2 posts tagged “arg”
How to shut down a university campus, using simple geocaching equipment.
In just 48 hours, Mind Candy suffered a complete decimation of its ARG workforce, with the entire story team and Director of Play (essentially the ARG manager) all leaving the company.
No-one is talking as to the reason behind the move, leaving GameSetWatch to hazard a couple of guesses, the most likely being the following.
ARGs have yet to justify the expense that they incur. The majority of the population does not have time for long, drawn-out affairs, even when presented with a setting that is appealing to them, such as The Lost Experience. How many of the players that even tried from the beginning made it all the way to its inevitably disappointing conclusion? Was the show best serviced by information about the Dharma Initiative being released only to the select few?
Even ignoring time-constraints, another majority proportion of people will feel ill-at-ease with playing role-playing games; the size of the LARP community is an indication of that.
The budget/reward proposition just doesn't add up.
What does this mean to video games? We've had various research attempts, such as ARQuake (mix of Quake in the real world), and business attempts, such as the Gizmondo (with a GPS reciever), to mix real-life with games. No attempt has successfully managed to prove it's worth to a wide audience; even Kojima-san jettisoned Boktai's light sensor for the follow-up game, which was a fairly tame mechanic.
It's hard to imagine a world where such limitations on the location of play, and the embarrassment many feel from public performance, will ever allow these game mechanics to work at a level where they can be relied on to turn a profit. Mind Candy have made the right choice.
No-one is talking as to the reason behind the move, leaving GameSetWatch to hazard a couple of guesses, the most likely being the following.
...if you can buy puzzle cards in packs and and solve them online for points, and that's fairly addictive on its own, why include potentially expensive ARG elements to the game as well? Helicopters don't come cheap.
ARGs have yet to justify the expense that they incur. The majority of the population does not have time for long, drawn-out affairs, even when presented with a setting that is appealing to them, such as The Lost Experience. How many of the players that even tried from the beginning made it all the way to its inevitably disappointing conclusion? Was the show best serviced by information about the Dharma Initiative being released only to the select few?
Even ignoring time-constraints, another majority proportion of people will feel ill-at-ease with playing role-playing games; the size of the LARP community is an indication of that.
The budget/reward proposition just doesn't add up.
What does this mean to video games? We've had various research attempts, such as ARQuake (mix of Quake in the real world), and business attempts, such as the Gizmondo (with a GPS reciever), to mix real-life with games. No attempt has successfully managed to prove it's worth to a wide audience; even Kojima-san jettisoned Boktai's light sensor for the follow-up game, which was a fairly tame mechanic.
It's hard to imagine a world where such limitations on the location of play, and the embarrassment many feel from public performance, will ever allow these game mechanics to work at a level where they can be relied on to turn a profit. Mind Candy have made the right choice.
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