(It’s not a very sizeable majority, though. If this is anything to go by, the audience figures were quite low. I’d be very keen to see the breakdown of user stats on this one.)

Overall I share your opinion that the experience wasn’t particularly compelling. The barriers to entry were high, too; creating a vid that’s actually good isn’t easy. I suppose that’s why I didn’t submit anything. Happiness is being a part of something complete and great, and as you say, the experience seemed to lack a feeling of coherency – it was neither complete nor great, though it was a very interesting idea.

But I still think Superstruct is valuable. Assembling stories collaboratively with large groups of people using social media has really only been possible for a very short time. We’re learning the ropes. Ultimately it shared the problems of a lot of ARGs – the barriers to entry were high, and it wasn’t really interesting for the lurkers. But I still think we’re groping or stumbling towards something very interesting and projects like World Without Oil and Superstruct are our scouts.

I admire the storymaking ‘world as if’ structure. But is it difficult for a player-run simulator to make connections and coherence between necessarily many different world-views, especially to make the world meaningfully respond to a single player’s journey. And is it also a problem that only the open-collaborative side of things is played? Sure that is the desirable side of player behaviour but it’s not exactly realistic nor without conflict does it lead to a compelling grand narrative.

is the news vulnerable to misinterpretation if presented in this context?

Well, the news is always open to misinterpretation. Challenge structure just allows the journalist as editor to pick the best material. But it allows the journalist to pick that material from the best of what everyone has seen, not just one person.

As for journalists having perspective and analytical training . . . well, maybe experience, yes, and you’d hope some training. Depends on the outfit. But journalists are just ordinary people.

The thing that journalists have over people who do other jobs is time, mostly. Time to go dig deep. If you’ve got a day job, you’re not going to go on an investigation. If you’re a journalist, that’s what you’re paid to do.

The public should be able to give you the leads that let you go on that investigation. There’s a process for this now – personal relationships – and that’s not going to go away. But with a properly crafted social media structure, the net can spread much, much wider. That’s what I’m talking about when I say collaborative story telling. If I’m the journalist, you provide the leads and details that allow me to tell the story – but that means we’re telling it together.

I like the idea of “challenge structure” journalism – the world is an interesting place, if a people won’t bother learning about it unless it’s in a game context, then why not accomodate them? At the same time, however, I wonder what this might do to journalism’s didactic purpose. ARGs could be a great way to get people interested in social causes, charities and politics, but is the news vulnerable to misinterpretation if presented in this context?

Rule 4 intrigues me for a similar reason. I understand that you’re not arguing that bloggers ought to be in charge of the BBC, but if we allow that sort of collaboration for anything other than information gathering, aren’t we doing something other than news? This point doesn’t really matter to ARGs – they can create whatever narrative experience they want – but don’t journalists have perspective and analytical training that an average contributor would not? I may just need a better understanding of how social media relates to mass media, but I do believe that in an ideal world the latter can reveal truths that the former does not have access to, no matter how big its contributor base is.

That said, maybe that “something other than news” is the sharp edge of something new. If ARGs have had a hard time conjuring enduring storylines, maybe the concerns of our old industrial media are the fodder they need.

I mean… the IRI of real life would have to be pretty high, right?

http://heekya.com/preview.php

This is why I find World Without Oil and Superstruct the most interesting ARGs from my perspective. Their storymaking aesthetic was quite different from the kind of user experience one got from I Love Bees and so on.

As for TINAG, perhaps. But the main point is that the medium is arbitrary – it’s reaching the audience that counts. Immersion, as you say, is key. What game could be more immersive than one that is actually set in the real world, today?

The techniques developed and implemented in ARGs show us how to build and incentivize communities of people for collective intelligence tasks. World Without Oil proved that these tasks could be relevant to real world problems. I’d say we’ve made a good start.