Alternate Reality Gaming Network:
Shake Up at OpAphid

March 15, 2007

On Tuesday, the creators of LonelyGirl15 made an official statement on the LG15 message forums concerning the state of OpAphid, the official LonelyGirl15 ARG.  In the statement, addressed "To Our Fans," the creators stated that they "have decided that Glenn [Rubenstein] will no longer be the puppet master of the OpAphid ARG," due to allegations of impropriety and questionable behavior between Rubenstein and some players.  However, the Creators also used the post to reassure their players that things are moving forward:  "We are actively looking for a new PM beginning today. There may be some downtime while we reconfigure, but we promise that when it returns there will be even better puzzles and character interactions."  This is a surprising and sudden development, given that the LG15 creators appeared with Rubenstein at the recent ARGFest-o-Con event in San Francisco less than two weeks ago.

So, where does the game go from here? For that, we talked with Greg Goodfried, one of the LonelyGirl15 creators.  Goodfried told us that he was surprised by the numerous emails he received today from members of the ARG community, many offering help and guidance.  "It's a pretty cool community," Goodfried told us, before talking specifics about the OpAphid game.  When asked about how things will move forward with OpAphid, he said, "Solutions right now are twofold... we're looking for good, talented people with ARG experience, and secondly, we're looking at the story and where it's going from here."  He also disclosed that in the future, the ARG is going to be central to the LonelyGirl15 story, which is a significant development in our eyes.  As for the pause in the game, players can rest a bit easier knowing that Goodfried is already hard at work figuring out how things will progress from this point.  "The truth is that we don't know if the pause will be long at all - it depends on our resources and time."  Hopefully this is a minor disruption in what has been a popular and interesting ARG.

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