A link for the new year: Wired indicates ARGs as the future of advertising.
Our hope is that ARG art form, still in its infancy, won’t become quickly swallowed by mainstream commercial productions, to create standard series of puzzles and mysteries… a post from Matteo Bittanti’s blog, entitled “The post-gameplay era”, quoted an interesting remark about mainstream videogames, and how the actions in them are often cloned from one another:

“In the past years, however, we have seen an enormous growth in the kinds of stories games try to deal with. Gameplay, on the other hand, has not evolved (or it may have achieved its absolutely perfection and there is no room to evolve further). In fact, I would argue that in essence, the gameplay of virtually all AAA titles is the same, even though their stories are vastly diffferent. Tomb Raider plays the same as Bioshock plays the same as God of War plays the same as Gears of War plays the same as Assassin’s Creed. Gameplay has become a standardized formal layer on top of narrative worlds that vary greatly”. (Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales)

I thought I was the only one to find mainstream videogames “all the same”, attracting spite from both players and programmers, accusing me of being too literary or, worse, female (!). Glad I found some back up out there.
Anyway, let’s hope this won’t happen to ARGs, whose main attraction was (ok, still is) the imagination and creativity behind…