[arg_discuss] ARG Criticsms (RE:Open Source ARGs)

[Brian Clark]

Mark, interesting conversation, and I think MJ did a good job of capturing
some of the "art criticism" aspect. I wonder, though, if a couple of the
wrinkles you mentioned aren't actually more the core of what you're trying
to describe. May I?

Mark wrote: "The problem emerges when the artists, and others involved,
believe that lots and lots of people are experiencing the works when in fact
this is not necessarily the case."

I get the sentiment, but think the actual causes might be slightly different
than how you're phrasing it. 

Some of it is outright puffery via Twain's Law of Statistics ("there's three
kind of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics") for self-promotional or
client-promotional benefit. 

Some of it is definitional, as the important statistics to different
industries come crashing together head-first: sorting out the engagement vs.
reach is something "new media" is having a hard time with, not just ARGing.

Some of it might just be plain ignorance, as statistic methodologies aren't
exactly a required trait for actual creation of an ARG (only its
evaluation). 

So I'm not sure that the misperception of audience size necessarily leads to
the problems you end up describing, but if you're starting from the claims
of audience size after-the-fact, you've hit a fair area of media criticism
for ARGs. Let's be clear, though, there are also fair criticisms of
Neilson's methodologies for estimating television viewership, and the NY
Times "Best Sellers" list is about copies in stores not copies bought by
individuals, etc.

So I think the analogy that follow up with ends up suffering some flaws, as
it assumes "popularity" is some important intrinsic trait. In reality, in
the advertising funded arena, it works something like this:

Scared Ad Account Exec (SAAE): OMG! The traffic numbers of unique visitors
on the websites isn't as high as we hoped, what do we do?

ARG Consultant (ARGC): That's a reach metric. Reach metrics are connected to
active marketing. Squirt $X into this ad channel and reach will increase.

SAAE: OMG! So traffic is up, but average stick time and pages per session
are down! Many of them never even came back a second session! What do we do?

ARGC: Those are engagement metric. Engagement metrics are connected to the
self-engagement of the audience with each other through an activity. Tailor
an expansion of the experience to meet the expectations of the new audience
you just paid to attract.

SAAE: But won't that make the reach go down? It will make it more complex!
Aren't people not getting engaged because it's so complex?

ARGC: No, they're not getting involved because the depth of their commitment
so far was to click a banner bar that didn't actually describe what they
would be experiencing ... but that same technique increase the click-rate,
and you wanted a higher reach number. Reach will continue to be impacted by
advertising that recruits fresh potential audience.

These things are very interconnected, but in any system as complex as the
fluid dynamics of audience attention, any attempt to optimize one cluster of
numbers will have affects on some other cluster of numbers. This is not the
way most traditional online marketing or publishing is focused in
measurement models either: they think of it more as a series of missles in
organized salvos called "media plans" :P

None of this though has very much to do with ARG as an artform, it has to do
with the existing mechanics of how much of that art (from DK to WWO) gets
funded and what it has to do to justify its existence.

Ask Jan Libby, though, what her important metrics were for her independent
games, and you'll get an entirely different set of answers.

So is your criticism, thus, really more of the justifications to the
existing funding models instead of the artistic intent of the practitioners?



-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Mark Heggen
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 7:17 PM
To: Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG
Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] Open Source ARGs

 "If they just likes the colours, that's OK, isn't it?"


Of course it is OK that people enjoy art to whatever depth and in whatever
doses they so choose. The problem emerges when the artists, and others
involved, believe that lots and lots of people are experiencing the works
when in fact this is not necessarily the case. The problem lies in the
reality gap, not simply the level of audience participation.

Imagine a studio where a team of dedicated painters spend months and months
laboring tirelessly over their paintings, working out each detail
meticulously. When they finish a painting it is placed lovingly in the front
window of a gallery below their studio, where it is largely ignored by
people walking by. As the painters hears the footsteps of the people passing
by they congratulate one another on the thousands and thousands of people
who must be enjoying their hard work, when in fact very few people took more
than a passing glance at the art.

This is not a healthy system. It isn't crime or a disaster, but it is not a
good way to reach people with your art and your message, nor is it a good
way help the painters grow in their craft. Things get even worse when the
painters attempt to convince local business owners (standing in for
advertisers in the analogy) and academics that their paintings are in fact
reaching a lot of people. If you were aware of the situation you wouldn't be
right to force the painters to stop their work, but you probably ought to
let people know what was really happening.

Regarding the Sex Pistols; the notion that the Sex Pistols started their
musical career never having HEARD a full song is preposterous. The Sex
Pistols, being active participants in a culture, were deeply steeped in a
musical history and a musical zeitgeist which influenced and shaped their
own work tremendously. Someone creating an ARG without having ever played
another ARG fully is not like someone without a traditional sculpture
education teaching themselves to sculpt; it is more like someone reading the
first half of the Wikipedia article on opera and then trying to create their
own opera. This wouldn't be unholy or apocalyptic, but it would deserve a
healthy dose of skeptical attention.

_Mark
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