The Lost Sport

An oddity I stumbled upon yesterday – forgive me if you’ve heard this one… The Beijing Olympics, with sponsorship from McDonalds, are running an Alternate Reality Game right now. (No big surprise – as James Wallis has noted, “ARGs have become a standard part of a marketing strategy”.)
‘The Lost Ring’ ARG has complicated backstory up the wazoo, as is always the case with these things. The bit that fascinates me is this: they’re trying to create a new sport. (Okay, I’m also fascinated by the commitment to different languages on display – game content seems to be divided among about a dozen different languages, including Esperanto.)
The new sport is “labyrinth running”. Check the details here. It’s a timed race where a blindfolded runner begins at the centre of a labyrinth and escapes as quickly as possible; teammates form the wall and hum to help the blinded person’s orientation.
As part of the ARG, groups have sprung up playing this old/new game all over. There’s a bunch of neat videos at the blog of Jane McGonigal (clever ARG designer-person who is presumably a key player behind the scene). The local Wellington crew are going hardout, Jane gives them props and you can see more of their videos and chat on their own site.
The Wellington crowd communicate the appeal nicely: “Basically, Labyrinth Training is a really fun team “sport” we’ve been playing outdoors with a good sense of humour, tea, coffee and biscuits.” (From this page of photos and description.) “Yes, we really gather to play labyrinth running, and yes, we’d love you to join us. No, we don’t take it po-faced seriously. Yes, we are aware we look silly.” (From the NZ site’s FAQ.)
It’s really interesting how this game has been designed – it seems decidedly unGrecian to me, but very in tune with the goals of the ARG which seem to be to build community and cross-cultural understanding. Games historians (or those like me whose parents owned a copy of the book) will immediately click to the comparable ethos of the New Games Movement. The New Games came out of hippie-era San Francisco alternate politics, changing away from zero-sum equations and working productively towards new community-affirming fun. This goes in the same direction, and while there’s a competitive element, it’s much more a communal, team-based, participatory and mutually reinforcing process. (With tea and biscuits, apparently.) The design of the new game is utterly ingenious – I wonder how long it took to come up with? It involves group trust, it can and should be played without language and thus cross-culturally, it invokes ancient forms and symbols, it’s cognitively demanding, it’s physical but not so physical that the participation bar is high… an impressively long list of attributes that serve the greater message.
I’m fascinated to see this ARG at work. I’m not sure if its profile is high or low in ARG terms, and I’m bemused by how the ARG’s aficionados are negotiating the tricky politics of a Beijing Olympiad. But the wider politics of the ARG are very much in tune with mine – games as a medium for communitas? That sounds like a big part of what I value in RPGs, and I’m sure the Creature Collective Ultimate players will also find that resonates. I’m curious about this ARG, and will keep an eye on things as they develop. If you guys come across any labyrinth running, give me a shout…
(also: go the Wellington Labyrinth runners!)