Most ARGs are like icing on a cake - they make an existing TV show, movie, game or book taste even better by giving fans another way to explore and interact with the fictional universe. But you can't live on icing, so the question is: can an ARG ever work on its own, without relying on a massive audience from another medium? Very few have tried, and there are no enduring successes (including my own Perplex City). As a result, many have implicitly concluded that a 'native ARG' can't be done, and are now moving on to transmedia. But at Six to Start, we think it can be done by adding the 'game' back into ARGs, and we've been researching and developing a number of projects to demonstrate this, including two smartphone-based games that take solid game dynamics and then adding a depth of character, story, and world that others can't approach. During development, we found that there are enormous advantages in creating an ARG that's attached to an online game; for one, you can avoid the irritating friction that always occurs when switching between media; for another, the ARG feels completely natural. I'll also share why this is so important for the future of games and storytelling, why it's taken so long to get right, and how other game developers can create similar games (while avoiding the pitfalls we encountered).
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6890
