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

[Brian Clark]

Beverly Hills 90210 and Usenet? That was a ramble there, Old Man Monello.
Happy 10th anniversary of Blair Witch to you though, Mike. 

I've known Mike for so long our stories are deeply connected: let me expand
on one of his points, and then dive off in a different direction (the "what
were you trying to accomplish" front.)

Mike wrote: "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."

The only reason the ARG community paid attention to us then, Mike, was
because there were damn puzzles in the Urns one. That was one of the few
textures we'd never bothered to play explicitly with before ... and that
time, it was something that had already been decided by the agency! The
first phone calls as Mike and I tried to unravel that we were apparently
"puppetmasters" were pretty fun ones. We kept going, "okay, I get it, that's
what we would call blah". So if you want to take a strict view of it, "Art
of the Heist" was the first ARG we did ... the first time we went, "okay,
let's synthesize the way we normally do this to embrace the ARG expectation"
which I think did a better job of putting the puzzles into a real narrative
context.

So back in those dark ages that Old Man Monello was talking about, one of
the other GMD Studios principals and I were (among other things) game
developers of the Diku II MUD platform ... essentially, the text games that
lead to MMRPGs. So I think my expectations as a producer were always about
"shared moments in time". The Web is more like performance to me than it is
like media ... it exists in order to be inhabited by people.

So it only made sense to use the web as a "place that people did something
together" as the whole point of what the Internet was. Some of that was
fiction (and looks like proto-ARG), some of that was non-fiction (and looked
like real-time documentary) and some of it crossed into B2B (and looked like
web publications serving strange niches).

See many of you tomorrow. 


-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org] On
Behalf Of Michael Monello
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 4:05 PM
To: Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG
Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] Topic of the Week July 13: Why are you here?

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_Ide
as

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
62 White Street, 3E
New York, NY 10013
212-612-9600
http://www.campfirenyc.com





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