That weird web thing

A note on artefacts

“Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth, wrought in the distorted image of human life. But this added, hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only for the moment. In the arms of children, there can be nothing but love. A clown, a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer, and a major. Tonight’s cast of players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.”

  Five Characters In Search of An Exit, The Twilight Zone, S3E79

This note is based on a Culture Hacker article about a artefact workshop that took place during this summer’s ARGFest. Also based on some of my dissertation’s analyses on ARGs (humanities point of view).

Making physical objects / clues to fit your transmedia plot.

“At ARGFest 2010, Michelle Senderhauf and I ran a workshop on game artifacts – how to use them to tell a story, deliver puzzles, and reward players.  We invited our workshoppers to create artifacts to continue an ARG scenario I cooked up, and lead the players to the next part of the game using physical objects.”

It’s interesting to see that it is possible to spend nearly nothing in object and artefact production: most of the objects created during the workshop seemed ready to use without any more modifications. Most of these were found in flea markets or second-hand shops (also antiques shops), and were then fiddled with for dramatic, play and aesthetic purposes. This “wear” (meaning used, old aspect) grants these objects “artefact status”: they’ve been used, they feel personal. There’s a great article about patina and the emotional load (la charge émotionnelle) contained in worn objects, that you can read on BERG’s blog.

From a storytelling point of view, artefacts always tell a story, whether in archeology or in a museum. In ARGs and transmedia narratives, they have this transitional purpose: they’re UFOs from this other world that we’re exploring, playing with, as we get acquainted with a fictional universe of an ARG. They’re familiar to our world but they come from another one.

Artefacts are also a piece of craftsmanship, which may be different from ours. Ultimately, they need to testify, materially, of a human’s touch, of a person’s use.

They’re unique. And it is this emotional bond, from belonging and being a piece of someone’s life to being found and given - from a thing of the past to a present - that turns them into precious, valuable items, no matter how trivial they actually seem.

That’s what makes them powerful alternate reality objects. They’ve been used so they must be true, they must be real.

In a way, I’d also say they resemble totems, more or less like the ones in “Inception” (NB: totems in that interpretation have a specific role: to discriminate reality from “non-reality”, call it dream or fiction) or Harry Potter’s portkeys. They’re immersion facilitators incarnating the audience relation to the fiction, that is made palpable but hidden. Hence the hacking process (détournement des objets) when making transmedia artefacts and using them on the players’ end. In transmedia fiction, whether subtle or blatantly obscure, these objects display some oddities (“something not quite right” - you can verify that with the pictures’ captions) that one can spot after a closer look. Because artefacts need to be looked at, handled, hacked, deconstructed again. They are puzzles in disguise, a piece of game mechanics, and sometimes a means of communication: in the workshop, all these objects form a system, a map delivering a message to get to a certain location at a certain time.

For the audience, they can also represent valuable objects that can last beyond the time of the game or the telling of a story, like a nice souvenir. Artefacts embody a universe, a world in all its complexity (relations, history, use, culture): the persistence of a moment that somehow happened or simulate this “coming into existence”. They’re a memento, a personal object: like toys you liked playing with and withholding secret stories.

From a philosophical and anthropological point of view, all artefacts are fakes, even archeological ones: they’re all manmade, artificial, cultural items. “Something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element”. Paradoxically, in this example (artefact-making) they emulate reality under a fake “naturalness” (triviality, patina, use, wear, etc) but also offer a reflexion on what is reality, since even “real” artefacts, from the distant past or objects which use we don’t understand, are “artificial”, a concentrate of images, something that is not “natural”.

Artefacts are non-objects: “A structure or finding in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.” A simulation, an icon: an indexed reality (like ARGs as an artistic form of reflexion of reality?). A sign, an image, made into a trivial thing by the hand and imagination of man.

Le règne de l’imaginal sensuel (realm of the imagery, of the trace) et le désert du réel (desert of the real, Baudrillard).