[arg_discuss] A postmortem challenge!

[Brooke Thompson]

This challenge is inspired by Andrea's blog post today, Voices: A Case  
Study in Failure. If you haven't read it, you should make a point to.  
It's quite good. http://www.deusexmachinatio.com/2010/06/voices-a-case-study-in-failure.html

So here is the challenge... write about your experiences with one of  
your projects. Tell us what happened. Tell us what you wanted to  
accomplish. Tell us what surprised you with how brilliantly it worked  
and what shocked you when it didn't. Tell us what you learned from  
that project and your experience with it.

We need this stuff. These things are too big for us to explore much on  
our own. Oh, sure, we can poke around, but what does that tell us?  
These are experiences which means they're experiential... once they're  
done, they're done. For big traditional ARG-like projects there is no  
way to go back and figure it all out even they're incredibly well  
archived. For smaller self contained projects, there's still stuff we  
could know about the design & development but don't. That means we  
need you to write about what happened - and your experience with it.

I don't care where these are posted. To the list would be great. On  
your own site or blog would also be great! But if you post it to your  
blog, can you send us a link and maybe a few highlights? I don't  
really have any plans for the challenge (I just want to see this  
stuff!) but it'd be great if someone wanted to step up and gather  
these things for argology.org - we could put stuff up there and  
maintain a list of links to various postmortems & case studies posted  
elsewhere.

If you send something to the list but don't want it blasted all over  
the internet, let us know and we won't (but remember, this is not a  
private list!). So, to all of you working with/for clients: try to  
share what you can. I very much understand and respect the sensitive  
nature of what I'm asking here, but  don't think that has to stop you  
from participating. Things can be written vaguely and we can change  
names & dates & such. Some details and issues may have to be left out,  
but there are probably things that could written and explained  
generally enough that keeps the lessons learned in tact while making  
it difficult if not impossible to associate it with a specific  
project. You can send it to me personally and I will keep it  
anonymous. And together we can figure out a way to share it somewhere  
& somehow while and keeping both you and your client(s) safe and happy.




Brooke Thompson
Transmedia Storyteller       ARGFest Chair
www.giantmice.com           www.argfest.com

email: brooke at giantmice.com
mobile: 321.277.7613