TINAG is death! or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the game

Will Emigh — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 21:19:00 -0700

Ever since The Beast started it all, the TINAG philosophy has been a guiding principle for the fledgling ARG community. The seminal book on ARGs is even titled “This Is Not a Game.” Since it’s such an recurrent refrain, we accept it as an overriding principle without much critical thought, to our detriment. Realizing that TINAG doesn’t always work is the first step toward using it effectively.

TINAG broke my game!

With our first MPN, Out in the Cold, we followed the TINAG philosophy as closely as we could. We made some sacrifices to allow us to sell subscriptions but even for that aspect, we set up a semi-plausible fiction to explain how even that could be part of the fictional world.

As a result of our myopic consideration of TINAG, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the story seem real and not enough time thinking about how to make it fun. Our pre-Studio Cypher ARG, Ares Station, was much better despite the fact that we knew nothing about ARGs, much less TINAG, when we worked on it. We did some soul-searching after our problems with OITC, especially given our earlier success with Ares Station. What we came to realize was that TINAG was holding us back.

What is TINAG anyway?

In a broad sense, TINAG is about allowing players to immerse themselves in your world. This means that the game can’t admit that it’s a game, a concept not unique to ARGs. Plays don’t talk about themselves as plays, nor do movies mention that they’re movies. And yet, plays and movies don’t have an equivalent TINAG movement. I think it has such a hold on the ARG community because the field is young enough that nothing can be taken for granted.

Over time, though, TINAG has come to mean something more specific (that plays and movies don’t really deal with): making the game as indistinguishable from reality as possible. This is the famous approach made famous by Urban Hunt. In this type of game, players continuously question the boundaries of the game and, sometimes, whether or not there’s a game at all. I call these “reality” TINAG games.

The first type of TINAG is necessary for immersion; the second kills it.

An appeal to authority

Several days ago, Jane McGonigal shared her thoughts on the lonelygirl15 phenomenon. Towards the end, she wrote:

“I don’t personally like entertainment in the form of credible hoaxes. Not necessarily from a moral position, but rather because I believe that “real or not” distracts from the more important question: How can I meaningfully engage?”

And then an anecdote

There’s a story told in certain cultures about an avowed atheist who continually reminds himself, “there is no God.” While he plows the fields and feeds his chickens, he thinks to himself “there is no God.” When he dies, he finds himself in Heaven (much to his surprise). A priest there was also much surprised, so he asked God, “How did that atheist make it in? I had to pray constantly to make it to Heaven.” God replied, “Thinking of me is a form of prayer, so the atheist was also praying constantly.”

When your game embraces the “realism” form of TINAG, your players become like that atheist. Whenever they discover a new website or interact with a new character, they think to themselves, “is this a game?”

If your players are constantly questioning the reality of your world, they’re not immersing themselves in it. That’s why I say that “realism” TINAG kills immersion.

Lesson learned

For our second MPN, Perfect Friends Forever, we tossed (“realism”) TINAG out the window and focused on gameplay first and foremost. We did our best to make sure that the world was internally consistent (the only thing worse for immersion than players asking “is this a game?” is the game saying “I am a game!”), but we tossed out reality whenever it conflicted with our game. In the immortal words of the Mythbusters, “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”

In a sense, we should have realized this in the beginning. Because of the way we’ve structured Studio Cypher, there’s really no way for us to create a game that appears real. In the future, we’re going to embrace this constraint rather than trying to push a round peg into a square hole.

What is it good for?

The broad form of TINAG is a good thing to keep in mind just because it’s so easy to create jarring fiction. Because ARGs are such a new art form, there aren’t as many accepted guidlines for their creation. Even in existing art forms, there are times when you lose immersion, so you can imagine how much harder it is when you’re inventing everything from scratch.

Even the “realism” interpretation of TINAG has its purposes. Use it to get your players to question the boundaries of your story. If you get them wondering what’s part of your game and what isn’t, maybe they’ll start asking the same questions about other media. You can also get more “realistic” reactions from your players (just remember that they’ll start wondering if it’s a game pretty quickly).

But remember that as a tradeoff, you’re reducing your players’ immersion.