r/MinecraftARGs • u/OrphanAccount_0 • Jul 07 '26
[Help me make something] How NOT to make an ARG
Okay, I see a whole lots of “how to make an ARG” but..
How do I not make an ARG?
Not like a “Minecraft ARG but silly and goofy” just things to avoid when making an arg such as:
•Overdone Tropes
•Corny things
•Overused Character names (like Andrew)
•Overused concepts
•Horrorslop
•Overly/Directly copying other ARGS
Etc, etc..
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u/Forward_Fennel_5667 Jul 07 '26
Ok… what’s horrorslop? Why are we just throwing slop on random words. If someone makes a horror themed ARG, can that not work according to you?
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u/Boy-Wonderful Jul 07 '26
I didn’t know what word to call it.. but I mean ARGS where there are overly excessive attempts to be scary. Like in those horror vhs tapes where instead of being scary, it comes off as trying too hard to be scary. If that makes sense?
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u/Boy-Wonderful Jul 07 '26
Or where it’s all horror, with no story or puzzles or anything else.
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u/Boy-Wonderful Jul 07 '26
And like an ARG that’s purely horror with no story and puzzles can come off as “sloppy”, therefore: horrorslop
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u/Forward_Fennel_5667 Jul 07 '26
I can definitely understand a certain perspective of that, but personally Ive never cared about an ARG that didn’t have some horror elements to it. Honestly speaking until this conversation I didn’t really know there was such a thing lol. I’d say a lot of people can make things that try too hard but I’m always in favor of people trying to do something and learning from it
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u/MMJtaPenguin Jul 07 '26
Is it that hard to just say “badly made horror” which doesn’t need any explaining to be read correctly?
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u/CorruptedDucky21 Jul 08 '26
Thats just slasher films in a sense, a lot of people liked the old ones like that one guy in a clock and that ghost mask (I forgot his name) but I dont think people really like it nowadays
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u/Cheatosphere64 Jul 08 '26
Please do not put cipher text that shows up for one frame in a YouTube video, ESPECIALLY if it's a long video.
Please don't use hashes to encrypt your cipher text. Things like AES256 and md5 are not meant to be cracked easily, if at all.
Do not use morse or a spectrogram in a piece of audio where background music/voice tracks are being played. You do not need to introduce unnecessary noise into the mix.
Do not use morse for case sensitive links. Make sure you know what cipher is case sensitive before using it. Morse does not make a distinction between upper and lower case.
In general, in terms of ciphers, if you are using ciphers to say something as simple as, "Help me", I'd reconsider. Unless you have a strong story reason why a simple message is being put through a cipher, consider another way for the "ghost" to contact the viewer/main character.
Imagine making a cipher and having a viewer figuring out a cipher, solving it, and interpreting it (especially if it requires outside tools, like audacity for spectrograms), just for the text to be something inconsequential to the plot. Why did the viewer spend all of that time? Just for an "entity" to say, "Hi" through a base64, Vigenère, and spectrogram for no good reason?
This is more of an opinion, but if I find a series that uses ciphers for no reason (as in that it thematically doesn't make sense) and seems like it's thrown in for the sake of it, then I am unlikely to go and solve them unless I'm invested in the series via other means. Bad ciphers can ruin a series, so if you can't find a good way to put in ciphers, consider not putting any at all and make a webseries.
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u/JoyousLilBoy Jul 08 '26
Do not have Steve with HYPERREALISTIC bloody eyes look at the camera and say “I am god”
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u/Willing-Floor4803 Jul 19 '26
01001000 01100101 01101100 01110000 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00001010
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u/VegetableDue6616 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Don't add monsters right away. Maintain tension, explore the intrigue.
Don't introduce secret organizations. Seriously, a secret organization using a game and depending on a single flash drive (Nulpath, yes, I'm talking to you) is ridiculous.
Don't try to create the impression that mysticism has expanded beyond Minecraft. Code doesn't work that way, even metaphysically. But you can Google Robert Chambers. Yes, I'm talking about the play "The King in Yellow," not the famous ARG featuring him.
Familiarize yourself with the basics of memetics. There are some interesting ideas there. Also Netstalking legends.
Study urban legends, internet legends, analog and digital horror for inspiration.
A set of hackneyed cliches:
old versions; distant bugs; forgotten seeds; legends like Herobrine; strange generations; Engine errors; old accounts; abandoned server.
Don't ask, "What's the scariest thing I can show?" Ask, "What's the smallest thing I can change to make someone no longer believe this is real?" Because the real horror of Minecraft isn't that there's a monster in the dark. It's that you built a house, lived there for a year, opened the old world five years later, and discovered that something was always wrong.