[arg_discuss] English Gargoyle ARG?

[Brian Clark]

Sorry, Andrea, 

I'm going to try a strange argument on for size. Bear with me, as I'm
synthesizing some of the thoughts of some narrative theorists here who I've
been engaged in dialogs with.

Let's try on for size a new perspective: ARG is a fluid label for a genre, a
momentary descriptor of an evolving art form at a particular moment time. At
some point, people will narrow down that as some kind of movement with all
kind of variance in it that had a variety of specific birth dates and a
conclusion date of that movement ... it will become something else,
hopefully dozens of something else.

That said, it is a convenient horseshoes target (where close does kind of
count), but I think it is actually a naturalist approach -- is this
butterfly of a different species of ARGus Multiplicus, or is this just a
small mutation of the same species? How many purple butterflies do you have
to see before you decide they are a different species than the indigo ones?

I think are some general consensus on some points, like that there is
something different between a "stunt" and an "ARG" ... there have been
publicity stunts for centuries (if not millennium) but no one felt the need
for a new label to differentiate something new from "stunt".

For me, this isn't an abstract argument. I watched "alternate" get co-opted
from a movement into a genre. I'm a defender of "independent" from getting
co-opted but it is a losing battle. When I was the President of Buzz & Viral
Marketing Association I told everyone, "Viral doesn't mean anything anymore:
people either mean cheap or effective when they say viral."

We also did stuff that was "not-ARG" but damn close until the community
slapped the ARG label on one of our works. Purple butterflies apparently
don't even KNOW they have Latin names, dumb bugs that we are. I also have
projects that used techniques that long names in say 1997 ("Shared diary of
multiple participants") that now we have short-hand for ("group blog") that
literally didn't exist at the time.

Art forms gain part of their strength from that calcification and loss of
label control: it gives us all the next thing to rebel against. Punk rock
rebellion of the prior rules is one of the great renewable creative fuels: a
strong art form finds ways to embrace that. They cheer the people breaking
the prior models down again :)


Brian