Search ARGN:

Blog Information Profile for argnet

Quicklinks



Green Web Hosting! This site hosted by DreamHost.

advertisements

ARGNet Staff



  • Michael Andersen - Staff Writer

    It was 2004, and Michael was watching television. The third presidential debate was wrapping up in Tempe, Arizona, and as usual nobody agreed upon a clear victor. As he watched the post-debate commentary while munching on popcorn and chocolate-chip cookies with his friends, Michael saw a giant poster of a bee held up on television, obscuring the numerous "Bush" and "Kerry" signs.

    That's right. Michael found out about ARGs while throwing a presidential debate party. Which is a perfectly normal thing to do, right? After a few years of sporadically browsing the uNFiction forums and ARGNet practically drooling over the Marketing possibilities, Michael finally took the plunge and started playing Deus City thanks to an article he read on ARGNet.

    Currently, Michael is teaching high school English a mere hour away from the Asahi Brewery in Nagoya (Japan), really putting his business education to work. And in case you're wondering, he doesn't know Satoshi. His claim to fame is taking a class taught by the producer of "Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego"--and he will try to work this into conversation whenever possible.

  • Will Bagby - Staff Writer

    Although he didn't realize it at the time, Will was first introduced to ARGs with EA's Majestic. He really liked the concept behind it, and wondered, "Why isn't anyone else doing this?" Another thing he didn't realize at the time was that there was another game, whose name rhymes with the stuff that makes bread grow. Alas, Google was not Will's friend...yet. Fast forwarding to October 2003...clicking on a random link in a random online alumni newsletter, Will was led to www.metacortechs.com. And then...the screaming started. He was utterly and completely hooked, and his family has still not recovered. He has played or participated in some way in pretty much every game since then, and even took a turn as part of the PM team for Orbital Colony. He was also one of the organizers of ARGFest '05 in New York City.

    When he's not busy answering payphones, traipsing over gravesites, or scouting out various Manhattan locations looking for clues, Will is a mild-mannered web developer for a small travel/social networking site. At night, he masquerades as a husband and father of two in Queens, New York. His favorite activities are hanging out with other ARGers, food, mathematics, laughing at his children (and occasionally, with them), blackjack (and recently, poker), the New York Yankees, computer games, his guitars, DVR, and explaining ARGs to his spouse while she rolls her eyes.

  • Nicko Demeter - Staff Writer

    Imagine sitting at the theater with friends. The previews are on and suddently Matt, your best friend, goes "What on God's name is a 'Sentient Machine Therapist'?" Imagine returning home, using Google to find the page of one Jeanine Salla, and how worried she is about her friend, Evan Chan. You are there. At the very beginning. It's happening and your friends are excited.....only you're not. What?!?

    Yes gentle reader, this one actually uttered the words "So what?" when faced with the ultimate murder mystery of all times. I know, I know, my head hung in shame I had to admit that ARG's are cool and I never looked back. Suddently typical video games seemed....mundane. And I found that I was not unique in my thoughts. Several others had joined in and now we know them as Cloudmakers.

    Nicko lives in "tropical" Sacramento, CA but he was raised in Greece. An avid reader and lover of history, he currently works as a computer forensics investigator (no, it's not like CSI). He has been involved with several ARG's and uttered obsenities when Majestic was cancelled. Currently he is mustering the strength to get his first tattoo on Sept. 16th 2006 and enjoys writting, watching whatever TIVO and Netflix tell him to (they are ALIVE!), and sleeping in as much as possible.

    You can contact him at the uNFiction forums under ndemeter and pretty much anywhere else with that handle, like oh, take Yahoo for example. ;)

  • Jessie Greene - Staff Writer

    During a specifically challenging game of Risk, the host attempted to divert Jessie's attention from her "mad strategy" by sharing his new obsession. He took her away from her armies and introduced her to a pre-game thread at UnFiction. His strategy worked. She lost the Risk game, but gained a new passion.

    That first brush with ARGdom was Chasing The Wish in 2003. She was a serial lurker until becoming an active participant within the community in 2005. Recently, Jessie ventured to the other side of the curtain as Chief Designer for Ny Takma.

    Jessie's transition to the Alternate Reality genre was a logical step in broadening her knowledge of and love for multiple forms of collaborative play. She remains a constant student in the fields of acting, storytelling, and gaming. She is also the most rockin' Special Education teacher to date.

  • Jackie Kerr - Staff Writer, Associate Editor

    While working as a lowly research assistant at a pharmaceutical company, Jackie discovered that science involves a lot of incubations and waiting time, and thus found that the best way to kill five hours was by surfing the internet and playing MahJong on Yahoo! Games. Luckily, a little TV show called Push, Nevada with its big monetary prize began around this time and Jackie, believing she was a worldly genius, decided that an online puzzle game was the perfect way to get the world to acknowledge her greatness. Instead, she discovered that she was only one of many genius hopefuls and that taking active notes on Peter Pan while watching primetime network television did not make for engaging watercooler chit-chat. Though the watercooler society had decided she was a dork-freak and banned her from all social activities, Jackie had been sucked into the world of IRC and the ARGN community, where dork-freaks are relished. During her tenure, Jackie has been an active player, lurker, pithy commentator, evil satirist, and Unfiction forum cop/admin, as well as a PM of Acheron.

    Currently, Jackie can be found lurking the hallways of the University of Maryland Medical campus in Baltimore, where she is a PhD candidate in Molecular Physiology with an emphasis in the signaling pathways involved in the development and prevention of cardiovascular disease. She hopes to have a positive income by the age of 30, and vents often about this on her website, intellinuts.com.

  • Marie Lamb - Associate Editor, Staff Writer

    Marie was introduced to The Beast by a co-worker at MIT who had even more free time on his hands than she did. While the job eventually went away (by choice), her love of ARGs and online games only grew, and she hung around for Lockjaw, becoming a moderator for the game's chat channel and the Yahoo group in the process. Since that time, she has become an administrator for the Unfiction forum and been a grassroots puppetmaster for JMX, Acheron and Omnifam, an ARG set in the Alias TV show universe.

    Marie spends her offline time caring for her two children, ages 10 and 45 (ok, so technically he's a husband, not a child, but he acts just like one.) She also has two standard poodles who don't understand why Mom spends so much time in front of the glowy box when she could be outside chasing squirrels like a proper pack leader. She lives north of Boston and manages to like Will B. in spite of his odious taste in baseball teams.

  • Geoff May - Staff Writer

    Also known with the moniker 'thebruce', Geoff is a full time professional web and datasystems developer who was introduced to the world of ARGs when the mysterious website flashed at the end of Halo's theatrical preview trailer - www.ilovebees.com - the trailhead for the viral marketing campaign for Bungie's Halo 2. Taken in by the mystery and intrigue, Geoff became an active member of the ARG community, and lost untold hours of his life during the following months, trying to do what he could to convince the puppetmasters to call just one payphone in Canada (near him of course), which ultimately wouldn't happen. Even so, his involvement in the community had him converted to an ARGer, eventually being sucked in to the time-splurging activity of lurking and moderating at Unfiction in various news, rumours, timewasters, and potential ARGs... and setting up wikis. Some have given him a reputation of an ARG-killer, after having a few grassroots ARGs that he'd wiki-fied unexpectedly implode or fizzle out. He truly hopes his wikis aren't cursed.

    Geoff is a lover of science fiction, movies, volleyball, art and photography, and is also an avid musician, belonging to a band as the acoustic guitar player. When not sitting in front of his monitor, Geoff is taking part in various volunteer activities, such as working with youth or children. And, approaching the age of 30, he still takes public transit everywhere he goes... because he hasn't yet made the effort to get a driver's license or car. Hey, at least he can say he's environmentally aware.

  • Brandie Minchew - Staff Writer

    Brandie became fascinated with interactive fiction after reading/clicking through The Dionaea House. Shortly after, she learned about Alternate Reality Games from reading a news story about the lonelygirl15 "hoax", which lead her to Wikipedia, which led to ARGs, which led to unFiction, which led to the most exciting year of her life in 2007.

    After spending five minutes feeling sorry for herself that she hadn't been paying attention in 2001 when The Beast made its debut, Brandie set out to learn all she could about multi-platform storytelling and interactive narrative while she experienced her first ARGs - MeiGeist, World Without Oil, Eldritch Errors, and (her favorite so far) Sammeeeees II: The Wrath of Johnson. After reading as many of the guides to past games as she could find, Brandie realized she had finally found a game genre that fulfilled her childhood dream of stepping out of the mundane and into another world.

    Today, Brandie lives and writes in Houston while slowly building up the courage to write and launch an ARG of her own. Her three cats provide plenty of distraction, as does her husband, who occasionally worries for her sanity when she paints SATOR squares under the bed or wanders around the house muttering about "ravens" and "dark temples". When she isn't writing or plotting, Brandie spends her time playing SF0 and playing games on her XBox 360.

  • Michelle Senderhauf - Staff Writer

    Michelle's first ARG love affair was with Majestic back in 2001. Just as she was about to discover the world of ARGs she was persuaded to play herself in another alternate reality that included a husband and a baby girl. Once she came to her senses, Michelle returned to play ABC's Push, Nevada. That's when she realized that she wasn't really all that good at solving puzzles, so she stuck around to learn a thing or two from the people playing Chasing the Wish and JMX.

    Michelle has played or lurked through countless games since and even took a stab at being a Puppetmaster with Omnifam and Orbital Colony. She intends on keeping up with that trend by only becoming involved with ARGs that begin with the letter O. In her free time she likes to pretend that she's still a young, artsy college student by splattering paint and pencil shavings around the house.

  • Sean C. Stacey - Staff Writer

    Sean C. Stacey lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves every minute of it. He owns and operates the ARGN affiliate site Unfiction.com, which provides a home for the largest community of Alternate Reality Gamers. He works on the side as a full-time paralegal at a small Elder Law firm, and counts his three computers and assorted gaming consoles as his pets, since real pets aren't allowed in his building. In addition to counting himself an ARGonaut since he discovered and mostly lurked during the Beast, Sean has played and lurked even more in dozens of games in a desperate and futile attempt to learn what a Caesar Salad has to do with cryptography, and was a Puppetmaster on the team behind the Metacortechs Alternate Reality Game.

    Sean likes long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and frog-gigging in the swamp at midnight. Sean is best approached when he is sober and you are not.

  • Brooke Thompson - Staff Writer

    Brooke Thompson is currently an overworked and underslept graduate student at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA. (a Master's in games?! Mom is so proud.) Although she hopes hopes her focus in Game Design & Broadband Entertainment will lead to her spreading the world of ARG to an entirely new and unsuspecting audience, she is happy to see the genre growing on the works of others.

    Brooke was first introduced to Alternate Reality Games in 2001, when her undergraduate advisor naively mentioned that the Beast might make a nice footnote in what would become Brooke's first paper on to the genre. Deciding to spend the summer making a little game, Brooke joined several others in watching their summer, fall, winter, and spring melt away under the power of Lockjaw, one of the first successful grassroots games. Since then, she has watched a number of other seasons pass as she tirelessly developed a number of other ARG and ARG-like experiences.

  • Jonathan Waite - Senior Editor, Writer

    Jonathan Waite was an innocent lurker when The Beast hit the Internet in 2001. From his temporary residence in Jeon Ju, South Korea, he was immediately captivated by the lush environment that had been laid out before his feet. Moving back to his hometown (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) in July of the same year, Jonathan continued to be involved in the burdgeoning genre of Alternate Reality Gaming, getting into Plexata and finding a voice on the forums dedicated to the game. Once Lockjaw hit in 2002, there was no looking back. Jonathan adopted the alias 'jamesi', started a fansite called GuysGuise, and the rest is history.

    Jonathan can currently be found as an administrator on Unfiction's forums, as well as owning and operating things here. In the past, he has been involved with Smirkbox, a humor site that focuses on the realm of ARGs, as well as actively creating and maintaining JMX, a puzzle trail website that is currently working (yes, still) on a second run. He is happily married and has two wonderful daughters.