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[Preezy]

 My first ARG

[Lovek]

Re: My first ARG

[Preezy]

No I haven't. It's simply been given to my class to do for a university module, probably because our course director is interested in them

[crazy-jake]

I empathize. I'm preparing to launch an ARG for my thesis project. NO small task. Im sure you've done this already, but research is your friend. There's a few books out there on ARGs, and also look into transmedia, though it's a new term, and also deals a great deal in the art aspects of media usage.

Keep it small, espeicaly if your are short on time and resources. Make it a local event, note cards on trees, letters on peoples desks, an email or two. Alot of 'big budget' ARGs use websites and live events and span the country because they have lots of time and money to put into the project. You probably dont have so much of either.

The key to making an ARG work is creativity and coming up with ways to challenge your players within your means.

Wish i could be more help, but i'm in the same boat and learning as i run.

[distilled]

I'd agree with Crazy-Jake. You have to keep it nice and small, I PMed an ARG last year, only 2/3 blogs with email addresses and a couple of electronic files. It was a complete nightmare to keep up with where each character was supposed to be, and who knew what information. I played each character myself and it was tough.

My friend, on the other hand, is a librarian at an all boys school. He took the ARG idea and applied it to education, he set up a few clues for the boys there and taped out an outline of a body on the floor of the library. The boys then had to follow a series of literature related clues till they found the killer. Turns out it was Harry Potter with Excalibur or something!

Anyway, my point was, he avoided the problem with playing multiple characters when there is just yourself. ARGs are still a fairly fluid medium, so as long as you are creating this reality, you can manipulate it how you like.

So, my tips would be:

1) Keep it simple.
2) Make lots of notes, keep track of where each character is at each point in the story, what the players have to do to drive the story and how each character knows each other character. It will help keep the ARG believable and managable.
3) Do something interesting with it. Blogs are all well and good, but people like to see new things coming in. Real world item pick ups are nice, cryptic clues which vary from the following: binary, morse code, substitution cipher.
4) Have fun. You can literally do whatever you like, take the story wherever you want.

[Preezy]

thanks for the replies guys, I'll take all that on board and see how I get on.