Just looking over some post-THATcamp documents (I was set to go but had to pull out last minute). I’ve had some similar thoughts (www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2010/05/post-story_post-promotion_post.php) if you’re interested in reading.

Alex

So as a hacking project, some kind of Omeka-as-ARGhive process would be cool, or even just a conversation about an Omeka-fied workflow for ARG play.

@tjowens – Indeed, there are some heavy epistemological questions hanging over the heads of scholars studying ARGs! Is an ARG a text? A game? A performance? A community? A platform?

An ethnographic approach (with interviews of participants, observations of key convergences in the physical world, etc.) should certainly be critical to a fuller understanding of ARGs, their implications, and the investments of the people who play them. It sounds like Zach’s idea of the ARGHive wouldn’t exclude the ethnographic side of things. I don’t think the ARGHive necessarily preserves an ARG so much as it gives a latecomer an approximation of how the ARG went down. Participating in World without Oil back when it was live was one thing; reading the blog archives and lesson plans now is quite another (an impoverished experience, I can tell you); but an ARGHive might be somewhere in between.

@Mark Sample – I’m glad you brought up 21 Steps because I’ve been meaning to ask — has it stopped working, or is it just me? I can’t get it to finish loading, and I’ve tried with multiple OS’s. (Could be a Flash versioning problem?)

Anyway, the geospatial aspect of an archive would be important to many ARGhives, I’m sure, so I’m interested to learn more about things like the new map plugin for Zotero and Neatline.

@Alex – The “reality emulator” was kind of a throwaway line, but if you like it, let’s run with it! Wouldn’t the Holodeck be a reality simulator, though? For us to emulate reality, we’d have to uncover the foundational processes of reality (as a system), and then find a way to execute those on some other platform than reality — which to me sounds like a hard thing to do. 🙂

More seriously, though, I’ve been trying to make something of oft-repeated definition of ARGs as “games that use the real world as a platform” (as opposed to, say, Heavy Rain, which uses a PS3 as its platform). If we think of that definition as more than a clever turn of phrase, it’s interesting to imagine a platform study of reality.

Failing the creation of an emulator to reproduce the unfolding of a fake reality, I wonder what we can learn from the world of digital storytelling. There are several “lifestreaming” platforms (including a few open source ones) and I wonder if these could be used to recapture the narrative unfolding of an ARG.

Also, depending on the format of the ARG, maybe Google Maps makes sense as a narrative platform for recreating the events and documents of an ARG across space and time. I’m thinking, for example, Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps might be an instructive model.

In any case, this session sounds great, and fits in with my own interest in geolocation and locative media.

Also, I’m fascinated by your idea of a Reality Emulator. Holodeck, anyone?