It hit a little deeper because the response to my question was: “TINAG is not supposed to be like ‘The Game’ where reality blended with the game and the player couldn’t tell them apart. It’s about the characters believing they’re real and acting accordingly”

But the blending of reality is the exact reason WHY I like ARGs. And the whole reason I am so excited about this new version of storytelling. I understand the dangers of blurring that line in a lawsuit world, but if new designers aren’t able to push that limit how do we know where it is?
An example of a newer ARG that dared to jump right over those lines would be the ARG Junko Junsui. Now I feel the PM here crossed way over to the dark side and really scared a lot of folks… but it also received some of the most active WORLDWIDE gameplay and discussion that I have ever seen.
When you bring this up to some of the entrenched vanguard of ARG creators you get an eye roll and scoffing about how that PM is crazy and went too far. Yes they did… but what a crazy ride to experience and to this day I can remember the feelings of “Is this real? WTF is going on here? Holy Crap did they just do that?!? No Frickin’ way!!”
These are the emotions I want to feel when playing ARG’s. TINAG has always meant that blurring of reality where the player isn’t quite sure if things are real… in other words making the player ask: IS this a game?
To sum up (Too late I know Why are ARG creators living by a 10 year old ‘rule’ that it seems no one really understood anyways? So my vote on all of this is that we totally change the definition and give TINAG to the players rather than the characters.

TINAG has value to the ARG community because it describes a somewhat generic concept as applied to a specific class of fiction or style of play, in which real-life participants interact with elements of a fictional universe. Most other forms of entertainment do not allow for such interaction in a meaningful way, so the term is irrelevant to them – suspension of disbelief is not required for both parties. If nothing else, TINAG has value as a signpost to ARG developers by pointing to a concept that should be provided consideration in development, regardless of how a campaign is ultimately executed and in spite of an audience’s ability to immerse itself in a wide variety of fictional constructs.

I would challenge you to rewrite your article without the term, abbreviated or expanded; I think you will find that usefulness does not always go hand-in-hand with necessity.

As intended, the current consensus seems to be that TINAG merely recognizes that characters shouldn’t acknowledge they’re fictional, and that players shouldn’t force that reality upon the characters. In other words, suspension of belief requires both parties. Is a specialized term really necessary to describe this concept?

@labfly: I’m always excited to see innovation in the space. And I see confusion at the TINAG term as a barrier to that, as it unduly clouds a fairly important lesson in game design: create an environment that is conducive to play.

Devs and PMs need to make better storyworlds. we (the community and ARGN) should find ways to encourage better work, beyond trying to silence the term TINAG or ARG or Transmedia. maybe we need to see rigorous critiques of the actual experiences, ARGs, viral marketing etc.?

I’m not sure why open broadcasting of campaign sponsorship is mutually exclusive of the TINAG aesthetic, unless your characters are personally saying in-game, “Hi, this cryptic email has been brought to you by Sprite!” So what are we trying accomplish with this dictum? To stop newbies from “dredging up” and misinterpreting the term?

Didn’t we just say it had already fallen into disuse? How do we put a stop to something that has already supposedly died on its own? Assuming we could, how would that solve the newbie developer problem? What am I missing?

“Of course, along with that belief comes a responsibility on the part of the developers.” If we were somehow to remove that belief, might we perhaps be implicitly relieving those developers of the responsibility to not make us feel stupid, instead licensing yet more of the patented dumbing-down that comes with the oft-expressed desire for mainstreaming of the genre?

This buzzword overload was brought to you by Starbucks.

If you go through the effort and expense to set up an Alternate Reality, you have to actually believe in that reality. Because the moment you stop, it deflates the balloon for everyone involved with a long depressing bplrlrlrlrrrffffffffffft.

(strike)ARG(/strike) Transmedia
(strike)TINAG(/strike) Immersion
(strike)Players(/strike) Monetization Units