The Code is about to start, and Adrian’s on good form here with some concise bashing of ARG-design stereotypes: “the ‘inverted pyramid’ model of engagement for ARGs and transmedia! But I don’t like it … feels like a post-facto justification of why only a few people get really engaged in […]
alternate reality games
16 posts
Details here… a six-week paid internship, beginning in October. We’re looking for smart people who are interested in making social and story-based online games. You must be able to demonstrate experience of having worked on games in the past, whether you helped make a big game, or worked on your […]
Austin Hill, Akoha Summary Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”. I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at […]
The secret of Viral Marketing (VM) is that it’s all about popularity. Which is to say … sooner or later, it’s all about sex. When we made Perplex City, the Alternate Reality Game, I learnt a lot of basics about VM just from going out there and trying so much […]
Dan’s put up the slides from his talk at the Let’s Change the Game Conference – but more importantly he’s done a long writeup with the slides embedded in the text, so you can get the flavour of the talk he gave even though you missed it. He set out […]
Alice Taylor, Channel 4 From the ARGs in Charity and Education conference last week. Alice was forthcoming on real data – and, more importantly, C4’s outlook/perspective – on a bunch of issues. Very useful stuff. As ever, errors and ommissions my own, and my commentary [in square brackets].
Juliette Culver Main post on the conference is here. As ever, errors and omissions my own, and any personal commentary is in [square brackets] EDIT: updated with some corrections, courtesy of Juliette
This week, I was at the tiny one-day conference on Alternate Reality Games, and their use in charity and/or education, at Channel 4’s offices in London. All proceeds from the conference went to Cancer Research UK (I think it was mainly organized by the team that this year won the […]
Introduction Another story – The (Former) General – has been released as part of Penguin/STS’s current ARG, We Tell Stories. This story, and the website it comes from, is all part of an ARG, from two of the key people (Dan and Adrian Hon) behind Perplex City (PXC). So … […]
(re-posted here from the main IGDA ARG SIG blog (http://igda.org/arg), because the IGDA webserver is too weak and crappy to allow image uploads, which I needed to do :( ) The 2008 GDC Group Gathering went well, with approximately 20+ people turning up. We had a quick discussion about SIG […]
Summary Speaker: Jeremy Irish, Groundspeak Entertaining, with a lot of very small anecdotes, but nothing non-obvious in this talk. Everything he gave as advice you’d probably work out for yourself within your first project without losing time from doing so.
Summary Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, […]
Summary Speaker: Jeffrey Steefel, Turbine IMHO, Jeffrey hereby strengthens the weight of evidence that Turbine is genuinely turning the corner from making poorly-guided foolish games to doing cutting-edge stuff and doing it well. Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has gone some considerable way to burying the failings of Asheron’s […]
Summary A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives. Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate […]
I was just formatting an old hard disk over xmas, clearing out old junk, and found some files from when I was working at Mind Candy on Perplex City – probably a backup of my USB key when I was re-formatting it while still working there (we tried a couple […]
(ARG as in Alternate Reality Game, of course…) http://www.letschangethegame.org/ A new ARG project from Adrian and Dan, in aid of Cancer Research UK. Great to hear they’ve got this off the ground, it looks like it’s going to be fantastic. But it could also become the biggest event in helping […]