unforum

[imbri]

[krystyn]

[Euchre]

Thanks Dan for validating that I 'get it'. Most of the points you are making are exactly the things that have been bugging me since I became engaged in this 'ARG' world via the 'it's not an ARG' Cloverfield promotion. Every time someone told me that it wasn't an ARG, the idea that I never crystalized into a sentence was "Can we stop bickering about what it is and get back to having fun?".

[Silent|away]

imbri: I guess I'll concede that. The unforum community however does appear to be the place where marketing would usually center around, because there is a high conceration of ARG fans here.

Basically, if I was wanting to do an adversting campagin using the ARG as a medium, I need demographics and hard data to know exactly who I am reaching and to see if it would be successful. unforums is the only place where I think we can reliably get data.

Euchre: I always thought most of the complaining about Cloverfield was due to many people claiming that the game was not fun at all, and maybe trying to stop people calling Cloverfield an ARG so as to prevent people from expericing this sort of non-funness.

[pancito]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Except for the cola preference, I'd have to say I'm in that exact same demographic. I've made enough trips around the sun that I'll never be anybody's fanboy. If you want my money, you'll have to work for it. I've all but stopped buying DVDs because of the games they're playing with releases on them.

[rose]

[Nighthawk]

[FLmutant]

My reaction to Dan's slideshow was largely, "Meh." As a diatribe against bad immersive design it is fine, but hardly illuminating (so perhaps it was intended for a more unsophisticated audience.) My fear is that it comes off as a "you just don't get us" diatribe. More to the point, though, is that Dan is late in arriving to the party -- many of us in the development community were planning the funeral for ARG as a useful label as far back as GDC in 2007. Most of us in the "experienced developer" bucket avoid the phrase like the plague -- it is useful, in a horseshoes sense, for describing the general target of the kind of experience a client might be asking for and for beginning a dialog of what they might actually want to do.

Let's not forget the real history of that term: it was a fan creation, invented after the fact of The Beast, to describe what the fans thought 42 was doing, colored through the lens of fandom. That's great: genres are usually given their labels by the fans of that kind of work after the fact, and those labels are generally short-lived ... they either fragment into a hundred different labels in the next round of innovation, or are appropriated by the corporate machine into marketing labels in the hopeful belief that they'll gain instant market by piggybacking on a trend. Color me as one of those people hoping for the shattering fragmentation of the label

A few interesting points have arisen from this discussion, though, that I can't resist engaging.

[thebruce]

hm. wow. here's someone who took the message to the extreme.
"Why ARGs suck"
nothing of significance in the entry (he just links to Dan's article), just pointing out the author's interesting entry title.

[FLmutant]

I think it is GREAT when people blog "ARGs suck."

Every successful artform constantly tears down the established work, rebels against it, and creates a new approach from the wreckage. Hollywood sucks. So does Pop Music. So did Romanticism.

Build, destory, rebuild. Static art movements are ALWAYS short-lived.

[thebruce]

At the very least it encourages people to re-evaluate, or take a deeper look at why they might disagree. And of course, everyone's entitled to their opinions :)
I was simply pointing out the leap this blog/linker took going from Dan's article to "ARGs suck", without actually saying why... I didn't get that tone from Dan's article at all... it was interesting. that's all. ;)

[natas]

[kosmopol]

@Danhon
Here is my little contribution to the discussion, my very personal perspective as a geeky nerdy ARG-junkie. (I send it to the Dan's blog)

[catherwood]