#argfail

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20.10.15 | ARG: PARTY PICS 11…

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[im-a-whorse]

Individual ARG reflection

For this project I was fortunate enough top be collaborating with the “Bluw Banana” group, which produced a partially successful ARG called “Fight Against Normality: My Edition or FANme for short.

-My group consisted of Marlo san Miguel, Karen Dane Gamo, Ryan Sue, Katriel Jay Lawrence, Julius Karl, Steven Wong, Annie Luo and Erfan Alavi On our first day (once groups were all properly sorted) we allocated team roles to one another based on what we could do/were interested in doing, producing the list as follows:

Marlo: Project leader, developer, user experience manager Karen: Editor, Documentor(Video and photos), Graphic designer Ryan: Game design, Writers, Graphic Designer, Storytelling Kat: Storytelling, Development Analyst, Developer Julius: Marketer, Developer, user interface designer Steven: Game Director/Manager?, Planner, Storytelling: Steven, Ryan, Kat = Research, Setting, Concept & Development Marlo(Developer) Technical, Engine, Tool,  Kat(Developer) assistant, associate, technical Julius(Developer)Graphic, Interface, Network Ryan & Karen = Game design, UE designer Patrick: Voice acting, game development, bullshitter in chief 

The majority of my group contribution for this topic is a few failed gameplay ideas and a fair amount of voice acting for our short promotional video, which included the reading of a poem written by Kat whilst accompanied by a set of drawings by Steven, telling a story about our game to give it a background and a plot. Unfortunately, in the final presentation for our ARG the audio would notwork for our video, and since the gameplay ideas that I had designed were scrapped I felt like I did not contribute hugely to the final product of our game however with such a large group having everyone trying to put something permanent in the game wasn’t going to work,and we made sacrifices and adjustments to fine-tune how it worked.

-Overall, from this project I would say that my key learnings were more orientated towards project management and time management. This is due to the fact that we pretty much had to ask every week what we were doing since the roles were out of sync with what we actually needed to do.. Then once we finally got our shit together and started working properly and diligently, productivity was boosted but we were short of time around this point, with our final presentation being two days away. Key learnings Time and Project management skills

-After our presentation was carried out and we received feedback, it became apparent that a lot of people liked how we stayed true to the aim of our ARG from the start, which was to break normality and get people to think outside the box a little bit  more in some fairly ordinary scenarios/situations. Our concept (of a rejuvenating kingdom) was also well received and this gave a feeling of success to what we had produced.

-I felt that (among a few others, but chiefly this) we could have made more of an effort to make our game into an actual ARG, as opposed to the final product being an internet-based popularity game. We were so obsessed with our theme of breaking normality, that we failed to see that, once running wild with the concept drawn up by Kat, we had forgotten what made our game an ARG, and therefore not completing the objectives that we had set out. To overcome this, I would have structured the story around the game as an ARG, how it interacts with the real world, as opposed to structuring the game around the story like we did in this project.