[arg_discuss] Communities and resources

[Adrian Hon]

On 11 Apr 2006, at 07:07, Guy Parsons wrote:

> Given the nature of ARGs, I wouldn't really expect ARGN to be running
> previews that make critical judgements on forthcoming games.  
> Instead, I'd
> see them as opportunities for PM's to inform potential players  
> about the
> nature of the game ahead, rather than try and "prove" its overall  
> quality.
> What sort of tone will it be? What sort of pace will it operate at?  
> What
> type of cool new stuff will you be introducing? I'd have thought  
> answering
> these sort of questions is bound to be useful to players.

Yes. Providing that it's accurate, of course, which is always an  
issue with features and previews (see 'Republic: The Revolution' as a  
case in point). It's not that I have anything particularly against  
previews or features, since they are very interesting - as you  
mentioned, PXC was effectively previewed before launch. However,  
previews still  suffer from exactly the same problems that other  
games magazines encounter, and they shouldn't be seen as a panacea.

As I said in my other emails, I think that critical reviews are more  
important (again, witness the amount of space and time given to  
reviews vs. previews in any games site or magazine). Now, by critical  
I don't mean 'negative', I just mean more thorough. Jon said:

"This is no longer an issue of thinking that we need to support the  
genre through thick and thin, but instead, is a result of just being  
too plain nice, I guess."

and I would agree. I think it's counterproductive at this point to  
just try and support the genre by being nice when we have a lot of  
players getting burnt playing games that self-destruct; this is a big  
issue being discussed at the Meta forums on UF, and arguably it ends  
up harming the genre. At the extreme, you can imagine a newcomer to  
the genre playing something like Renata Isle or Find Araya and  
thinking 'Is this supposed to be a good ARG?' So, it would be nice to  
do more regular updates on the progress of ARGs (since in the case of  
'ARGs gone bad' you only find out right at the end), but I completely  
sympathise with the fact that this would take more time and resources  
that ARGN has. I do wonder whether a better model to look at are TV  
review sites... typically a review every week!

Incidentally, I did like the most recent PXC article that got some  
positive and negative quotes about our new Story So Far as well  
though (honestly!) - I think that sort of thing helps us, and it  
helps other developers as well.

Adrian

--
Adrian Hon - mssv.net
Executive Producer and Director of Play, Mind Candy
mindcandydesign.com - newmars.com - ibiblio.org/astrobiology