Every once in a while I have to field the question “Why are you trying to trick people into believing Martin Aggett is a real person?”. So I thought I would tell the story of how Martin Aggett was “born” to help explain that The Martin Aggett Story is not intended to be a hoax.

Early in 2008, I started to research ways to tell stories with modern technologies and social media.  I had been working on a story idea for about ten years and the narrative had grown into more than just a traditional linear book.  I wanted to adapt it into some kind of modern choose your own adventure story (which now has “secret online endings”! – how cool is that?).  That research led me to the wonderful world of alternate reality games.

After studying current and past games I noticed that many of the characters in these stories were very superficial.  Especially in the grassroots games that didn’t use characters with established identities from traditional media and other intellectual property.

I wanted my characters to have depth.  I wanted them to be complex.  I wanted them to be as realistic as possible, and to have an online history that went back more than a couple weeks when the game started.  With that goal in mind I quietly created several social media accounts for my protagonist, Martin Aggett, to begin the process of establishing his authenticity.

Another shortfall of grassroots or independent ARGs, I decided, was the limited ability to attract a large audience in the introductory stages of a new game.  To solve this problem I decided to connect with people who regularly play ARGs using the social media accounts I created for Martin.  I thought that when the game launched and people discovered that someone with whom they’d interacted with for months was a fictional character that they would be excited to participate in the game.  In hindsight I realize that was a very naive hypothesis.

So, while I developed my own Alternate Reality Game, Martin began making friends on Facebook, gathered followers on Twitter, participated in online discussions, played several grassroots ARGs, and was even a guest on the ARG Netcast and had an article published at ARGN.com.

After Martin Aggett had interacted with people online for almost a year without revealing his fictional nature I came to a crossroads. Many of the people that I had come to know through the character of Martin Aggett were encouraging him to attend ARGfest 2009 in Portland.  It was then that I realized that if I attended ARGfest in character as Martin and made real friendships and connections with people that they would feel betrayed and foolish when I revealed Martin to be fictional.  In truth, I had already formed friendships with people online through Martin’s character and many people felt betrayed, angry, and foolish for believing he was a real person when I finally revealed his fictional nature just prior to attending ARGfest.  (to be continued…)

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.