Written by Fono on August 11, 2007 – 10:40 am
I just wrote an unbearably lengthy post on my blog about the role of community in alternate reality games.
My point, then, is that the emphasis on community and collaboration actually creates a barrier to play. And I ought also to point out that if a player is turned off by any of the above factors, buying out of the collaborative play is not really an option. The lurker can follow along with the game by monitoring the communications of the community, but meaningful interaction will probably remain out of reach. To be sure, this isn’t always the case — there have been examples of designers altering the trajectory of a game as a result of the actions of an individual. But for obvious reasons, that’s not a pattern that can be frequently replicated. ARGs are currently (and understandably) designed for scale, and the meaningful player-developer communication occurs on the aggregate-level, the group-level.
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