[arg_discuss] [meta] Introductions

[Brooke Thompson]

Ack, the bio/intro spiel.

Hi! I'm Brooke Thompson and unlike many of you, I came to gaming, 
media,interactive narrative, etc through the ARG genre.

I got involved with it all through my undergraduate work in sociology 
when a mentor suggested that I look into "the Beast" for an independent 
study & paper that we were working on. That led me to join the "LockJaw" 
development group as I figured that it would be useful to observe for a 
future paper or two (my plans were graduate studies in fun things like 
demographics, online communities, and social movements). Through some 
twist of in/sanity, I found myself a core member of that team (later to 
be known as Karetao) and, once it was over, joined up with Steve Peters 
and Sean Stacey to promote this crazy new stuff. Once we got the forums 
up on UnFiction.com in hopes of providing a stable foundation for the 
community, I put my energy into supporting Push, NV with the fan site 
PushDiner.com. I hoped that it would not only show support for the 
show/genre but help to pull people into the UnFiction community. Since 
then, aside from playing and moderating games, I've taken graduate level 
courses in interactive design and worked with Dave Szulborski (Chasing 
the Wish), Evan Jones/Xenophile (ReGenesis), Karetao (Metacortechs), and 
SMB (Fifth Son - coming by 2010 if we have anything to say about it).

Currently, I write for ARGN & moderate the meta section of UnFiction. I 
am also working on a project that will invite people to explore the same 
narrative in various ways throughout a major metro area. My academic 
hunger is being fed by looking into the small community built ARGs run 
by often unprepared teams/individuals which I find reminiscent of 
tabletop Game Masters and/or murder mystery hosts. Specifically, I am 
looking at ways in which those analogies can be utilized to strengthen 
the teams behind such games and reduce the negative impact those games 
can have on the community and the genre, perhaps even making them a 
positive. If you have any thoughts on this, please share!

To pay the bills, I work with several HR professionals on projects that 
utilize highly narrative games as a way to train employees on both 
technical skills and corporate communication networks. We also take 
advantage of the community nature of the games to promote team building. 
While I would like to get back into the larger entertainment based 
experiences at some point, I enjoy the quick turnover and smaller scale 
of the corporate games as it allows for some greater experimentation in 
design. Oh, and any whisper of me calling them my lab rats is just rumor.

Looking forward to the future discussions!
Brooke