Alternate Reality Games (ARG) Festival

This piece is a review of the IDEAS Festival 2006 from http://www.argn.com/

by Michelle Senderhauf

As previously reported, the 2006 IDEAS Festival took place this past weekend at Indiana University in Bloomington. The annual festival celebrates Interactive Digital Environments, Arts and Storytelling (IDEAS) and promotes the university's Masters Program in Interactive Media and Game Design (MIME). In past years, the festival exhibits were judged and awarded prizes. The coordinators of this year's festival decided to eliminate the judging to create a more open environment where ideas could be shared.

Works in several different media were exhibited including video games, alternate reality games, immersive virtual reality environments, interactive sculpture and mobile art. Many of these pieces explore different ways to immerse or interact with the audience. One piece by Robert Derr, Chance, immerses the art museum-goers by giving them the opportunity to interact with the artist by rolling a die to determine his fate. Derr places four video cameras on his body and moves throughout the city in the direction determined by what number is shown on the die. Another piece, The Uncanny Road Ahead, uses virtual reality technology to immerse players in the virtual environment. I attended the event myself to exhibit Orbital Colony as interactive art and storytelling, but the IDEAS Festival had an ARG of its own, IDEAS Festival 1906. I actually was lucky enough to take part in a live finale for the game during the show:

One of the characters, Director Anderson, entered the hall and announced that he was going to exhibit a game from the future called Non Compos Mentis. This was the cue to begin my mission. I nervously made my way through the halls of the university building, keeping an eye out for Anderson's cronies. Agent Sueno and Silas McGuffin were counting on me to retrieve the evidence they needed to bring down Director Anderson. I made my way to the locker and unlocked it with the combination they had given me. I found enough evidence inside to ensure that Anderson was going to be brought to justice. Soon after, I joined Sueno and McGuffin to confront Anderson and show him the video of his future arrest.

Overall, the most exciting part of the festival was the high level of awareness about Alternate Reality Games. A surprising number of people in attendance knew what an ARG was and could name at least one example. Most of those who weren't already familiar with the genre were very interested in learning more.

Scenes from the Culture Clash

Interesting piece about changing work and social styles

From: Issue 102 | January 2006 | Page 72 By: Danielle Sacks

Beverly Hills psychiatrist's office is an unlikely triage center for the mash-up of generations in the workforce. But Dr. Charles Sophy is seeing the casualties firsthand. Last year, when a 24-year-old salesman at a car dealership didn't get his yearly bonus because of poor performance, both of his parents showed up at the company's regional headquarters and sat outside the CEO's office, refusing to leave until they got a meeting. "Security had to come and escort them out," Sophy says.

A 22-year-old pharmaceutical employee learned that he was not getting the promotion he had been eyeing. His boss told him he needed to work on his weaknesses first. The Harvard grad had excelled at everything he had ever done, so he was crushed by the news. He told his parents about the performance review, and they were convinced there was some misunderstanding, some way they could fix it, as they'd been able to fix everything before. His mother called the human-resources department the next day. Seventeen times. She left increasingly frustrated messages: "You're purposely ignoring us"; "you fudged the evaluation"; "you have it in for my son." She demanded a mediation session with her, her son, his boss, and HR--and got it. At one point, the 22-year-old reprimanded the HR rep for being "rude to my mom."

The patients on Sophy's couch aren't the twentysomethings dealing with their first taste of failure. Nor are they the "helicopter parents." They're the traumatized bosses, as well as the 47-year-old woman from HR who has been hassled time and again by her youngest workers and their parents. Now the pharmaceutical company that employs her has her in therapy, and she's on six-month stress leave.

And she's going to have plenty of company. Managers and their companies will have to deal with the 76 million children of baby boomers, born between 1978 and 2000, who have started pouring into offices across the land. Four generations are being asked to coexist at once: traditionalists (born before 1945), boomers (born 1946-1964), generation X (1965-1977), and millennials (alternately known as gen-Y, echo boomers, Net gen, and even "generation why," because they never stop questioning the status quo). Managers will be challenged to minimize the friction and maximize the assets of four distinct sets of work values and styles simultaneously.

The latest generation to join the mix is disruptive not only because of its size but because of its attitudes. Speak to enough intergenerational experts who study such things (and we spoke to more than a dozen of them), and you begin to get the picture: Millennials aren't interested in the financial success that drove the boomers or the independence that has marked the gen-Xers, but in careers that are personalized. They want educational opportunities in China and a chance to work in their companies' R&D departments for six months. "They have no expectation that the first place they work will at all be related to their career, so they're willing to move around until they find a place that suits them," says Dan Rasmus, who runs a workplace think tank for Microsoft. Thanks to their overinvolved boomer parents, this cohort has been coddled and pumped up to believe they can achieve anything. Immersion in PCs, video games, email, the Internet, and cell phones for most of their lives has changed their thought patterns and may also have actually changed how their brains developed physiologically. These folks want feedback daily, not annually. And in case it's not obvious, millennials are fearless and blunt. If they think they know a better way, they'll tell you, regardless of your title.

Meet any of the millennials now embarking on their careers, and this picture comes to life. Impatience with anything that doesn't lead to learning and advancement? "Nothing infuriates us more than busywork," says 24-year-old Katie Day, an assistant editor at Berkley Publishing, a division of Penguin Group USA. Fearlessness? "I don't have time to be intimidated," says Anna Stassen, a 26-year-old copywriter at the advertising agency Fallon Worldwide who treats her bosses like "the guys." "It's not that I'm disrespectful; it's just a waste of energy to be fearful." Permanently plugged in and juggling? "I'm constantly playing video games, on a call, doing work, and the thing is, all of it gets done, and it gets done well," says Beth Trippie, 26, a senior scheduling specialist, aptly enough, at Best Buy's corporate offices who's also finishing her MBA. "If the results aren't great, then fine; but if not, who cares how it gets done?"

Can some of this be chalked up to simple naïveté and brio, hallmarks of every generation in its youth? Sure. But experts believe that this won't wash away with age. "It's not a case of when they grow up, they'll see the world differently," says Joseph Gibbons, research director at the FutureWork Institute. "These values don't change over time." So if companies want to attract, retain, manage, and motivate the next generation of workers, they're going to have to adapt.

And if they don't want to--well, they'll have to, because this is our future workforce. Eighty million boomers will retire over the next 25 years, and there are only 46 million gen-Xers. Millennials will dominate the workforce for, oh, the next 70 years.

Stickers, hundreds of them, splatter a conference-room table. They represent Elvis, multiculti Barbie, cell phones, peace signs, disco balls, poodle skirts, even a TV dinner. A bunch of thirty-, forty-, and fiftysomethings have been sent to this room in Sonoma, California, by their companies as they wake up to what happens in the office when the millennials land. This is a three-day seminar led by intergenerational consultant Lynne Lancaster--and another unlikely front in the generational clash. The nostalgic stickers serve as therapy. She asks these reps from health-care companies, banks, law firms, manufacturers, and city governments to plaster the stickers to their name tags to identify every political, social, and pop-culture icon that's influenced who they are today. The point: to understand that what's shaped us as children directly correlates to who we are at work. Know where the millennials are coming from, Lancaster says, and you're that much closer to getting along with them.

After a cathartic exercise in which boomers and gen-Xers role-play the "clash points" they have with millennials (a chance for them to get improvised tongue rings and the word "phat" out of their systems), the silliness ends and the real issues rise to the surface. Cindy Pruitt, a professional development and recruiting manager with the national law firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, shares with disbelief a recent incident in which one of the firm's summer associates broke down in her office after being told his structure on a recent memo was "a little too loose." "They're simply stunned when they get any kind of negative feedback," Pruitt says. "I practically had to walk him off the ledge."

Womble Carlyle, like many companies, is also dealing with an incentive structure and culture that doesn't work for this new generation. Young lawyers were once willing to sacrifice the next 10 years of their lives chained to a desk in the law library, working 100-hour weeks, for the chance to make partner. But increasingly, law-school grads want work-life balance, flexible schedules, and philanthropic work. They couldn't care less about partnership. "The older lawyers think the younger lawyers are lazy," says Kristin Carretta, director of professional development at Womble Carlyle.

Womble Carlyle can't afford to think that way. Top-tier firms all compete for the same elite law-school grads, and Carretta says that it costs firms $400,000 to lose an associate. So this October, Womble formalized a part-time track, in which attorneys can work with supervisors to shape personalized schedules. Carretta tells the group that so far two lawyers have decided to pursue it--but not without lingering resentment from the top. "I think the struggle going forward is opening the eyes of the other generations that it's okay to have a different type of law employee," she says.

A handful of other companies are making profound changes to harness the talents of the new workforce. Deloitte & Touche USA, the accounting and consulting firm with 32,000 U.S. employees, heard from its gen-Y workers that brutal audit schedules, in which teams had to camp out at client companies for weeks or months at a time, seemed superfluous in an age when client records are digitized. They felt they could get the same work done remotely. Deloitte's clients told the firm that they didn't care whether auditors were on-site or not, as long as the quality of the work didn't suffer. After a successful test in its New York office in which employees had the choice to work off-site, Deloitte is rolling the program out nationally over the next 18 months.

Marriott International decided it had to change its approach to training in recognition of millennials' multisensory, rapid-fire style of information consumption. "They have exacerbated the need for brevity--on-demand, short sound bites," says Michelle Lapierre, a baby boomer who helps run Marriott's global salesforce of 415 people across 70 countries. She's now developing bite-size "edutainment" training podcasts so workers can download information to their cell phones, laptops, and iPods as they need it.

Although companywide initiatives are encouraging, it's the grassroots practices that reveal how individual leaders can truly energize their youngest employees. Sheila Gallagher, director of the restaurant segment of General Mills' bakeries and food-service division, knew last summer that she'd soon be hiring a batch of fresh college grads. So the 18-year veteran of the company rethought her management style. To address their desire for a lot of feedback, she decided she'd connect them with senior staff, including herself. When she hired Frank Brodie, 22, as a marketing associate, Gallagher made sure to devote time to building a relationship with him, and paired him with a sales manager to act as a mentor. Brodie also joined the company's "newcomers club," where General Mills' youngest employees can socialize with its oldest.

Her team was also prepared last September when Brodie, then a grizzled veteran of four weeks, sprang a surprise.

He'd had an idea to sell Totino's Pizza Rolls (a late-night snack he and his college buddies knew well) to restaurants that were trying to reach folks just like him. Huge opportunity, Brodie figured, and he'd backed it up by researching market data, prices, and emerging restaurant trends on his own time. While sitting in the audience at a four-day marketing and sales meeting, Brodie decided there was no better time to pitch his plan. Between sessions, he took the idea to Gallagher. "Our first reaction was, 'We've tried it before,'" she says.

But because Brodie had facts behind him and a new spin on an old idea, Gallagher opted to bend the rules and let him present the idea to the sales team so they could decide. The following morning, Brodie ran out to the supermarket, whipped up 200 pizza rolls, and made his pitch between tightly scheduled sessions. "General Mills is a fairly hierarchical organization," Gallagher admits. "But being flexible is really key. It ended up inspiring a lot of enthusiasm on the team." The sales managers are now actively pitching pizza rolls to fast-food chains and sub shops, and Brodie, still glowing from his triumph, has learned that when he does his homework, his ideas are respected regardless of his title. "That's what we want from employers," says Brodie. "A chance to learn, to be challenged, to be taken seriously."

And ultimately, that's what it comes down to. Millennials aren't asking for signing bonuses or the right to bring their dogs (or parents) to work. They just want to be heard, which, when you think about it, really isn't that much to ask.

Fishbon Collaboration Statement

Reminiscent of the 19^th century Parisian salon, Fishbon believes in the power of collaboration between artists, scientists, engineers, performers and participants to create compelling experiences that would have been impossible in isolated individual working environments. The synergy—sharing of perspectives and skills—made possible in a collaborative space creates a unique and special context for art that speaks to contemporary audiences. Much more about process than product, Fishbon creates a diverse “interactive learning community.” Dreams and ideas are shared and brought to life in exciting, real-time creative adventures that inspire and enchant. Everyone benefits from the free and open exchange and the result is demonstrated in Fishbon events.

 

Plan B World

In artist Camille Rose Garcia's newest exhibition entitled Plan: B, the title itself suggests an alternate course of action, or fanciful reaction to the current state of world affairs. With cutting, and often times humorous narrative, Garcia creates a visual world where fantastical counter organizations, not dissimilar to exaggerated factions of our own society, pollute and conspire, battle and breed. In Garcia's world:

Plan: B is what happens when Plan A, our over-populated, over-consuming way of life known as Western Society, stops working. Plan: B is an elaborate escape and survival plan devised by three separatist factions when western society collapses. The Royal Disorder; the elitist prisoners of denial and fantasy who float around in ball gowns swallowing apathy elixirs. The Orphaned Nihilist Society; the part- doomed existentialists, part-paranoid militants who devise various escape shelters at the bottom of oceans and inside of caves. And lastly, The Subterraneans; a pasty doomsday cult who have been living underground for years, stockpiling and making preparations to take over when society, as we know it, collapses.

Using symbolism and metaphor, Garcia critiques our current state of denial about the environment, population, and military catastrophes which have undeniable consequences for us all.

This is a dark vision, but one well worth exploring. How does the apocalypic influence us? How do we neutralize it to reshape our world (personal and collective)

Collaborating

We've talked a lot about how the individual genius model is losing its relevance and how participation in the experience is the only way to really create experience in the moment. The first title for this post was "How to collaborate with other creative people" and I changed it because it seemed like replacing an individual with an elite. Better but not much. This idea is based on spontaneity..in the moment, on the fly, whatever description seems to fit. But it has much more in common with game space than traditional art space. The whole idea of "quality," judgement and criticism are much less relevant in this world than they are in the traditional art world. What is important is the "experience" and the experience is a here and now event. It includes the environment, the other people (friends, strangers, and others) that inhabit it with us, the time (real or virtual), the types of interactions possible and exercised. There has been a Fishbon discussion of the goal of ecstasy and transformation in the experience. Something needs to change, and change by your own action. Ecstasy is the degree to which the experience is free and beyond sense.

Jean Beaudrillard discusses it in his book: Fatal Strategies:

Ecstacy is the quality proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form. Fashion is the ecstasy of the beautiful: pure and empty form of an aesthetic spinning about itself. Simulation is the ecstasy of the real..Anti-theater is the ecstatic form of theatre; no more stages or scenes, no more content, but theatre in the street, actor-less, theatre of all for all, which even becomes confused with the regular unfolding of our lives without illusion. Where is the power of illusion if it delights in retracing our daily life and transfiguring our workplace?

..The real does not efface itself in favor of the imaginary; it effaces itself in favor of the more real than real: the hyperreal, the truer than true: this is simulation

So, what does this have to do with collaboration? I think it's the degree to which the experience can be taken. Experience in the way Fishbon seeks to context it, is a world where ecstatic extremes are possible and transformation extends itself into a safe, but immersive simulation rather than observed stage magic.