[arg_discuss] Open Space, and Anonymous (Project Chanology)

[Laurel Kilgour]

Hello,

 I've been a lurker so far (and no background in designing ARGs... yet!) but
have two things I wanted to share.

1. Christy, as it happens, I'm trained in Open Space facilitation, and I
think it would be a fantastic format for what you're doing.  I'd be happy to
facilitate an event for free (if it's in the US) and can also recommend some
more experienced facilitators who would be great (eg, Siona van Dijk,
http://www.sionas.com/openspace.html)

2. This isn't an ARG, but has anyone else caught wind of the
counter-movement against Scientology?  They put out a video that I thought
would make a compelling intro to an ARG, with a computer-generated voice
over stylized video. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=injy0hsXHqs

(People may also be interested to see the distributed way in which their
efforts are apparently being planned:
http://www.partyvan.info/index.php/Project_Chanology   "On February 10th, at
the 11th hour of the day, anonymous will assemble around all the Churches of
Scientology in the world and demand that they be demolished.")  Interesting
times!

--Laurel
lakilgour at gmail.com


On Jan 26, 2008 9:00 AM, <arg_discuss-request at igda.org> wrote:


> Send ARG_Discuss mailing list submissions to

>        arg_discuss at igda.org

>

> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit

>        http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss

> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to

>        arg_discuss-request at igda.org

>

> You can reach the person managing the list at

>        arg_discuss-owner at igda.org

>

> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific

> than "Re: Contents of ARG_Discuss digest..."

>

>

> Today's Topics:

>

>   1. Re: ARGs, Game Industry & Story (Christy Dena)

>

>

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

>

> Message: 1

> Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:46:50 +1100

> From: "Christy Dena" <cdena at cross-mediaentertainment.com>

> Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] ARGs, Game Industry & Story

> To: "'Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG'" <arg_discuss at igda.org>

> Message-ID: <20080126045050.CAOR23867.oaamta05sl.mx.bigpond.com at HPPIE>

> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"

>

> 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

>

>

>

>

> ------------------------------

>

> _______________________________________________

> ARG_Discuss mailing list

> ARG_Discuss at igda.org

> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss

>

>

> End of ARG_Discuss Digest, Vol 29, Issue 23

> *******************************************

>