Tag: interview (Page 2 of 3)

ReGenesis Featured on Podcast

May 16, 2006 / Jonathan Waite

The ReGenesis extended-reality game found itself back in the mainstream spotlight two weeks ago when Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur interviewed Evan Jones, creative director of Xenophile Media, the force behind the Alternate Reality Game that runs concurrent with the television series. In the podcast interview, Jones outlined how the game works and talked with the hosts about ARG, the ‘collective effort’ and the interactivity of the game (as previously reported here). You can download the episode through iTunes or at the Inside the Net podcast website.

Inside the Net is part of the popular TWiT.tv network of audio and video podcasts. Laporte and MacArthur are both hosts of Call For Help, a regular television series on G4techTV in Canada and the How-To channel in Australia.

SXSW Interactive: Brian Clark of GMD Studios

March 14, 2006 / Dee Cook

ARGN at SXSW

Editor’s note: For those of you who played Art of the Heist last year, or who are currently enjoying Who Is Benjamin Stove?, you might already know about GMD Studios, the driving force behind some of the biggest Alternate Reality Games to date. Brian Clark, who co-founded the company in 1995, has become a valuable and active member of the ARG community. His energy and creativity have helped in taking the genre to new heights, and Dee Cook was lucky enough to sit down with Brian during the SXSW Interactive festival for a few words.

What is your favorite movie?
My favorite movie? Probably my favorite movie of all time would be Bladerunner. [Ed. Note: Possible spoilers for Bladerunner.]

The director’s cut or the original version?
Oh, definitely the director’s cut. No narration, no Mickey Spillane voice-over with the extra wrinkle that the Bladerunner’s a replicant (Oh, no, spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! I spoiled the movie!)

Did you see the narrated version first?
Yes.

Do you think that made you appreciate the second one better?
No. I think once they took the voice-over out, it left more to speculation. Peoples’ motivations and machines’ motivations became less clear. We didn’t need to have Harrison Ford tell us about Rutger Hauer dying. We could just watch that scene and not have to say, “Maybe in the end he valued any life, even his own.” I think that the film company underestimated the intelligence of the film-going public.

I read somewhere that Harrison Ford said he did the narration badly deliberately so they’d have to cut it.
Really? That’s a great detail – a little sabotage.

True, but I don’t know whether it’s an urban myth or not.
Yeah, but it’s interesting.

SXSW Interactive: Cluetrain: Seven Years Later

March 13, 2006 / Dee Cook

ARGN at SXSW

Speaking today at South by Southwest Interactive was a panel on the Cluetrain Manifesto. Published in 1999, Cluetrain.com is a list of 95 points regarding companies, consumers, and the relationship between the two, asking companies to wake up and deal with their customers on a human level rather than treat them as potential sources of profit. The panel, moderated by Henry Copeland (founder of BlogAds, was a discussion of Cluetopia and whether society is getting there.

One of the original writers of Cluetrain, Doc Searls, spoke on the origin of the manifesto. In the midst of the Dotcom madness in 1998, the Cluetrain founders, as they would become known, were discussing the disconnect between what the internet actually was versus what was receiving funding and how the net was playing out in the press, as if it could be an extension of the shopping malls in the real world. The founders would use their theories on marketing in order to filter out clients whose philosophies didn’t mesh with their own; if the clients did not agree with the concept of marketing as a conversation, the founders would decline to work with them. The discussion turned into the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was kicked off by Chris Locke’s statement from the everyday citizen’s point of view, “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.”

Interview with Jane McGonigal

October 28, 2005 / Dee Cook

I caught up with Jane McGonigal of 42 Entertainment after her talk at the Austin Game Conference on Thursday. She was kind enough to give me an interview.

Me: Do you have a favorite ever, of any game?

Jane: Yeah, well like I said [during the talk] I think the explosion of creative interpretation with the GPS coordinates [in I Love Bees], because I’m a big believer of player suggestions. Like in The Go Game, we have people constantly sort of misinterpreting what they’ve been told to do, and doing things that are more exciting or more interesting or braver than we have suggested, and then we’ll be like, “Oh that’s great, let’s actually make that a mission.”

ARGs in Now Playing Magazine

October 24, 2005 / Jonathan Waite

Recently, our very own Steve Peters was part of an interview in Now Playing Magazine called “Meet the Puppetmasters”. Before you go off to your local convenience store in a mad panic, hoping to find the issue there on the magazine rack, check this out — Now Playing has decided to embed an ARG right in the magazine! Without saying too much, those of you who are lucky enough to get a copy of the magazine can look to the page where the article is found. From there, we’re told that there are a series of interactions that players can go through. Neat!

(There’s also a link on their website, and after trying 2267 ways 2 view the content, we had success. Maybe you can as well…)

Thanks to Now Playing Magazine for featuring ARGs in such an interesting article!

Team Noah Boddy Interview

January 24, 2003 / Steve Peters

Sin_Vraal has scored an exclusive interview with the folks behind the Push NV spinoff ARG Noah Boddy. Turns out he needed a little assistance from some of his friends, though.

Read his story and interview at DeadDrop (Part 1), Unfiction (Part 2) and here (Part 3).