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So the International Game Developers Association has a Special Interest Group for Alternate Reality Gaming and it recently released a "whitepaper" on ARG. This is a document that is intended to be authoritatively informative about a certain subject (although UrbanDictionary defines it somewhat differently).

The whitepaper is an interesting read and certain sections are well done but Jackie Kerr has raised some pointed yet quite valid criticism of the paper and its editorial process. There are some major problems with this whitepaper that deserve scrutiny and correction; it is apparent that whatever process of production was in place broke down somewhere along the way, without pointing any fingers of blame at specific individuals. Somewhat ironically, it seems much of this could have been avoided had some sort of peer-review been solicited from the community of ARG players before the paper was published.

And that's exactly what should happen now. Declare the current version of the whitepaper to be a "working draft," submit it for review and comment to the ARG community as a whole (and listen!), then research and revise from there. There is a lot of potential in this whitepaper and it is in the interest of everyone who wishes to see this genre grow and succeed to support the effort. It seems to me that if that support is invited, welcomed, and taken heed of, the whitepaper can only improve.

A few years ago, in the midst of my first draft of a trail for Lockjaw, an early alternate reality game, I came up with that very term (yes, I am that particular idiot), for the lack of any better way to quickly convey a feeling for what might be involved in the information that followed, catalogued on that page in excruciating detail. That same impetus to try to categorize a nascent genre, to distill a definition into a more memorable soundbite, drove me to create the Unfiction site, mainly because I realized that I could not define the genre so easily as I might have wished. This site became my surrogate definition; instead of repeatedly explaining at length what these "things" were, the idea went, I could just point people to the site instead. As has been readily apparent to those active in the ARG community, however, there has never been any collectively agreeable, concrete description of alternate reality games.

So here's where where I tell you that I have a way to define alternate reality gaming in such a fashion as to prove to you that I cannot in fact define it at all. While the previous statement may seem nonsensical, I encourage you to bear with me. The following is written with the assumption that the reader has some passing familiarity with the history, mechanics, and gameplay of ARGs.

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One of our servers (sadly enough, Gibson) was compromised yesterday and used to launch a flood of spam. Our excellent host caught it quickly and shut everything down, but we've had to rewipe and reload everything from scratch in order to make sure the forums software is as secure as possible, as our old patchwork code was the most likely weak point. We're taking this opportunity to add some new features, but it will take a bit of time before all of the old functionality returns. We thank you for your patience as we work furiously to bring uF back!

Keep an eye on our Status Page for brief updates on progress.

From September 27 through 29 this year, the Cross Media Week PICNIC '06 convention will be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. ARGN has entered into a network partnership with Cross Media Week and is offering discounts on registration to the three-day convention.

Some of the hard-hitting scheduled speakers at the event include Simon Guild, President and Chief Executive, MTV Networks Europe; Dr. Michael B. Johnson, Moving Picture Group Lead, Pixar Animation Studios; John de Mol, Co-Founder of Endemol and Founder of Talpa; Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Lab/Second Life; Craig Newmark, Founder, craigslist.org; Jamie Kantrowitz, Senior VP Marketing Europe, Myspace.com; Reinier Evers, Founder, Trendwatching.com.

Imbri and I will be meeting up with Giskard to attend the convention. We'd love to organize a get-together of European ARGonauts who can make it to Amsterdam sometime that week, probably Saturday the 30th of September. Watch this post for updates with exact details; meanwhile, anyone who would like to get together with us in Amsterdam at the end of September, sound off in this thread!

We hope you see you there!