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July 14, 2006

Develop 2006 Report

A much smaller gathering this time (obscured by the megalithic amBX stand in front of the IGDA booth), but we had 7 people come along mostly to learn about ARG's, from backgrounds as diverse as AI, mobile, and audio. Hopefully some new faces on the list in the coming days...

Develop was a good conference - short, sweet, and by the beach. For a 2-day conference, we managed to get in to a surprising number of parties, although I think the VIP room at the Ocean club probably won
hands down. A whole lot of mingling later, and yours-truly several pounds lighter in Perplex City cards now transferred to the hands and pockets of the great and the good, I'm confident the ARG message is continuing to spread far and fast.

My personal feeling is that this year, at GDC and Develop, the receptiveness for ARG's and interest in them from developers seems to have increased considerably. That's partly that we've got better at distilling out the most interesting - and most revolutionary - aspects, but I think it's also the knock-on effect from the big mainstream successes of gameplay and story of the last year or so, combined with the mini-boom as people ramp up for next gen.

Download presentation slides (MS PowerPoint)

Posted by AdamMartin at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2006

Michael Lebowitz

I'm the Co-founder and CEO of Big Spaceship ­ a digital creative agency with a significant focus on games of all kinds. The most relevant projects to this group are the Lost Oceanic-Air and Oceanic Flight 815 sites and related content and the original Hanso Foundation site. More about us here: www.bigspaceship.com

Posted by AdamMartin at 12:34 AM | Comments (0)

Ed Martin

As a Europe-based screenwriter/producer, I come from more of a film background than ARG, but I'm interested in cross-media as a storytelling tool and as a means to create puzzle-driven narrative mythologies. Though many people consider "The Beast" as the "Citizen Kane" of ARGs, I think it would be more accurate to compare it to Griffith's "Birth of a Nation". Both films represented a breakthrough in cinematography at the time of its release, but Orson Welles' masterpiece was really a quantum leap forward in style. In this regard, I'm currently designing an as-yet-to-be-launched ARG that will blur the boundaries of mainstream traditional ARG and other entertainment/narrative disciplines. Anyone interested in pushing forward the limits of ARG, please contact me.

Posted by AdamMartin at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)

Jonathan Waite

I have been involved with alternate reality gaming from the time of The Beast. I was teaching English in Korea when I came upon the link to the Bangalore World University, and was hooked from the get-go. From that game, I travelled through Plexata before becoming completely immersed into Lockjaw, and I've been hanging about ever since. In 2004 I joined the writing team at ARGN and in mid-2005 I accepted the role of Associate Editor. When founder Steve Peters left for his new
opportunity, I inherited the site and have been Senior Editor and site
owner since December. I have also begun development on the ARG Archive at www.arghive.com, which I hope will be a central hub for the history of ARG.

Posted by AdamMartin at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

Hugh Davies

Coming from a background in filmmaking and education in sculpture, I first encountered Location Based and Alternate Reality Game's through studying multimedia design in Scandanavia and ended up developing an ARG for delivery on mobile phone. Since that time I have maintained an active interest in ARG's from several angles: ARG's as relational aesthetics, ARG's as guerilla marketing, ARG's and game theory and ARG's as fun games to play. I am also very occupied by the boundaries of immersion that are created by reality and am interested in exploring ways of overcoming this barrier.

Posted by AdamMartin at 12:19 AM | Comments (0)