Chapter 1.0 of the Martin Aggett Story was told through a mini Alternate Reality Game during ARGfest 2011 in Bloomington last month. It was exhilarating to launch the game and get the experience of seeing an audience interact with the game. I learned more about game design and running an ARG in those few days than I did spending years researching other people’s games. There is nothing like the thrill of getting a phone call and realizing it is a player calling one of your fictional characters. There were more than a dozen awesome moments like that during the weekend.

As we prepare to release Chapter 2.0 we’re studying what went well and not so well during the first chapter so that we can learn and improve the game over time. Going into ARGfest, much of the game had already been planned. All of the un-lockable story elements were written and waiting to be published. Challenges were planned and drafted on the website. I even arrived at the venue a day early to explore the area and scout out locations for live events and dead drops. I was confident that after several years of planning that I was completely prepared. That was my first mistake.

The first lesson I learned is that I needed to be flexible. For example, for months I had planned to incorporate a university campus webcam into one of the game challenges. When I checked the webcam days before the event I discovered that the link was broken and the webcam was offline. Now I had to come up with a new challenge to make up for the one designed to use the campus webcam. In fact, two out of the six challenges had to be replaced because of one problem or another.

Two of the biggest mistakes I made during Chapter 1.0 were actually very minor but caused cascading consequences. The first small/big mistake happened during the Briefcase Challenge. This challenge used a locked briefcase that belonged to Martin Aggett and was integrated into the ARG Museum trivia game run by Geoff May from 4DFiction. Players had to scan the ARG Museum QR code to see the trivia question; which was “What is Martin Aggett’s birthday? M/Y”.

Players were told that the answer to the trivia question would be the combination to open the briefcase. The problem was that when I scanned and read the trivia question as a test I didn’t notice the “M/Y” at the end – the combination was actually the DAY and MONTH of Martin’s birthday. This small error on my part made the challenge unsolvable and frustrating for the players. They were enjoying the challenge of finding Martin’s birthday online and then trying multiple combinations to open the briefcase, but ultimately had to come to me to get hints about the year. That’s when I realized something was wrong and had to just tell the players that the year wasn’t part of the combination and immediately fixed the typo in the trivia question.

The second small/big mistake was another one that fell into the “attention to detail” category. During the Activate This Axon challenge, players were given the instructions “19 August 2011 – 1700 – 39 10 11N 086 31 47W” which would lead them to a payphone. To prepare for this challenge I scouted the payphone location a couple of days before the challenge and took good GPS readings using my iPhone. I even double checked the coordinates in Google maps to make sure the location was accurate. Then when I transcribed the latitude and longitude from my phone to the website I made the mistake of ending the latitude with “11″ instead of what should have been “00″. This resulted in more than a dozen players being sent about eleven blocks north of where they needed to be to complete the challenge. As a result, they gave up after about thirty minutes and I was left watching a payphone waiting for players to come around the corner at any moment.

This was definitely the more egregious of the two mistakes – because of a simple typo, I sent a group of people into a residential neighborhood where they were looking in trashcans and poking around in someone’s front yard. The group could have been arrested for trespassing, or worse, I could have accidentally sent them some place dangerous. I was lucky that the only real consequences of this mistake was a bunch of annoyed players and a disruption in the flow of the game.

There were a lot more mistakes than just the ones I’ve mentioned, and I’ll share more of the lessons I learned in future posts here. I’d like to use this to get some discussion going – what small mistakes have you made that turned into big mistakes? What could you have done to avoid those problems? Share in the comments! Thanks for reading.