unforum

[Phaedra]

I think it's all a matter of believability and what you're using the site for. If you've got a band in your game, well, a lot of bands have MySpaces. If you've got an emo 16-year-old, a MySpace account is very believable. It may make more sense for the character to, say, display their pictures there. My sister's a non-computer-obsessed college sophomore. She and all her friends know what MySpace is. They've never heard of Flickr. It may seem obvious to us, the internet-addicted, that Flickr is a better option for displaying photos than MySpace, but we're not actually representative of the population.

Of course, just because something is believable doesn't automatically mean it's necessary. After you ask yourself is this believable for this character, to me the next question is what am I going to use it for?

Just because a character would have a MySpace in real life doesn't necessarily mean that they need to have one in the game. I have a Google calendar in real life, but if I were a character in a game, unless that calendar was going to somehow advance the story, provide clues or information, or have some other actual use, it'd be fluff.

So. IMO, MySpace is okay if 1) the character would be likely to use it heavily in real life, 2) the site does something, game-wise, and 3) whatever is being done with it is integral enough to the game to outweigh the annoyance of having to deal with MySpace.

(I say this as a dedicated MySpace-hater.)

[konamouse]

What I hate about MySpace in the sense of an ARG (or any other similar entity) is that you have to register in order to access certain information (MySpace) or you have to register to make comments (blogspot). Which leads to the creation of your own page...which to make your interaction with an in-game character believable (if you like to interact with the characters - like I do) you have to put something up on your page. So now I have a Flickr page (thanks to Vic), which by the way, has been very very useful; a MySpace page (thanks to Sabotage)' and a blogspot page (thanks to Ron at Tomorrow's Talk Studios). Then when you have occaision to visit that space, you feel woefully inadequate about what you have there (what if the ingame character visits your page?) and feel you have to provide some appropriate content - without giving away too much about yourself (since you didn't register those accounts for that purpose in the first place). Then you find yourself trying to add something every once-in-awhile to keep it looking like you really do use the space (cause you might need it again in a future ARG) and someone outside the ARG finds it and you have spammers to deal with, or real life friends find it and you find yourself using the page for non-ARG related stuff....and then it's an addiction and your checking it every day to see if anyone else out in the real world has visited your page or made any comments...which leads to you wishing you had the creativity to make it a nicer looking page with background and music.....

and then you come to your senses and remember that you only have it there just in case you need it for an ARG.

Phew!

[SirQuady]

[catherwood]

[SirQuady]

I don't have the internet littered with blank pages in my name. Instead i have STUPID webpages littered around with my name.