Through The Looking Glass

More on the We Tell Sto­ries fic­tion series and Alter­nate Real­ity Game fol­lows shortly, but I got a bit dis­tracted from my read­ing and sleuthing when I found this post by ‘nara’ on the Unfic­tion Forums, a com­mu­nity web­site devoted to ARG playing:

I’ve been fol­low­ing track­backs from the var­i­ous arti­cles men­tioned here. I found the one for Jack Mottram’s submit response blog. Is the story you get from the email sup­posed to be about what hap­pened to him at the station?

Then, later, this:

I cre­ated a twit­ter account to follow Jack Mottram…I hope this wouldn’t be con­sid­ered stalking….this is what his last post said:

Anyone else reading/playing We Tell Sto­ries? http://​tinyurl.​com/​2​vckou - http://​ican​haz.​com/​cluez

Won­der­ful! For a little while, I became a char­ac­ter in a game I’m play­ing myself!

I resisted the temp­ta­tion to play along, plac­ing myself inside the ARG as an unof­fi­cial hybrid player-​character. But only because I’m so easily iden­ti­fied as a real person, and most play­ers would instantly assume that Six To Start, thor­ough as they are, prob­a­bly wouldn’t write seven years’ worth of weblog posts or some­how insert a decade of jour­nal­ism into the press in order to create my backstory.

Though I wonder if this sort of trick been tried before? I’ve never fol­lowed any other ARGs, only read­ing about them after the fact, but it strikes me that recruit­ing demon­stra­bly real people to play char­ac­ters would be an inter­est­ing move, adding to the level of dif­fi­culty and longevity of the game.

Posted at 1pm on 28/03/08 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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Tags: arg, meta, source, wetellstories