[arg_discuss] ARGs, Game Industry & Story

[Brian Clark]

> But I really am a sucker for events where experts from lots of

> different areas get together to change something.


Totally agree, Christy, I'm nearly obsessed with that in several different
wrinkles (from how cross-fertilization of ideas take place to how artistic
influence echoes from communal movements.) A large part of our work in
community building (outside of ARGing) is deeply influenced by the way it
really works in the real world when it is elevating instead of debasing,
which is the search for antidotes to the "dilemma of invisible man culture"
that pervades the Interwebs. Do you know if there are any articles about the
gathering itself? That link says it happened over a year ago.

Essentially brings the topic back around to Mike's about personal influence,
as I could point to one of those kinds of communal experiences among my
influences. Back in 2002, a number of people were thrown together for a week
talking about story and media and interactivity and gaming and
transformative media, called "Crossover Studio A"
(http://www.weblab.org/crossover/). Since then, they've used the Crossover
model in Australia and Europe too, and I often wonder how long it will take
for the "Continental Crossover Convergence" :)

For me, that was just after "Nothing So Strange" had its festival debut at
Slamdance. Many of my concepts about how those things might fit together
were still very elastic, and you could lean into hanging out with the kind
of theorists that almost made you angry. For me, it was Canadian academic
artists (no offense intended) who would frequently dismiss filmmaking as
"mere documentation of performance". They saw the filmmaking of NSS almost
beneath study, but the performance techniques fascinating (almost the
opposite of my internal meters.)

At a conference, I would have just bristled. At Crossover, I could
interrogate their opinion over drinks in a hottub after a day of theoretical
ping pong. It made me a better artist because of how much academic
performance art theoretical structure made me hone my argument about what I
was intending artistically in the independent media theoretical structure.
Those opportunities to dig deeper are becoming rarer and rarer in our
micro-sub-divided-attention post-modernism.


-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Brian Clark
Sent: Friday, 25 January 2008 22:45
To: 'Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG'
Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] ARGs, Game Industry & Story

Christy, did you see anything new or interesting in there? I got bored after
the third page: it felt like, in a couple of years, that group might
discover the Experience Design community about 9 years after it started :)

-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Christy Dena
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 7:48 PM
To: 'Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG'
Subject: [arg_discuss] ARGs, Game Industry & Story

 

"Late last year, a select group of experienced game designers, the unicorns
of the game development profession, gathered at a remote ranch in the dusty
hills of Texas. Their purpose? To solve the great game design issues of the
coming decade. The event? Project Horseshoe, organized by Game Developer
Hall of Famer George "Fatman" Sanger."

 

They split off into groups and discussed different issues. In a recent
article in Gamasutra, one of the participants in a group on Story described
where they looked for inspiration: ARGs. 

 

 

Daniel Cook, 'The Watery Pachinko Machine of Doom: Project Horseshoe's
Thoughts on Story' 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3498/the_watery_pachinko_machine_of_.p
hp?page=1

 

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