[arg_discuss] ARG SIG Chat Feb. 3 - Goals and Sharing Info/Techniques/Ideas

[Adam Martin]

"<imbri> yeah, in my ideal SIG, it would be a gathering place of
people (players, developers)
interested in meta level discussions on the genre and working to
evangelize it throughout the
world" -- I think this is one of the things least-well supported by
other ARG-centric resources, and sth we need to continue doing a lot
of, independent of whatever else we decide to do.

It seems from reading the logs that "developer community & evangelism
& education" is too
unclear a distinction for many of the aspects to split into.

In particular, imbri's concerns about this leaving no place for the
genre are a big issue IMHO. Especially the point about IGDA being for
developers: I want to re-iterate that this is NOT the case
for the SIGs, as far as IGDA is concerned they are about
"developMENT", which is a much bigger
thing than developers, and very much includes genre stuff beyond
developing a game per se. IGDA's name is what it is for  historic
reasons, but we mustn't feel constrained by it :)

As a bystander reading the logs afterwards, I came away with the
impression that the goals were:
 - Rhiannon's quote that where UF is to foster playing  ARGS, the SIG
fosters making them (or whatever it was, sorry I've lost it in the
log): this has two parts, a public part and a private part

 - evangelising ARGs to sponsors, creators, and players: demonstrating
commercial value, pros of ARGs vs other games/formats, educating about
the existence of ARGs (although IMHO that's something that other
groups already do very well, and whilst we should always be promoting
ARGs to potential players when we have the opportunity, is it
something that's part of our core aims, or something we do on the
side?)

 - analysing the ARG genre: academic study of ARGs and their artistic
roles, abilities, values, future directions, etc

 - supporting the ARG genre: non game-specific initiatives, such as
preservation/archiving of complete arg history

On the issue of privacy/sensitivity, just as our fears that players
might swamp the list with requests for clues proved utterly unfounded
(and I was one of the really paranoid ones, oops :(), I wonder if we
are actually OK and dont need to worry about people reading too much
into our posts (clues) or finding exploits (security holes)?

I would like to make "encouraging much more sharing of advice and
ideas" one of our aims, but this is a personal thing (feel free to
shoot it down :)). I feel we need to kickstart more sharing of
sensitive materials - NOT the mid-game "shall I do this with the plot,
or that?" that was mentioned in the logs, but the other part, the
post-mortem thoughts/improvements/ideas etc.
If you look at the post-mortems regularly published on
gamasutra.com/Game Developer Magazine (and even collated into books!),
they are stuffed full of commercially sensitive info: facts, figures,
references to and explanations of corporate strategies, slamming of
partners/publishers for screwing up, etc. I've pulled some stuff out
of them that the authors would have been in trouble for saying in any
other context.They were officially the most popular article, I think
according to reader surveys, always interesting, and generally the
most useful for professional development, I suspect. For a genre based
so much on communication and the use of media, I think we are too
quiet. I totally understand that client relationships put brakes on
what people can say, but we need to help people convince their clients
to allow much more open sharing. Perhaps post mortems are the way to
achieve this? Colin's right: "<colin> you can talk about coding
without compromising the contents of your game", BUT ... 90% of the GS post
mortems wasn't coding, usually there was lots of politics and corp
strategy, and project mgmt info.

Adam