[arg_discuss] The viability of small-scale ARG

[Aaron Scott Hildebrandt]

For the last couple years, I've been involved in small-scale ARGs. I'd
call them small-scale because they only have one person who is truly
"playing" -- everyone else is acting.

We're usually approached by a friend or significant other of someone
once-removed from us, so we don't know the player. They give us a date
where they assure us the player has the next 24 hours free. On that
day, we wake them up and give them an initial task (for example,
rescue their "kidnapped" girlfriend). The next 24 hours are a
carefully planned sequence of events that puts them in the center of a
massive terrorist plot that only they can stop. The events can get
truly epic -- we've even jumped the player, tied them up, and flew
them on a small plane to a nearby city where they were "tortured",
only to escape.and have no idea where they are... until they realize
the importance of the map they found on a dead body in a hotel room
earlier in the day. The game lasts a full 24 hours, and every hour is
action-packed.

We have a number of people who are usually involved as actors and
actresses, and without exception it's always gone exceedingly well.
The unsuspecting player always embraces the game and their role in it
completely (usually because they know that even if they don't see
them, their significant other / friends are involved).

So far, we've run one game per year for the past... four years, I
think? The thing is, this is something we've been doing purely because
we love doing it. It costs between $500 and $1200 to pull off, and the
expenses have always been covered 100% by my friend, who also does
most of the planning (I'm usually one of the lead actors and help with
some of the technical stuff). We've never asked for a cent from the
player or his friends.

We've been talking this last while about how viable it would be to
continue doing these ARGs, but for paying customers. Are there any
companies that have successfully done this? I know it opens us up to a
whole range of problems, from liability to finding clients who would
be willing to pay a pretty steep fee for our services (between the
actual expense of the day and the months of planning put into it). I
know that companies like The Go Game do this on a much larger scale...
is there anyone out there doing this on as small a scale as us, but
trying to do it as a viable business?

Just for the record, we are not actively pursuing turning this into a
business -- as long as we can afford to do it, we plan on continuing
to do this for free, once a year. But if there was any way for us to
turn this around and make some money, it's definitely something we'd
look into.

-- 
Aaron Scott Hildebrandt
andcuriouser.com