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Rick Healey wrote:I should also admit that plenty of us are looking forward to describing this on our resumes. It's something that we hope will stand out.

Has anyone else used this ARG as a kind of school project, or something else? Will you refer to it when people ask you what your experiences are? If so, we're glad we could help

Oh it is going on every one of our resumes. We hope to gain gainful employment one day

This ARG helped me in that way, but also it helped me get through a pretty damn rough year, again thanks to all my co-workers and all the players.

Well, I do plan on writing an essay about all of this. There are some great things I learned about game development (I am trying to put together an indie shooter with some friends), and I got some great insights about ARGs because I've now gotten to see both sides of the curtain. I bet there are folks who would be interested in reading an essay about it all. I know some of the other puppet masters have even suggested that I expand it to a full book. I think they're just kidding with me. I think.

I probably will contact folks individually about quotes and the like at some point in the near future.

I'm pretty sure it helped Bill get a job. The reception of the game from the industry establishment has been very positive. It would be very nice if someone from the industry reading this swooped in and gave me a check made out to cash. Just sayin.

In seriousness, it was a huge pile of fun. I know I am going to miss the direct, unfiltered interaction with the audience that an ARG allows. You don't get that ever with novels, you get to see the reaction years later and not respond with screenplays, you get to play off of laughter and suggestions in improv... but nothing comes close to the pure, immediate feedback you get from having Adell livestream his battle with Cthulhu, and then go missing.

I am going to miss this game like some sort of drug withdrawal. I can't imagine starting another one of these right now, but sooner or later, I'm going to start itching all over until I get my fix.

Actually, someone did use this as a school project. As I've stated elsewhere, I produced the Peter Pan videos, but someone else directed them. The amazing Carl Rogers of http://doorway-films.com/ used it as his Cinema/Television "internship." It was a great opportunity for him because most internships don't let you direct pieces that are going to be shown and "played" internationally. Its funny, because I'm a student at the same school in the same major, but I signed his papers. I was scared for a while that the school would respond with "What? Eric is signing these papers? Whats going on here, Carl!?!" But no, it never happened. Thankfully.

Did you guys learn anything interesting?

I for one, learned that, apparently, cute things help to calm down people.

This entire post-mortem is full of stuff we learned. Cataloguing it is a big part of our motivation for doing the post-mortem at all.

Most of us had never run an ARG before. We all had some experience--playwrights, game designers, new media types. A few of us had worked on ARG's (Soph, Eric) and those who had played them were regarded as the elite few (Rick, Eric, and... maybe Sophie?).

We came into it with ambitious, untested game design principles and a willingness to work our asses off.

The biggest thing I learned involved crisis management. In a crisis, there's no time to panic, or be consistent, or be polite. If you're the ranking person on a project when something goes wrong, you gather whoever is around and you get them to do what has to be done. Damn their job descriptions, if they're the ones nearest to their phones, they're the ones who deal with it. But you save the dirtiest work for yourself.

You bring the engines to a halt until you determine how big the gash in the ship is, change course as soon as you determine the right one. No time to apologize if it was you that put in the wrong course. No time to be nice to the person who put the bad course in if it wasn't you. You can do that later. For now, you put everything else aside until the crisis is over, or you are relieved.

I also learned that the best way to avoid a crisis is to literally never stop working. Not sure that was the healthiest thing I could come away with, but you can't win them all.

Tom wrote:I also learned that the best way to avoid a crisis is to literally never stop working. Not sure that was the healthiest thing I could come away with, but you can't win them all.

Never stop fighting 'til the fight is done?

I came away with a lot from this whole thing. I was one of the people who had no idea what an ARG was before I applied, and even though the concept wasn't that difficult to wrap my brain around, there are a lot of things I wish I'd known going into it. I learned a lot about writing for this kind of experience, and how it's really unlike any other kind of writing. It's incredibly free and incredibly constrained at the same time, and if I were to go back and do it again, I'd do a lot of things differently with my arcs.

I also got to meet everyone - the other PMs and all of you players. I almost regret not giving in to the temptation of stalking your chat. =P

As a player being a part of this from the very beginning, I'll say it helped me in a lot of different ways. The most obvious I think is it kind of forced me to step up and really be a supportive member of a team, and really try and understand the friends and people I worked with so I made sure we could win this thing once I was promoted to Mod I pretty much made it my responsibility to take care of everyone and try to calm down the mass paranoia/tension going around. It was really weird to fill that kind of role, it wasn't that I didn't think I'd be able to, but more like I didn't think it would come to me as naturally as it did (I suppose it's debatable as to how well I did/am doing, though I think I did the best I could have done)

also, this is the first ARG I've actively participated in and seen through to its end, and if there's one thing I got to take out of this is I know a lot of great people all over the world now.

Yes. It helped me work with people as a team, make new friends, got me interested in certain books ( I didn't know exactly what Don Quixote was until this came along), get a taste of what an ARG was, and helped me overcome my shyness.

Oh, I learned something huge, and I hope everyone learns this.

Genre Savvy is damn hard.

There were points where my initial reaction to things was "How could they do that? Don't they see the trope in play?" But I realized that it's not always clear, in the thick of it, to see which of several tropes with similar setups are going to happen. Sometimes, as the surprise thread shows, it's not even clear what genre you're in (and thus why Wrong Genre Savvy exists). And finally, sometimes you're not familiar with the genre and are just operating on tropesin general.