Comments on: GameCamp ’08

By: Get your game on – GameCamp 2 is coming for you « Philip Trippenbach ¦ Just Another Meme Vector

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:40:52 +0000

[...] know much about unconferences, either. Among other sessions, I heard James Wallis run a prescient session about how ARGs would soon die, and Adrian Hon describe Civilization III played as a massively [...]

By: trippenbach

trippenbach — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:37:00 +0000

Hell no - link away. But you'd be better off linking to someone who actually knows what they're talking about when it comes to ARGs - like Jane McGonigal or Dan or Adrian Hon. Dan deserves credit for the political party idea - we were sitting next to each other when this came up and it's based on an old concept of his for another game.

By: stalherz

stalherz — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:48:22 +0000

That is an amazing idea – getting people to organize an ARG for a political party. I’m looking for a new ARG to get into. Any advice?

I keep trying to pitch the company I work for that ARGs are the way to advertise, but they can’t see it. Do you mind if I link your site?

By: yojimbouk

yojimbouk — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:03:46 +0000

I used to write movie trailers for a living. Leave it to me.

By: trippenbach

trippenbach — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:58:13 +0000

Hmm. I see your point. In a way what we need here is a trailer function, or a book jacket function, for ARGs. You can look at 30 well-edited seconds of a movie and decide whether it's worth devoting two hours of your life to watching the whole thing. Same with books - read the back and you grok it, right? Is there an equivalent for ARGs or other games? Not yet, really. Most game trailers tend to be excercises in graphics rendering porn - "Oooh! Look at all the reflections! Twenty THOUSAND independently animated warriors at once!" - but this sort of thing doesn't actually say much about the gameplay. The trailer for The Lost Ring is quite cool, but gives almost NO indication what you're getting into. It leaves you thinking 'OK, yeah, I'm in! Now what?' Book jackets and movie trailers give you an anticipation of the full experience, using the same medium you'll be experiencing. You could do this with an ARG. I think it's possible by focusing on three things: the real-life experience, previwing gameplay and mentioning star power. The star power is the easiest: MOVIE GUY VOICE: This autumn, the creators of The Beast invite you to experience a real-life adventure like you've never imagined . . . . . . followed by a trailer where you see real people doing stuff in the game. This is the 'real experience' part: you see people doing cool stuff, with the implication that you could do this too. If you spread it the right way this doesn't have to be uncool. Even better, tease with the actual gameplay. Start with a small addictive casual game that has some sort of connection to the gameplay of the bigger thing. numb3rs attempted this with Chain Factor. That didn't make a mega splash, but the principle is sound.

By: yojimbouk

yojimbouk — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:48:10 +0000

One would hope we’d get better ARGs. But the present systems of rabbitholing and trailheading ARGs mean that it’s impossible to tell whether an ARG is going to be any good until one has already dedicated a good amount of time–days, even weeks–to it. Taken with the fact that it’s impossible to be fully involved in more than a few ARGs at a time, that doesn’t seem to be a recipe for quality.

By: trippenbach

trippenbach — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:37:56 +0000

Well, the more ARGs there are, the more each of them needs to compete to get the aniseed, it’s true. But if the rules of competition hold, shouldn’t that just mean that we’ll get better and better ARGs – not a collapse of the genre?

. . . as for the workshop in applied killing techniques, we had two guys and four girls. Sharp elbows, those girls. Most effective.

By: yojimbouk

yojimbouk — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:13:48 +0000

James here. My point isn’t so much that an increased volume of ARGs breaks TINAG; I don’t think TINAG is necessarily core to the ARG-like experience. I believe that as the number of ARGs increases, each one will find it harder to attract an ‘aniseed’, the small but intense core of players at the centre of each ARG, around which the rest of the player-community coalesces. My theory’s more developed than that, and I have a model for an ARG-like game that doesn’t have these problems (I’m not enough of an ass to call it ARG 2.0) but there’s a limit to what can be covered in a half-hour session or a 700-word blog post.

Your session was something of a hit, I gather. All the attendees were female?