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

[Andrea A. Phillips]

On Jan 14, 2009, at 10:58 AM, Mike Monello wrote:

>

> Nice post, Andrea, but I've got take issue with one detail and your  

> conclusion. First, the detail: you state that Blair Witch didn't  

> offer audience volition or puzzles, but that is not true - it's a  

> common misunderstanding of many people who's experience of BW comes  

> second hand, probably through reading. This is one misconception  

> I'll be addressing soon in my series of blog articles, but for the  

> record, Blair Witch had a great deal of audience volition.


Aw, shucks. Lucky for me I've come to terms with the idea that when I  
talk about somebody else's work, I will *always get it wrong* ;)  
Please link us up here when you do all of this writing about Blair  
Witch -- I feel like it would be incredibly educational to get a good  
post-mortem out of it.


> As for puzzles, well it did not have traditional puzzles, and I  

> don't equate with gameplay, but we did have many game like elements  

> in the experience, including hiding pages of Heather's hand written  

> journal throughout the site and not making them live until the  

> audience discovered them.


Hmm. I might consider that story archaeology, though. I guess it  
depends on what you mean by "hidden pages," and how players went about  
finding them. Puzzles are one of those flash-point disagreements in  
the definition debate, anyway.



> Remember that the Blair Witch community and experience existed for  

> 15 months before the movie was released theatrically. A LOT happened  

> in that time, and most of it has never really been documented, as  

> there wasn't the kind of attention paid to what was happening with  

> online entertainment that existed even a year later, when we did  

> Freakylinks ( http://www.haxan.com/portfolio-of-past-work/ ), for  

> example, or the year after that, when The Beast happened.


I'd considered making another condition, that being a galvanized  
community of players dedicated to going through the experience  
together. I didn't include that, though, because that's got more to do  
with how the project is accepted by the public than how it's designed.

As I understand, Freakylinks DID have such a community, and Blair  
Witch had bunches (small groups dedicated to "unraveling the  
mystery.") Did it have cast/world interaction at all? ;)


> But I disagree with you that all this discussion is just wanking.  

> You might only be concerned with whether something is fun or not,  

> but if you want someone to put up some money to pay you to make it,  

> then you better be prepared to explain it, define it, and defend it  

> from all the other definitions and buzz out there surrounding it.


Well, yeah, you're right that when you want somebody to open their  
wallet, you need to be able to explain what they're buying. My  
intuition is that you can do that a lot better and faster if you don't  
say 'ARG,' though. If the client comes to you saying 'ARG,' you're  
going to have to ask them to clarify no mater what.

But hey, if you have a client coming to you asking you for ANY  
creative work -- an ad campaign, a sculpture, whatever -- you'll be  
having a similar conversation. It's just a part of the process, and it  
doesn't mean that we don't have enough consensus on what 'sculpture'  
means. Still, I'm not in the trenches pitching stuff; somebody else  
will surely correct me on this. (See above: always wrong when talking  
about somebody else's work!)

But myy accusation of wankery really revolves more around the stuff  
like, "Well, but was (X) an ARG? Should (Y) be considered the first  
ARG?" Where X and Y are usually things that hit some of those criteria  
I pulled out of thin air, but not all of them. It reaches a kind of  
strange reductive point where people can bring out an example of  
anything that meets one or two of those elements - epistolary novels  
and MUDs very often -- and say "Well, but then was THIS an ARG?"

The thing is, not one of those elements is a novel invention. As for  
whether the combination of several of them together rises to the level  
of a novel invention... well... that just gets us back into more  
semantics arguments, I think.

--
Andrea Phillips
http://www.deusexmachinatio.com
Words * Culture * Interaction