[arg_discuss] Re: Communities and resources

[despain at quantumcontent.com]

I'm just getting caught up on non-mission-critical emails and realized
there were a few messages here I didn't have time to respond to before.


"Gupfee" <gupfee at gmail.com> wrote on Fri, March 31, 2006 5:26 am
> An interesting bit of history for you who have not been around in this
> genre since the beginning, like a few of us have--back when The Beast
> was being played, there was a subset of players who had some of the
> same criticisms of the Yahoo Group Cloudmakers that have been
> expressed here about Unfiction: Cloudmakers was a clique, they were
> solving puzzles too fast, there was no way for newbies to participate.
> Another group called Spherewatchers was set up as a "kinder, gentler"
> way to play the game.  To the best of my knowledge, this group never
> "finished" playing.  As their gameplay was several weeks behind when
> the game ended, and the PMs stepped out from behind the Curtain,
> anyone who was seriously playing along moved back to Cloudmakers in
> order to participate in "real time".

I've been wondering why more ARG communities haven't sprung up along side
Unfiction, and maybe you're right - it goes all the way back to this. I
remember it when it happened, but it didn't occur to me it might set a
pattern for the future.

I wonder if the design of ARGs so far has unintentionally promoted this
collapse of communities down to the one with the most "mass."

And I wonder how to tweak the design so it's easier for a group of
communities to form.

Wendy Despain
quantumcontent.com