How many hours did it take you to solve the puzzle?
Answer: Roughly 2 hours.
Did you receive any clues when solving this puzzle? If so, were they helpful?
Answer: Yes. Did not find the hidden hints at first, so a hint was given to find those. Was also encourage to follow said hints.
How clearly explained was the puzzle?
Answer: There were many steps in the puzzle and the sheer amount of information on the blog made it a bit confusing.
How can this puzzle be improved?
Answer: It was really hard to see the coloured letters. It was also not clear which cipher to use from the post about ciphers. Finally, perhaps a post of how to solve a cipher or part of one would have been helpful.
Other comments:
It was fun, but a bit frustrating at times.
Comments from the creator(s):
The main problem for the solver during this test was to combine the found letters with three numbers each to create course codes. Partly because the solver did not realize that the differently coloured circles in the Sudoku grouped the numbers and signified the order. However, this will not be changed as it was clear that the solver thought the colours meant something, but did not figure out what. As this is in-tended to be solved by several people at the same time, someone within the group may draw the correct conclusion.
From the feedback given, the colour of the letters will be slightly adjusted. The letters can be found by using inspect on the website as well, so it should still be hard to see. In addition this is something the future Puppetmaster can easily change at will later to adjust the difficulty.
As for the comment about it being hard to find which cipher to use, this will not be changed. As there is a hint for this in the main post of the puzzle, where it is stated that he tasted something called Mexican wheels which is a hint to the Mex-ican army wheel-cipher. It may have been missed due to the many different kinds of information you find on the blog, but we believe it will be noticed when several solve the puzzle together.
Testing of Main puzzle (test 3)
Creator(s): Sara Stråhle, Ludvig Lemner Tester(s): Karim El-Nahass
Documented by: Karim El-Nahass Date: 2022-04-18
Was the puzzle entertaining to solve?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Not at all Very enjoyable
Comments:
What did you think of the puzzles difficulty level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Too easy Too hard
Comments: There was way too much information to proceed at once and the amount of posts you have to go through are many.
Did you have previous knowledge that helped you solve the puzzle? If so, in what way?
Answer: Knowing how to solve a Sudoku, and how course codes looks like helped a bit.
How many hours did it take you to solve the puzzle?
Answer: Approximately 10 hours, split up into several days where I was stuck at several points and could not continue.
Did you receive any clues when solving this puzzle? If so, were they helpful?
Answer: Yes, when I got stuck I received a few clues that helped me proceed with the puzzle. These clues stated where I could look for more information
How clearly explained was the puzzle?
Answer: It was not too clear nor too unclear, it was in-between. This made the puzzle more interesting since you had to look for information yourself which are hidden.
How can this puzzle be improved?
Answer: Maybe including more hints throughout the puzzle. There are a few hints already which is good, but these can be expanded upon.
Other comments:
Overall I enjoyed the puzzle even though it took long to solve it, it was still enter-taining. Even though I cracked the numbers used for one of the courses, I could not apply the same logic for the other course, apparently it was reversed. This could have been intentional or a mistake.
Comments from the creator(s):
As was made apparent in this test, the coloring was not correct in the Sudoku so this will be fixed. Several of the hints were added during the testing, so it is difficult to approximate how much time it will actually take to solve. For this, further testing will be done. Also, some of the hidden hints will be made clearer as this was asked for and to help with the many steps in the puzzle.
The creators agree that there are many blog posts but everything related to the puzzle is connected by the hint of a strange number for the month. It was thus deemed unnecessary to change this.
Testing of puzzle Main puzzle (test 4)
Creator(s): Ludvig Lemner, Sara Stråhle Tester(s): Henny Biander, Markus Moen Documented by: Sara Stråhle
Date: 17-04-2022
Was the puzzle entertaining to solve?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Not at all Very enjoyable
Comments: It was fun that the type of cipher was connected with the comment that he was tasting Mexican wheels in the main post.
What did you think of the puzzles difficulty level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Too easy Too hard
Comments: It was difficult to spot the letters of a different colour in the main post.
Did you have previous knowledge that helped you solve the puzzle? If