[arg_discuss] ARGs, Game Industry & Story

[Christy Dena]

Hey Brian, 

You've got me rambling now:

The last event happened in November 2007: http://www.projecthorseshoe.com/.
I haven't checked for other articles. I've just looked at the Story team
website: http://fabularasa.org/. 

I haven't done a Crossover but I have mentored on rapid-prototyping labs
that facilitate cross-fertilization. In my experience and observation of
many models I've found the unconference model to be most effective (when
encouraging an egalitarian sharing of knowledge). I was lucky to have
organized the first BarCamps in Sydney, Australia and I have since utilized
the methods we employed and learnt in that environment in my chairing of
academic panels! I find the 'change this' goal an exciting proposition. I've
been looking at the Open Space Technology model (which we used a bit of at
BarCampSydney): http://www.openspaceworld.org/; I've also been a fan for a
few years of Buckminster Fuller's World Game.

"The logic for the use of the word "game" in the title is even more
instructive. It says a lot about Fuller's approach to governance and social
problem solving. Obviously intended as a very serious tool, Fuller choose to
call his vision a "game" because he wanted it seen as something that was
accessible to everyone, not just the elite few in the power structure who
thought they were running the show. In this sense, it was one of Fuller's
more profoundly subversive visions. Fuller wanted a tool that would be
accessible to everyone, whose findings would be widely disseminated to the
masses through a free press, and which would, through this ground-swell of
public vetting and acceptance of solutions to society's problems, ultimately
force the political process to move in the direction that the values,
imagination and problem solving skills of those playing the democratically
open world game dictated." Source: http://www.bfi.org/taxonomy/term/170/all

Now, obviously I'm moving into world change territory when we're talking
about practitioner, genre and or industry change. But I believe the same
essential characteristics work well across the board. I'm a big fan of
sharing insights -- because I think we all get better then; and I also
believe that experts of different areas and so-called non-experts is perhaps
an ideal mix -- because it facilitates the wild-card moment, the added
X-factor. I'm rambling.

But spending a few days with people, chatting in (as you say) hottubs, is a
great way to evolve ideas. I guess I just find some of the location-based
events a bit of an obstacle because very rarely are they designed to involve
people in other geographic locations as well.

As for the academics that made you angry. Yeah, there are imbeciles in
academia....and industry, independent arts & gaming, media...everywhere. A
person's job, location, or chosen artform is not an indicator of talent or
wisdom. When I find interesting, talented, curious and good people, I try
and treat them like gold. It takes strength and wisdom to see the world from
other people's point of view. Indeed, studies have shown that it takes more
cognitive skill to think about another person's perspective. Here are some
excerpts of a post I did on this a while ago:

<begin edited excerpt>
People do work with assholes though, and even go so far as to defend them.
I've even heard people come up with reasons as to why some people are
assholes, reasons such as: geniuses are temperamental. Hmmm. I completely
disagree. A team-centered approach, an approach which treats everyone with
dignity and respect, that values everyones input takes intelligence.
Nastiness doesn't take brain power. I recall now a talk given by David
Perkins (http://www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/DP.htm), 'What Makes an Organisation
Smart?' at the 12th International Conference on Thinking held in Melbourne,
Australia (http://thinkingconference.org/). Perkins asked how there can be
smart people in dumb groups? He answered this with the 'dinosaur paradox':
negative archetypes, even though less effective, tend to drive out positive
archetypes. He said that negative archetypes keep power-hungry leaders in
power. But more important, to me, is the point that dinosaurs take over
because of the cognitive load of positive archetypes. Positive archetypes
tend to be more complex. Taking different perspectives is more complex and
complexity hurts the head. Also, Perkins explains that in stressful
conditions, we find it more difficult to maintain complex thinking. In other
words, my words, positive leaders are more intelligent!

[...]
In his article/manifesto, 'The Upside of Assholes: Is there Virtue in Bad
Workplace Behavior?' on one of my favourite sites, ChangeThis, Bob Sutton
shares his research and views on assholes in business. He has researched
apparently well-known assholes such as the CEO of Apple Steve Jobs; the CEO
of Disney, Michael Eisner; and the CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison. Sutton
presents the benefits of nastiness in business, examples such as fear-driven
performance and bringing clueless and lazy people to their senses. But
Sutton also outlines how nasty people delude themselves about the
relationship between their apparent success and their abhorrent behaviour.
He also discusses how the effects of behaviour (how other people act) feed
their delusion that they are a success. He outlines some of the ways, too,
that nasty behaviour costs a company. This well-considered exploration is
then ended with the only logical and wonderfully affirming conclusion:

"In closing, I want to make my personal beliefs crystal clear. Even if there
were no performance advantages to barring, expelling, and reforming nasty
and demeaning people, I'd still want organizations to enforce the no asshole
rule. I believe that my life and the lives of the people I care about are
too short and too precious to spend our days surrounded by jerks. We all die
in the end, and despite whatever "rational" virtues assholes may enjoy, I
prefer to avoid mean-spirited jerks and will continue to question why so
many of us tolerate, justify, and glorify so much demeaning behavior from so
many people. After all, even if acting like an asshole helps you win, in my
book, you are still an asshole and I don't want to get near you."

Source: http://www.changethis.com/32.01.UpsideAssholes

Jules Marshall also put out a great summary of ideas from the 2006 Picnic
(crossmedia week). Here are some thoughts that stood out for me:

"Passion with out ideals will lead us into (greater) vacuous irrelevance (at
best), or drive us more quickly off the cliff of eroded civil liberties even
faster.

Ideals without action will just lead to cynicism, apathy, and addressing
these issues together will inevitably lead to cognitive and political change
individually and society-wide. Action, if it is to scale up through society,
needs to be effective and sustainable.

Celebrating entrepreneurialism enables effective activism. Rather than
criticising or disdaining those who create wealth, jobs in new creative
businesses, creating new and successful business models will be the best way
(for individuals in our industries) of gaining credibility and power to
effect change. Traditional disdain for business by the alternative and
creative communities just leads to their/our arguments being sidelined, and
good critical thinkers simply preaching to the converted.  By the same
argument, seeing Web 2.0 as just a great new way to make money, or merely to
produce entertainment, without looking at the wider social situation in
which this is being done, will be polarising to society and a selling short
of the potential of this techno-social revolution." 

Source: http://picnic07.typepad.com/weblog/2006/11/impressions_of_.html
</edited excerpt>

Source of excerpts:
http://www.cross-mediaentertainment.com/index.php/2007/03/10/assholes-dinosa
urs-cables-entrepreneurialism-as-activism/

-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Brian Clark
Sent: Saturday, 26 January 2008 01:50
To: 'Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG'
Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] ARGs, Game Industry & Story


> 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

 

_______________________________________________
ARG_Discuss mailing list
ARG_Discuss at igda.org
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss

_______________________________________________
ARG_Discuss mailing list
ARG_Discuss at igda.org
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss


_______________________________________________
ARG_Discuss mailing list
ARG_Discuss at igda.org
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss

_______________________________________________
ARG_Discuss mailing list
ARG_Discuss at igda.org
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss