I’m not sure what I expected when I approached Intellagirl
with the idea of running an ARG and trying to recruit faculty to play it. In my
wildest dreams I imagined hordes of faculty members running around campus,
furiously tweeting, collaborating, and one-upping each other, but those were
pretty wild dreams. I hoped for a few faculty members playing and lots of them
lurking and following the action to see what this thing was like. A few people
promised me they would lurk, and of course I don’t know for sure if they did.
It’s a pretty unfamiliar genre for this particular demographic.
This all started when I realized that, with James Gee’s
visit on March 23rd, we had a great opportunity to give this kind of
learning experience some exposure. Like a good hostess, I’m reading the 2nd
edition of his book What Video Games Have
to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (because I get to drive him to the
airport). One of the things that has struck me from his narrative about his
experiences playing games has been his claim that baby-boomers (and I’m one of
‘em) are often impatient about the non-linearity of games. We want to figure
out the quickest way to get to our goal; we don’t want to wander around
wondering what items we should be picking up. Maybe we are the epitome of
wanting to know what’s going to be on the test and studying that. And we’re
likely to at least start playing a game by ourselves instead of in a community.
None of that thinking is really very useful in an ARG. When you start, you
rarely know exactly what you are after or how you are going to get it, so why
even get embroiled in the whole thing (to say nothing of the fact that you
might “fail”)? Then you have to follow several threads – blogs, twitter
accounts – and that’s just kind of annoying. I will have to admit that if I
wasn’t involved, I might have decided I was just too busy to mess with the
whole thing.
In retrospect we might have gotten off to a faster start if
we had called it something besides an Alternate Reality Game, a title that gets
a lot of blank stares. Intellagirl thought we might have gotten more traction if we
called it a game that is played via social media or something. Maybe. I just
think everyone needs more exposure; they need to get used to the idea. Maybe
we’ll call it something else next time, but there will be a next time…
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