Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Jeff Watson: ARG 2.0 (Part Two) - great resource

via henryjenkins.org

Excerpt from: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/07/arg_20_part_two.html

V. New Directions

[Studio] execs are mired in next-quarter earnings, and ARGs and other transmedia extensions require time to take root and build active, invested communities. It is decidedly a long-term investment, the fruits of which [may] not be fully realized until a significant period of time post-launch. As such, most studios aren't willing to make the investment needed to bake those components in from the beginning or allocate the funds/resource necessary to ensure their ongoing success (Gennefer Snowfield, Transmedia LA 2010).

Perhaps if ARGs weren't so demanding on marketing budgets, studio executives would be more willing to "bake them in from the beginning" and hang onto them for the long term. One way around this problem is to develop replayable, ongoing ARGs that engage fans in practices rather than the mere consumption of additional layers of a property via interactions with puzzles and in-game characters. Unlike the labor-intensive PM-centric traditional ARG model, such solutions have the capacity to produce the bulk of their content and interactivity through the emergent effects of a ruleset. These kinds of ARGs might not be the future of storytelling; but perhaps they are the future of story facilitating.
Over the past few years, several major ARG projects have attempted to engage fans in the co-creation of narrative content by using a ruleset to structure and guide participation. One of the most well-known of these projects is World Without Oil (Ken Eklund et al, 2007), a collaborative production game that invited players to speculate about what their lives would be like in the event of a sudden oil shock. While this game retained many of the characteristics of the traditional ARG, including an event-driven and time-sensitive structure, it shifted the emphasis away from the collective solving of puzzles and toward the production of content....

Read more: http://henryjenkins.org/2010/07/arg_20_part_two.html

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