[arg_discuss] Topic of the Week July 13: Why are you here?

[Michael Monello]

Well, The Blair Witch Project opened in the US on 23 (I think) screens 10 years ago today, and since then I have been focusing on distributed, interactive narratives. At some point, someone pointed at a project I was doing (with Brian Clark) and said it was an ARG, and that's when I started following the ARG scene.

While Blair Witch was the most sophisticated attempt at hacking reality I had done at that time, it wasn't the first. Many years before, probably 1992, a friend and I were exposed to Usenet and email through our universities. We started playing characters in the Usenet group devoted to Beverly Hills 90210. The board seemed to be made up of college freshmen gossiping about the characters and situations each episode, so we pretended to be pretentious philosophy grad students who were dissecting the meaning behind the show. Basically, we were speaking intellectual gibberish to each other

"Brandon's philosophical disenfranchisement reflects an inability to deal with his religious la de da and so on."
"I disagree with your hypothesis. Clearly, Brandon has exhibited la de da and so on"

We would post these endlessly verbose responses back and forth over a few months and watch as people either struggled to understand what we were talking about, got the joke and joined in with their own gibberish, or told us to relax, it's just a TV show.

Oh how I enjoyed it.

-Mike




On 7/13/09 9:02 AM, "Andrea Phillips" <andrhia at gmail.com> wrote:

This week's topic: What drew you into ARGs, and what keeps you
interested in them? For those of you who arrived at the same forms
independently, can you chime in with your thought processes on what
you were trying to do, and tell us whether it worked out the way you
expected it to?

If you have a suggestion for a Topic of the Week, feel free to add it in here:
http://www.igda.org/wiki/index.php?title=Alternate_Reality_Games_SIG/ToW_Ideas

Or if you're a little shy, email me about it and I'll put it in
myself. Have a great week, everyone!

--
Andrea Phillips
http://www.aaphillips.com
AIM: Andrh1a * Skype: Andrhia
Words * Culture * Interaction
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---
Mike Monello
Partner, Campfire
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New York, NY 10013
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