Mssv

“No-one’s watching TV any more, and even worse, all this user-generated content is killing us.” That was the cheerful attitude at the C21 Futuremedia TV conference I went to last week. The audience was composed mainly of TV executives, with a smattering of smug ‘internet people’ like myself, who alternately confirmed their worst fears and [...]

On Tuesday, after about five hours of sleep following the Second Life ARG panel, I found myself at the BBC Audio Drama Festival in London. As usual, I was due to give a talk about ARGs. I did think it was a little strange that I was invited to speak, because while we do have [...]

It’s late notice, I know, but I’m going to be in Second Life tonight at midnight, talking about Perplex City, ARGs and (unsurprisingly) Second Life. It’s part of the Second Life Future Salon, and hosted by the Electric Sheep Company. You can find out more here. Also, you don’t need to be in SL to [...]

Next week, I’m speaking at a couple of conferences on Perplex City in London. Can you guess I didn’t get much notice? Anyway, if you happen to be going to either, please say hi!
Tuesday November 28th: BBC Audio Drama Festival. I’m speaking on the Gaming panel, which is at 9:30am and also repeated at 11:30am.
Friday [...]

I occasionally get emails from people asking how they might work for a company that creates ARGs; many of these people are students. Since the question is repeatedly asked, I thought I’d put my answer here in case it interests anyone else.

‘Ministry’ is the name of the latest installment of G. W. Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. These sixty page booklets have been arriving on my desk every Monday for the last five weeks, and there are still another five to go. It’s certainly a novel delivery system.
I can’t remember exactly how I [...]

Much as I hate to perpetuate memes like this, the whole saga of YouTube’s lonelygirl15 has just hit Metafilter. Basically, someone has posted a bunch of video diaries to YouTube purporting to be a young homeschooled girl with ultra-religious parents. She’s having drama with a boy, and she appears to be involved in some satanic [...]

I’ve been at Mind Candy, developing Perplex City full time, for almost two years now. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a Bruce Sterling novel, jumping from neuroscience to a job which didn’t exist five years ago and is still difficult to explain to people. It’s obviously been a fun, if hectic, time, and it’s [...]

Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and researcher into videogames talked about alternate reality games, among other things, in a recent interview. I quite like when Jenkins has to say most of the time, but I found his comments on ARGs to be bafflingd.
It’s perfectly true to say that ARGs [...]

There are a lot of numbers floating around the web regarding the audience of different alternate reality games, some of which are confusing and contradictory. I’ve presented some data that I’ve gathered over the past few months for presentations and collated them here. All data is as of 10th February 2006.