[arg_discuss] How long is your dev cycle?

[Brian Clark]

Responding to a bunch of people in one email! Threads be damned!

>I know the development/pre- production cycle for existing ARGs has varied
>wildly from Heist's six weeks (was it?)

Totally depends upon how you slice it: from when we got the official client
"go" it was about 7 weeks to build it out on Heist, but that was after
nearly 3 months of pitching and honing and timelining. I'd tend to call all
of the above "development" on some level: the planning before the 7 weeks
began was the only thing that barely let us scrape it out in time. I would
have liked another 2 weeks: Iannet would have been better for it at launch.

Jennifer wrote:

>But what do people think?  Is there a bare minimum people would be willing
>to run with (6 weeks?!?)?

OMG! Some crazy idiot I know signed onto a 3 week dev cycle for an ARG this
week. A far less complex one, mind you ... but 3 weeks. I think the real
answer is based upon the complexity: you can write movies that be shot in
one shot, if you really wanted to. It just means you have to embrace your
limitations as stylistic choices.

Adrian wrote:

>I have no doubt that a good team, be they volunteers or commercial, could
>develop a great ARG with only a month of preparation time. They might kill
>themselves in the process

and Adam wrote:

>1 day to sketch out the end-game, so you know where everything has
>to culminate?

Need a quick crying break.

Okay, I'm back.

Jennifer also wrote:

>Can the pre-launch development "take over" a game, making responsiveness to
>players subordinate to the game timeline set out in development?

I imagine anything can happen, but I'm not sure "responsiveness" and "game
timeline" are necessarily mutually exclusive poles of some scale. You can
build in responsiveness into the timeline, and you can write your way out of
any problems or into any golden accidents without "breaking" the timeline.
In Heist, the villain even changed after launch to respond to players
actions, but it also had the tightest of timelines to match up with physical
events who's planning dates were outside of game control. I think you can
have both.

Adrian wrote:

>In terms of Perplex City, our game will be running many times the length of
>a standard ARG, and so our dev cycle is probably more akin to running a
>arc-based serialised TV show like Lost or 24, or perhaps an MMOG.

TV is probably the right metaphor, but "comic book publisher" might also
work (some kind of periodical but fiction in nature) because you've got all
the joys of distribution management on top of the joys of production, right?


Heist was definitely run at a sprinters pace on the production team (there
was collateral damage.) No way possible you could have continued at that
depth in a sustained serialized fashion: at Mind Candy, do you feel like
you're sprinting or have you found some "marathon runner" alternate?

Adam wrote:

>To what extent does state-of-the-art ARG development simply take advantage
>of a very handy feature (not having to be completely developer by
launch->day) it has available, rather than actually *require* the
flexibility >granted by doing things JIT? 

This is just me from my perspective, having slid into ARGs from a different
related cluster of branches than others. I think the difference between
"state of the art" stuff like ARGs is that you engineer in what you can do
with that "very handy feature" rather than just rely on it to pick up the
slack. More specifically: non-state-of-the-art is "individual interactivity"
and state-of-the-art is "communal interactivity"; non-state-of-the-art is
"rigid" and state-of-the-art is "adaptive"; non-state-of-the-art is
"channelized" and state-of-the-art is "integrated"; non-state-of-the-art is
"interruption" and state-of-the-art is "participation".

So because we know the creative strengths and limitations of leaning into
the interactive space, we create plans that actually require that
flexibility (because they are built upon minimizing the limitations and
maximizing the strengths of that core creative decision.)

That JIT/communal space is something I'm trying to figure out how to convey
as part of a panel at SXSW in March that's really about the 8th anniversary
of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (http://cluetrain.org) about networks as
conversations. ARGs are going to be one of those examples I want to explore
of the kinds of unexpected, Web 2.0 kind of concepts that are connected to
those core concepts in that manifesto. I suspect anyone who "gets" ARGs will
"get" the manifesto, and suspect that communal JIT feature is part of it.

Best,


Brian