ARG Academy

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Week 1 - Narrative

This Tuesday - May 7, 2012 7pm-slt in Second Life on Front Range.

Bluebarker Lowtide will be going over Narrative Structure and Character Developement for use in education and in an alternate reality game(ARG).

Narrative Structure is an important part of Story Composition. An ARG is an eleaborate story that needs the right kind of planning to make it engaging enough for your students and allows for the interconnectivity that our Technology Native students desire.

For the first half of the discussion, we will be talking about narrative, some examples, what are the 9 elements of Narrative and how to address a Narrative component into your lesson teaching. This is a tool that can be utilized for every kind of curriculum from science to history and middle school to higher education. Brainstorming techniqes will also be discused. There will be a quick 5 minute video on the importance of visual storytelling and how you can draw insipration from multiple different sources and not just educational spheres.

We will break for 5-10 minutes, questions may be asked here and the slides will be available for dowload off of Slideshare if you desire. There will be also time at the end of second half for more questions. 

For the second half of the discussion, we will be talking about characters and their development in the ARG. A quick exercise on writing a character biography using characterization points ***It is encouraged to have a fun/interesting looking avatar***. You can post what you write on this discussion board as well as thoughts, questions and expansion upon the lesson. We will also be going over Jung's Archetypes and how they can be utilized in an ARG as well as adressing the roles of non-playable characters(NPCs) and how they help the ARG along. Lastly we will briefly go over meta-sociology and the possible progression of the cyber society within your ARG. Remember most ARGs are considered to be TINAG meaning "this-is-not-a-game" and will imitate the real world and they, more often than not, spring a life of their own.

If we have time to spare and don't mind staying over the hour, I will be happy to stay after for more questions. Thank you very much for participating in this discussion. We should have it recorded and up within no time, so please keep looking at back here for the video link.

Task Discussion


  • Jack Mosel (Jack Buxbaum in Second Life!) @moseljack (Twitter)   May 10, 2012, 12:07 a.m.

    Your presentation was superb Blue.. Stoic.. Epic!. Spot on with so many facts and creative understanding for elaborate themes and doctrines which hold them in place.

    Well Done my man!

  • Jack Mosel (Jack Buxbaum in Second Life!) @moseljack (Twitter)   May 9, 2012, 11:31 p.m.

    Submitted for consideration...

         Life - Being strangely more realistic in an augmented reality platform begs to be less thoroughly investigated, with less finite answers to be put firmly in their place. Games in life, enhancing the augmentation of life, seemingly harmless, rudimentary and innocuous to most.. Suggests that you do not look back at the reality of life. Life barks back at games in life (upping the ante') and says you must not look -- Games response: I dare you.

    Title: The Greatest Augmented - Virtual Reality Story Ever Told...
    Dateline: April 2012...

         "Rifts in Virtual Worlds, which created iconoclastic camps and isolated thousands... Innaccessable Virtual wastelands are now desireable and freely available for open teleport and migration throughout all Virtual Worlds. MOOC Group successful in hyper-grid creation with Virtual Reality cyber evangelism as their quest "

         The adventures of way see'rs, Mystic Wiccan teachers (the massively MOOC) comprised of Epic Duderanch's and Chiccorella's and way powered up technological hippenccrat's! These are the present day persona or avatar's or guild's that have transformed their once daily routine lives through Virtual reality immersive world access. These Avatar's were once everyday average people in society that hit a Wall in their RL... Leveled up in SL and then as this story will expand great effort to elaborate on, gridjumped to the Alternative-life, transcending into a 'bannished' grid through an Open Simulator hyper-reality gate portal that they created, to provide what we now know as the freedom to access all grids freely at anytime...

         These fearless MOOC-minded avatars were to become what we now know of as the Cyber Evangelists Guild, fearlessly set off plotting their course to the once banned Open Simulator grid which permits and encourages way-friending and meshing of the social fabric norm with Kin Avatar's occupying this bannished grid who were tragically seperated from what WAS once their grid home. The SL grid, which turned its backs on them, caused the dreaded "repressive norm malady disease" (RNMD)... Beguiled and plagued by RNMD, many emmigrated to a cyber wasteland, uninhabitted and unfit for anyone... A cyber-gulag not prepared for earnest population from anyone. The emmgrants' have since established a civilization that is today attractive, vibrant and beckons their re-instated cameraderie with their isolated kin from their past, now residing on SL grid. Seperated through a virtual Berlin wall of the corporate TOS weaponry as means for mutually assured destruction and an ultimate deterrent, never to be traversed or to be brought down for free travel in or out. All remain segregated and isolated between these two grids... Until now.
     
         Gate-keepers and corporate trendsetter advisers on the SL grid tried through acts of vain glory, with contrived and orchestrated acts of high drama and even treachery to repress the massively MOOCian waysee'rs attempts for connecting these grids or permitting these Dude Ranch's and hip Chiccorella's along with the Way Powered up Technological Hippencrat Guild's from their accessing friends and former compatriots, now residing in the enhanced open and altered-living condition's of the Open Simulator grid... Open access through grid jumping will not be tolerated.

         Threatened with the Crossing of the Rubicon implications for ne'er plotting this journey or to face the consequences and the perils that may lye in wait for them if they were unsuccessful in their carrying out of their commitment to change all that they were after.. if successful, the combined worlds would become self sustained, self-supported and self-governed and freed from tyrannic corporate rule and rule by sociopathic-tyranny. The MOOC Guild and associated clans forms like storm clouds on the horizon... Discussing their committment to free thier once bretheren guilds and clans and themselves individually through passing through this sought after foretold hyper-gate in existence and grid-jump into the forbidden simm.. Damming the TOS to hell.

         This story, strangely born of reality... which bears it's origin greatly from the book Snow Crash, which initiated a meshed alternative reality of connected humans on Earth, bears the hallmark of a continuum from it's intended and original purpose... extended and augmented as if alive to the present day circumstances and present day conditions. The intention of Snow Crash was to change life as we know it, to become euphorically self-deterministic for each and every individual, struggling to be set free from what each knows is literally killing them.
    The grid therefore takes on a fractal-like extension from enlightened beings to cast aside all they knew was real and through which will breach the boundaries universal... As intended -- Freeing countless others as they journey.
     
    These are the stories of their quest...

    -- Got a MOOC? Got a MOOC?.. Can you do the Fandango?! .. Thunderbolts and Lightning.. VERY VERY FREIGHTENING ME.. Galileo Galileo -- Galileo FigarOOoo >> and if you go oo ooooo...
     
  • beth w   May 9, 2012, 12:11 p.m.

    looking forward to the video...

  • graymills   May 9, 2012, 4:05 a.m.

    Sounds fascinating and sorry to have missed it. Did the slides get posted?

  • graymills   May 10, 2012, 1:55 a.m.
    In Reply To:   graymills   May 9, 2012, 4:05 a.m.

    Ah, useful stuff, including slides, on Front Range sim in SL.

    Via #arged on Twitter, slideshare.

  • Jack Mosel (Jack Buxbaum in Second Life!) @moseljack (Twitter)   May 8, 2012, 12:14 a.m.

    Very cool...