Community Building

As much as I love game and experience design, it is the community that has always driven me. In fact, it was in studying online communities that I discovered “the Beast” and led me into this crazy world of design. Over the years, I have volunteered much of my time to developing as well as sharing and collaborating with both the ARG player and developer communities.

Community Gatherings


ARGFest (Chair)
Back in April, 2003 when unfiction’s Sean Stacey decided to head to Vegas to have beer with ARGN’s Steve Peters – a dozen or so of us joined them. ARGFest was born. Six months later, we figured we should get together again. This time, I hosted the gathering in Orlando and two dozen people showed up! Wow! It turned into an annual gathering meeting at different cities across the US and by the time we hit New York City in 2005, we had a conference room in a hotel and panels of speakers in the morning. Insanity!

As chair for the 2010 event in Atlanta, I took ARGFest from a weekend event to a four day experience with two full days of conference sessions, workshops, & parties followed by a two day long game festival and, of course, more parties. It was a bit of a risk and had some stressful moments but, on the whole, it was incredibly successful.

Community Websites


Unfiction (Administrator)
It’s ancient history now, but there was a time when people playing alternate reality games didn’t have a central hub to gather with other players to talk about all things ARG. To meet this need, I worked with Sean Stacey to establish such a place at unfiction and, in September 2002, we launched the unfiction unforums. If only we had known what we were getting ourselves into! Today, the forums boast a member list of over 20,000 ARG enthusiasts who have written well over a half a million posts. I currently serve as a forum administrator as well as the moderator for the “Meta” sections which cover the genre as a whole.


IGDA ARG SIG (Chair)
The International Game Developers Association’s Special Interest Group on Alternate Reality Gaming (IGDA ARG SIG) is more than just a mouthful – it’s a great little resource for those interested in the Alternate Reality Gaming space on a professional level. I have participated in the SIG since its inception in 2005 and was a fairly heavy contributor to the IGDA ARG SIG White Paper which was published in 2006. The two chapters that I contributed: Understanding Your Audience and Current & Recent Games can be found both on my website or as a part of the larger white paper. I was elected to serve as Chair in May 2010 and hope to publish another White Paper in fall of 2010.

Community Resources


ARGNet (Staff Writer)
The Alternate Reality Gaming Network, ARGNet, is the largest and most complete news resource devoted to Alternate Reality Gaming. I served the site as a Staff Writer from 2005-2007 where I wrote on theory (This Is Not A Game), Conferences & Events (Picnic & LCP), Business News (Mind Candy’s Venture Capital), Game Launches (MeiGeist) and more. See the full archive of the my articles at my ARGNet Author page.


ARG Netcast (Panelist)
The ARG Netcast is a weekly podcast which discusses gameplay, events, and topics related to Alternate Reality Gaming. It began in October, 2006 with myself, Sean Stacey of unfiction, and Jonathan Waite of ARGNet and in the years since, I have been a fairly regular panelist.


Push Diner (Creator, Designer, Writer)
Push, NV was an early mainstream attempt at an interactive television show with some transmedia elements produced by Live Planet and airing on ABC. In order to introduce people into the existing community and similar games, I created pushdiner.com which linked to a number of player resources on existing community sites as well as maintained a very comprehensive guide to the television show including relevant news, cast biographies, transcripts, maps of the fictional town, and descriptions of each character and location. It wound up being the most comprehensive website regarding the shortlived television series and was referred to on official ABC and Push, NV websites. The full website, or what have been able to recover of it, is available here: Push Diner

Game Tools

QuickLinks
During the early years and up until Last Call Poker, I maintained “QuickLinks” for each of the games that I played. These were a simple html file that could be opened in the sidebar of the browser using a little bit of javascript. Not only did they serve as a great way to keep a master list of all game related websites (both in-game and out), but they were a quick way to find out what was new and notable as I would add to them as the game (and player resources) grew and mark which sites had recently updated.

The following Quicklinks are available, however the majority of the links are no longer working: