View topic - The future of ARGs

unforum
a.r.g.b.b

Welcome!

New users, PLEASE read these forum guidelines. New posters, SEARCH before posting and read these rules before posting your killer new campaign. New players may also wish to peruse the ARG Player Tutorial.

All users must abide by the Terms of Service.

Website Restoration Project

This archiving project is a collaboration between Unfiction and Sean Stacey (SpaceBass), Brian Enigma (BrianEnigma), and Laura E. Hall (lehall) with
the Center for Immersive Arts.

Announcements

This is a static snapshot of the
Unfiction forums, as of
July 23, 2017.

This site is intended as an archive to chronicle the history of Alternate Reality Games.

Our Esteemed Contributors

The time now is Fri Nov 15, 2024 4:26 pm
All times are UTC - 4 (DST in action)

View posts in this forum since last visit
View unanswered posts in this forum

Calendar

Forum index » Meta » General META Discussion

The future of ARGs
Moderators: imbri, ndemeter

Page 2 of 2 [18 Posts]

Goto page: Previous 1, 2

Author

Message

FLmutant
Decorated

Joined: 29 Oct 2004
Posts: 244
Location: Orlando, FL

a rose by any other name
WWDD = What Would Darwin Do?

What an interesting thread. A few thoughts that come to the top of my head: Foily!

First off, don't feel bad the genre starts in an area where patronage money (in this case, marketing) is available. Knowing the other puppetmasters out there, they aren't the marketing suits you should be worried about. That said, the basic premise of this thread is crucial: the last thing this scene wants to become is a marketing tactic, which means storytellers stepping up and finding other ways to tell those stories. Remember that when they do, they are back into the arena of independent art and will sacrifice some portions of the artistic palate in order to maximize new portions of the palate full of fresh creative opportunity. We should make sure to support that kind of risk taking with extra love and a swallowing of fears from being past stung.

Second off, though, is that pesky phrase ARG. Like all good buzzphrases, it is a double edged sword: it works as a marker into a general cluster of related storytelling techniques that arise from the Web, and it separates some types of experiences from others (for example, Ze Frank's community bears many of the structural similarities to the collaboration of ARGs, but is not an ARG.) Conversely, any label of a genre creates a bit of constriction on the range of creative options taken in that genre: when was the last time you met a band that could describe to you what genre it was without at least a few slashes ("Wow, man, we're like a blues slash emo band but with a big dose of hip hop, you know?")

That raises the issue of what ARG is trying to descibe ... is it trying to be a label like "blues" that is relatively distinct but has fuzzy edges and bonds well to slashes in multi-genre descriptions? or is it trying to be like "music" and be a master label that supports other "genres" inside that overall form? Imbri might be arguing more for the former, Spacebass (with a rebranding to "chaotic fiction") might be arguing more for the later.

Third, I've been wondering if we aren't suffering a bit here from the Error of Platonic Forms ... we're approaching these definitional issues from some kind of apsirational philosophical angle. I'm wondering if a more sheerly descriptive taxonomy might be valuable, just for us to learn as a community. Humor me a moment:

Imagine that we built something like a species chart. The top of the chart are the "oldest projects" and the bottom of the chart are the "newest projects". They are boxes spanning their length of time. Boxes have lines leading towards things that were "influenced" or "related to" them. Sometimes new boxes appear out of thin air and start no chains of related projects: sometimes a project spawns a host of similar ones. Sometimes multiple projects feed in as inspiration to one box.

Sounds like a big collaborative filtering and sorting project, which is part of what this group is good for. For example, where do the projects of Vivid Studios in 1995 -- projects like The Rift and Hackers and Johnny Memonic that predate anything we'd normally talk about in the origin of ARGing -- fall into that tree of related projects? Definitely game plus story plus web funded by marketing efforts sometimes even tied into major movies. Is there some obvious tree or set of branches that we think of as ARGing versus other arms and branches that lead in other directions? For example, I might make the argument that a branch down from The Rift would lead to Second Life ... a big part of their story was told via VRML worlds that you had to manipulate, an alien branch from ARGing ... but did other stuff come in? The Rift is certainly part of my origin of thinking about interactivity in storytelling because I soaked in it as a player.

How would Darwin react to this problem if the landscape of creative work were strange critters from some Galapagos? Perhaps theory can emerge from a descriptive look at the fossils as well as the live critters.

Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 11:25 am

FLmutant
Decorated

Joined: 29 Oct 2004
Posts: 244
Location: Orlando, FL

Update: was an interesting piece online about a map of scientific disciplines. This is more advanced than anything I was imagining, but notice the surpring morphology of connections:

http://mapofscience.com

Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 12:33 pm

konamouse
Official uF Dietitian

Joined: 02 Dec 2002
Posts: 8010
Location: My own alternate reality

Interviews with Brian Clark, Dan Hon, Sean Stewart & More

Let's Be Serious: Non-Casual Investigations into Alternate Reality Gaming

blog by Mark Heggen

_________________
'squeek'
r u a Sammeeeee? I am Forever!

Posted: Wed May 16, 2007 10:40 pm

Display posts from previous: Sort by:

Page 2 of 2 [18 Posts]

Goto page: Previous 1, 2

Forum index » Meta » General META Discussion

Jump to:

You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
You cannot post calendar events in this forum