FAQ

What is this?

is this ARG? aggregates social media feeds from Alternate Reality Game designers, players, and observers.

What kinds of social media services do you aggregate from?

Whatever we can find for each person or source, so long as the stuff they post via that service semi-frequently has something to do with ARGs. Right now, we’re pulling in feeds from Twitter, Delicious, Unforum, Google Reader, Wikipedia, and various blogging platforms. Any site or service with an RSS feed will work.

How do you decide whose feeds to use?

First, I’m not sure that’s a grammatically correct question. Second, I do it pretty much by the seat of my pants. If I come across a blog or Twitter account that seems to have a compelling ARG voice, odds are I’ll add its feed to this site. If I meet someone who designs or plays or thinks about ARGs in interesting ways, I’ll seek out their public social media presence and try to place it in the stream presented here. I try not to just aggregate interesting new media and transmedia feeds: this site is for the ARG design/play/research community, and I try to select the sources accordingly.

Okay, but not everything on here is about ARGs. Like, here’s a tweet about someone’s cat, for example.

There’s really no avoiding that. People use their blogs and Twitter accounts for more than just designing games, playing games, and thinking about games. There’s this other thing called real life. I’m cool with that.

What’s up with all the brown links?

Because of the sheer volume of activity coming from the Unfiction forums, I’ve tweaked the stylesheet to make it easier to spot non-Unfiction posts amidst the daily flow of forum activity. Posts from the Unfiction forums appear with brown links and in a slightly smaller font size.

How come the stream is the same today as it was yesterday?

Potential apocalypse aside, it’s highly unlikely that no one has said anything in the past 24 hours. Try reloading the page. If that doesn’t work, clear your cache, then reload the page. You shouldn’t have to do this, but certain browsers under certain conditions might load the cached version of a given page if the gap between the present request and the last time you checked the page is less than a couple of days.

Why are you doing this?

I’m a writer and a PhD student who’s lucky enough to be earning a doctorate designing and researching ARGs and similar cross-platform story/play activities (you can read about that here). This site helps me to keep track of what’s happening in the community without having to flip through a thwack of Twitter lists, Google Reader folders, blogs, and searches. I have a little bit of PHP and Wordpress know-how, so I decided to make a dedicated site that would gather all that material into one place. I also felt like I wanted to contribute something useful to a community that has been very inspiring to me over the years, and this is a step in that direction.

How did you do it?

Basically, I hacked a great Wordpress plugin called Lifestream, designed a custom WP theme, and scraped together some PHP to make calls from the database in a slightly nonstandard way. I implemented a similar, though much smaller-scale, version of this idea for USC’s Media Arts and Practice Phd program.

Can you add something/change something/take something down?

Yep. Get in touch with me via the contact form.

I want my media feeds to appear here.

Great! Use the contact form to send me a link. Keep in mind: the idea with this site is not so much to create a social networking platform for ARG people — something like a Ning site would do a better job of that, anyway — but rather to build a kind of curated archive of feeds. Think of it as a real-time magazine that curates publicly available sources rather than commissioned content. Heavy meta, baby!