[arg_discuss] TOW: almost 8 years after the Beast, which is your favourite ARG and why?

[Morbus Iff]

Above all, I prefer longevity and wealth of story.

With that said, my favorite in most recent years has been Perplex City:

  * Cards to collect; I'm a heavy collector and packrat.
  * Lots of story available. Not all of it was "mysterious".
  * Lasted a long time.

If I look at current-day "ARGs", the only one (I know of) that matches 
would be Scholastic's The 39 Clues, which shares much the same bullets: 
10 books, 2 years, 355+ cards, and /tons/ of online content. There's so 
much content that I still haven't gone through it all yet. I love it. 
And yeah, it's aimed for 6 to 14 year olds. Oh well.

A lot of the problem I have with most ARGs is they're too mysterious to 
start out with. It's hard for me to "solve a puzzle because it's there", 
when there's no contextual reason on /why/ I should (and "I'm missing!" 
or "I need your help!" is irrelevant when I have no clue who the 
characters are who are pleaing for help). If I want to "solve a puzzle 
because it's there", I'll buy a GAMES Magazine. If I want to play an 
ARG, I want the AR before I get the G.

Of course, "wealth of story" can backfire. The Halo 3 ARG was neat for a 
bit, but quickly became an elitist adventure where you had to have read 
the books to really "get it" (since when do toting FPSers read books?). 
FTLR was neat for a bit, but I hated the foreign language aspects of it 
all. The Cloverfield stuff was great (but that's primarily because I've 
had a hard-on for kaiju eiga forever).

-- 
Morbus Iff ( accept no prostitutes )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Enjoy: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.videounderbelly.com/
aim: akaMorbus / skype: morbusiff / icq: 2927491 / jabber.org: morbus