Alternate Reality Games
This weekend while engaged in quite a bit of driving, I listened to the July 16 episode of The Maccast featuring J. C. Hutchins. The topic of conversation focused on Alternate Reality Games, a massive media genre that encompasses a broad assortment of communication methods to engage people in the topic of the ARG. The entire infrastructure is built around the web, so it becomes geographically dispersed as the game takes on a life of its own.
Wikipedia provides a more in-depth definition:
An alternate reality game (ARG), is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.
The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.
ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly and an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and subgenres. They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g. collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relationships with existing products (for example, I Love Bees was a promotion for Halo 2, and the Lost Experience and FIND815 promoted the television show Lost). However, pay-to-play models are not unheard of.
Imagine how something like this could be used in an educational setting. It would be a project of great undertaking, but it would certainly engage today’s younger learners.
To read more about ARGs, explore the following resources:
- The Complete Wikipedia article on ARGs
- A Wikipedia article describing “The Lost Experience,” an ARG created to promote the television show Lost.
- Personal Effects: Dark Art (a novel by Hutchins with an accompanying ARG)
- J.C. Hutchins’ web site
- The July 16 episode of The Maccast
Warning: Information Overload
While spending time on my mid-year review, I spent some time focusing on an ongoing problem for many of us: information overload.
As I prepare to write my Master’s paper in the next few months, I am trying to become more skilled at personal information management. There are lots of tools to help us manage information, but I’ve learned that a critical part of our own personal information management system involves filtering. That’s right, simply choosing to be smart about what information we allow into our space. If we are trying to process too much information, we will find ourselves quickly overwhelmed.
Here are a couple of steps I am employing to help me manage and filter the flow of information coming at me right now:
- Avoid web (meaningless) browsing. This is not only a source of a tremendous amount of meaningless information, but is also great time waster. For many of us with a “geek” mentality, this is a tough one. I would rather browse the web, for example, than watch television. Still, if I am sensing I am getting close to information overload, it’s time to log off and shut down. When I do hit the web, I try to do so with purpose. Within my GTD system I have established a @Web category that helps me spend time on topics that will advance a goal or project one more step. I’ve also learned it’s a good idea to have a pen and sheet of paper on the desk while working on the web. When an idea crosses my mind that I need to look into further, I write it down and put it on my @Web list as opposed to dropping what I am doing and jumping to a new topic. Understand that by its very nature, the Web is meant for browsing. Every paragraph we read can contain hyperlinks that open a new browser window and open an entirely new topic. It’s easy to loose direction. Trust me, I’ve been there. Still, with a little discipline, you can begin to tame the web and provide more purpose to your browsing experience.
- Unsubscribe. We all love something free, and invariably, as we come across blogs or sites that seem to provide good free content, we pop in our email address or subscribe with our blog reader and wait for all of that free information to start flowing into our inbox. Over time, however, you know what happens: suddenly you have dozens of emails hitting your inbox every day from people you don’t even know. Moreover, all of this free information is actually costing you a lot of time to process. This is where it’s important to take control. Part of my semi-annual review is to go through my inbox and my RSS reader and unsubscribe from lists I am no longer interested in. How can I tell if I’m no longer interested in a list? Simple, if I have ceased reading the blog entries or emails from a certain site, it’s time to unsubscribe. This past week, for example, I reviewed my Google Reader subscriptions and found more than 100 feeds I was no longer reading on a regular basis. It took less than an hour, but I had brought my Google Reader subscription list down to a more manageable 80 feeds from the nearly 200 I was subscribed to.
While researching / reading on this topic, I came across the following article from Seth Gillespie on “How to cope with information overload.” He provides the following advice:
- Alter your work routines. It’s very easy to become a victim of your routines. The insatiable need for more information is one of them.
Plan your day and prioritize your time. This is often an impossible goal, for many people. But it’s an important first step that can help you focus your energy on what’s most important.
Cut your phone time. The average worker would be shocked if he knew how much time is wasted on the phone. And a relatively small amount of time is spent on important calls. A Reuters survey said that 20 percent of all voice-mail time is spent fumbling through menus.
Manage e-mail. Respond only to important e-mails. Get rid of all junk e-mails. Simply respond by indicating your wish to be removed from the mailing list, and make sure you have a good spam filter.
Monitor your Internet time. Most of us waste hours on the Internet. It’s very easy to get lost and distracted when searching for something. Stay focused so that your Internet searches are targeted. It wouldn’t be wasting time to learn Boolean search terms. This will narrow your searches, and cut your Internet time dramatically.
De-clutter your desk. Regardless of where it comes from, the average worker is still drowning in paper–most of which he doesn’t need. Look around your desk and office, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you discover that a healthy percentage of the paper that’s been piling up can be trashed, and the rest can be filed for future use. Ideally, your desk should be clear. It should contain only what is pertinent to what you are working on at the moment or during the next couple of days. If you tend to let things pile up, it’s a wonderfully cleansing feeling to see only what’s important at the moment in front of you.
At home, try to disconnect from the office. If possible, try not to take work home. For most career builders, work becomes an obsession–and it’s often not necessary to take work home. For many compulsive overachievers, it’s hard to disconnect from the office and its routines and change your rhythms so you can focus your energy and attention on fulfilling non-work related routines.
Pursue a hobby, sport or interest–anything that’s not work-related.
Shut off your cell phone or Blackberry when you get home. If your job doesn’t demand that you be on call 24 hours a day, make it a rule to shut off your cell phone or Blackberry at a certain hour, say, 7 or 8 p.m.
What are some steps you employ to help you manage information overload?
Texting While Driving: How Dangerous is It?
Car and Driver hits the test road to compare the effects of driving while drunk verses driving while testing. Which one do you think is more dangerous?
4 Simple Tips for Recording High-Quality Audio
The Rapid E-Learning Blog has an excellent article on recording high quality audio on your computer. Having clean, crisp audio is critical to the successful implementation of your learning applications. This article is well worth the read.
Good audio is critical to your elearning success. You might be a great instructional designer and create the most engaging courses possible. But it all falls apart if the audio quality in your course is not very good.
In an earlier post we looked at when it makes sense to consider paying for professional narration. If you have the money, this is a viable option. However, many of you are like Old Mother Hubbard and your cupboard is bare. If you do have a limited budget (or you want to do the narration yourself) then here are some tips to help you do the best job possible.
Today we’ll look at the microphone and recording environment. And in a follow up post, we’ll explore ways to get the best sounding narration.
CNN Acquires Leading Twitter Account
Steve Musil (Webware.com)
CNN gained nearly a million Twitter followers on Wednesday when it acquired the @cnnbrk Twitter account.
The account, the largest on Twitter with more than 947,000 followers, had been maintained and nurtured by James Cox. CNN did not disclose financial details of the acquisition, probably because rules at the microblogging site prohibit the selling of Twitter accounts.
The acquisition comes as the race to 1 million Twitter followers heats up. As of Wednesday afternoon, Ashton Kutcher was in second place with 917,000 followers, followed closely by Britney Spears, who has about 913,000 followers.
Kutcher publicly challenged CNN to a race to 1 million users on Tuesday in a video posted to Qik.com.
"I found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter," Kutcher said. "And so I just thought that was just kind of an amazing comment on the state of our media, and I said that, if I beat CNN to 1 million viewers, then I would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner--because I don't think it's gonna happen."
CNN accepted Kutcher's challenge Tuesday on the "Larry King Show."
Kutcher, who is best known as star of TV's "That '70s Show" and husband of actress Demi Moore, has said he will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day if he is first to 1 million followers.
Meanwhile, game publisher Electronic Arts is getting in on the action, promising to put Kutcher's 1 millionth follower in a future EA game and give that person a copy of every game EA produces in 2009--but only if Kutcher beats CNN to the million-follower mark.