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Needs Cleanup -SpaceBass
ARGFest 2007 - Panel III ~ Running an ARG 2 31:08
- Panel III ~ Running an ARG (Specific Issues Part II a.k.a. "OMG I'm a WHATmaster?!")
- Introduction by Jonathan Waite (JW)
- Moderator: Brian Clark (BC), GMD Studios
- Miles Beckett (MB) ~ Lonelygirl15
- Greg Goodfried (GG) ~ Lonelygirl15
- Glenn Rubenstein (GR) ~ Op.Aphid
Credits: Panel III, Running an ARG 2, ARG Fest-o-con 2007, San Francisco, CA
JW: This is Panel Three, Running an Alternate Reality Game, Specific Issues Part Two. Also known as,
"Oh my god, I'm a WHATmaster?!" And the moderator is Brian Clark.
Introduction
BC: So, what's really interesting, I wanted to start with a story about what happens when an egg hatches. So an egg hatches and this chick comes out of this egg and the first thing that it looks upon, it assumes is its mother. And it bonds so completely with that thing that it looks at, that sometimes that thing that gets looked at starts to think of itself as the thing's mother. And that's where you get all those hilarious photos of the dog walking around with all of these little chickens following it? It's even happily kind of coexisting in a relationship that maybe they had never planned to be in, certainly was never the plans from their parents' point of view.
What we've got here with the Lonelygirl guys is something that I-- touches my heart in a similar way in that I never planned on being a Puppetmaster either. And when we did Sharp, and the Legend of the Sacred Urns, we thought we were doing another kind of interactive narrative like we'd done before, and this one just happened to include puzzles. And you guys, like chicks hatching from eggs, looked at us and said, "Well, you've gotta believe everything the Puppetmaster's telling us." And we went, "What? What was that?" And this was the same thing here, so I figured let you guys talk about, you know, a lot has been said about Lonelygirl, but kind of pick up the story from when this community started to count on you and started to wondering whether you were their mother.
First Encounter with the Player Base
MB: Well, sure. The initial idea for Lonelygirl was just to tell an interesting story on YouTube, using the medium in kind of a unique way. And so what we wanted to do was create a fictional video blogger, and people wouldn't know whether or not she was fictional because just by the very nature of the technology, you can't tell who uploaded the videos, and then there would be this sort of mysterious plot that was evolving in the background of this person's life. And we knew that there would be a lot of mystery surrounding that, an element of trying to figure out what's going on, but we certainly didn't have actually puzzles as a part of it. And what happened was, really, really quickly, people realized that it probably wasn't real, and - because of the lighting, everybody talks a lot about the lighting - um, which is really funny because we used a window and at that point, I mean, we didn't have a light then. We just spent a lot of time getting the lighting right.
And, basically, I would imagine a lot of you guys out there - have often met people in person (?), yeah - came to our site and started saying, "Well, is this a game, and if so, what are we supposed to solve?" And the problem was that we hadn't given anybody anything to solve, so instead they started trying to figure out who we were. Which was kind of interesting.
GG: Yeah.
MB: That's kind of, I guess that person's counter.
BC: And what was that like? That sounds like a nice, polite thing.
MB: It was frightening!
GG: It was scary. You know, for me personally, what happened was, as Miles was saying, there became this point in time where they just said okay, all we know now is there's probably not a girl, and who is she, you know, what is her name, what's Daniel's name, and really, who are the Puppetmasters? And so they basically started looking into kind of every element of clues that they could get to. And the first thing they found was, in about July people started selling, you know, Lonelygirl15 T-shirts and mugs and hats and we were like, "You know someday we might want to make money off this thing, so let's register the trademark." You know, realizing that trademarks are made public record; not realizing that there's people like you out there, who are going to go look at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and say, "Did somebody register the trademark?"
So they searched it, you know they found that it was registered to my Dad's name, who is kind of our attorney, they found his home address in Encino, California, and it just became madness from there. So they had his name, and it kind of evolved over a period of about two weeks. You know the next thing they had, my Mom's name, they had when my Mom went to high school, you know, there was a cousin, and then there was a friend of my sister. And my sister was about twenty-five years old, she worked as like an assistant in Hollywood, she liked to go hiking, she like--you know, she had a boyfriend who kind of looked similar to Daniel, it was like, "Oh my God. It-- this is Bree." So every day, you know, people kind of took these clues and went further and further down the line, and that became the ARG. But you know, who are we to ask what an ARG was. And it was, like I said, it was, you know it became frightening because you really don't know - it was endearing, it was kind of cool that people were so engaged in our show - but at the same time, seeing my family's history plastered all over the internet, it was bizarre. And it was definitely moments of waking up at three o'clock in the morning, you know, cold sweats, what's gonna be on the website next. It was madness.
<CROSSTALK>
GR: <unintelligible>
<CROSSTALK>
GG: And then just to kind of round up the entire story, of really how the conclusion came to the point was that we got linked - my wife, she is kind of the persona of Bree on the internet, so she answers all the YouTube emails, and she worked at the Creative Artists Agency - and so she was, during her downtime, answering emails and a reporter from the LA Times, and a law student in Pennsylvania, a kid from Michigan, and another guy in Texas got together and set a trap on a MySpace page, where they embedded software that could track the IP addresses. So they befriended her over the course of like a week or two, lured her to go their page, and said, "Hey, I've got this really cool song, come check it out!" She hit on their page, two minutes later, sent them a message saying, "Hey, that's a really cool song," you know, as "Bree." Two hours later, the reporter from the LA Times calls CAA and says, "We gotcha." He says, "Someone from inside your building is sending out messages as Bree." So then they took--
<CROSSTALK>
BC: Sorry, then they took! Gotcha! Gotcha!
<CROSSTALK>
GG: And then so they - you know, it was totally nuts - and so then they took my Dad's last name - Goodfried - Creative Artists Agency, and then they found my wife. And then through my wife, they found me, and so all of our wedding pictures were all over the internet. <laughter>
MB: But they still didn't know how we got...
GG: They still didn't know. They still didn't know Miles, they still didn't know Mesh - but you know basically in our minds, this was our first time ever learning about ARGs. We were like, "Wow! There is something out there called an ARG. Only, I don't want to be the subject of it." <laughter>
It's okay to be the Puppetmaster but not the <something> - So we put out a message on our website saying to everyone, you know, to our amazing fans, like this is so awesome that you're this engaged in our show, but this isn't the goal. You know, the goal of the show is not to find out who we are; the goal of the show is to use the mysteries and the puzzles and the clues that we kind of put in - and we'll put in a lot more for you, you know, if you want, to help people unlock further plot points and go forward - and that's kind of where we spun out to, you know, what Lonelygirl is now, which is a fictional ARG, as opposed to you know the Miles and Greg that's actually behind the story.
Jumping Deeper Into the Genre
BC: This is perfect. No that's a great transition to - so, despite this wonderful first introduction, despite this like perfect first date with the ARGer community, you jumped in deeper.
MB: Yeah.
BC: Instead of withdrawing from it, you decided, "Let's jump in the pool."
MB: Well, we wanted to create sort of a new type of a show. I don't - I mean, there've been things sort of like this before, but we wanted to have as many interactive elements as possible and we realized that puzzles and clues are a huge component of that. So we thought, well we have this community that's sort of come to us, we should engage them more, and we should give them some things to do in probably a more healthy manner than stalking us. But the reality was that we didn't have the time, resources, or experience, really, to do that and so miraculously, there was someone already doing that. Glenn, you can talk about that.
GR: Yeah, well I wasn't even the first. Originally, there was a fan effort called Cassie's Watching - I'm sure many of you are familiar with that. I saw that and I discovered that very shortly after the time I discovered LonelyGirl. I had always known about the Alternate Reality Game concept - my background is a little bit in journalism, like video games and stuff, just a variety of things - but for me, what was really interesting about it was Miles, Greg, and Mesh actually issued a statement - I think around the time the second Cassie's Watching video came out - because everyone assumed that it was a product that was tied Lonelygirl15 because of the locations and things like that. They issued a statement saying, hey, this isn't us. And originally people were talking about the whole This Is Not A Game thing and whatnot, was it really them, wasn't it?
For me, what was really interesting about the idea, was that if no one is doing something officially, anyone could be doing it, as long as the quality of product is good and it sort of captures people's imaginations. Pretty much through my frustration with Cassie's Watching and seeing what was happening there, I came up with this idea for Op Aphid and basically - I don't know, what is it now, March? Or something--
MB: Yeah.
GR: --2007? It's still pretty much completely the middle of September 2006, because when I had this idea, sleep pretty much stopped after that, the rest of my life pretty much just ground to a complete halt, and I got really involved in this idea of just sort of creating something that - you know, some people like to very nicely call that a "Dynamic" ARG that shifts, but really it's constantly figuring out what's the next move, where are you going. And especially because it was originally a fan-fiction effort - and Cassie is Watching sort of shot themselves in the foot by predicting where the Lonelygirl story was going and basing their narrative so heavily on it that when Lonelygirl took a different turn, Cassie is Watching stopped completely.
So not only did I have to deal with constantly coming up with where my story was going, with my characters, but kind of have three or four different versions of it, depending on where I thought Lonelygirl15 was going to go, and how I could do something that tied into that universe, not having any more access than anyone else did.
Collaboration between LG15 and OpAphid
BC: That was going to be my next question. So now, you've got really two sets of artists working in the same universe - in a way that's not quite fan-fiction but not quite corporate Hollywood, multimedia, LucasArts-style property. So how much exchange is there of information? Nothing? <to GR> You're working blind from what they did?
MB: Now it's totally happening, so yes.
GG: Well at first, Glenn was doing this on his own and Miles and I were just watching Op Aphid as fans. And we were like, "These videos are fantastic!" And you'd certainly captured a large part of the imagination of our fan base. So, basically we did what we do a lot of times, which we go onto Bree's MySpace account then we sent an email to Op Aphid saying, "Wow, you're really cool. Let's start talking." He wrote back - the first time he tried to kind of stay in character a few times, and I was like, "No! This is 'Greg.'" Like I'm not talking as "Bree," like he really totally--
GR: I can't be talking to fifteen year old girls on the internet. <laughter>
Not after what happened last time, restraining orders, I don't want to have to notify my neighbors or anything... <laughter>
GG: So that's why you say "this is not a game" a lot, isn't it? <laughter>
So I was like, "Let's meet up, figure this out." So we gave him our phone number, our email, we talked to him a few times and just kind of felt him out, and saw where he wanted to go with the story and how creative he was. We said, "This is awesome, we'll let you into our world. We'll bring you into the story meetings, we will give you scripts." We kind of had that period of bordering full-integration, yet he was doing his own thing autonomously, but seeing where we were going ahead with the story. As that evolved over time - really, a short period of time - we said, "Let's work together," and basically now we are fully working together. Glenn is now working on Lonelygirl, writing scripts for Lonelygirl, he's directing, editing, as well as running Op Aphid. It's a full-on team effort.
GR: Yeah, this past week I had two of the Lonelygirl15 episodes that were ones that I wrote and directed, so in addition to doing the ARG stuff, it's very interesting to be going from the perspective of being a fan, to doing fan-fiction, to actually working behind the scenes on the original fiction that inspired me. It's, uh--
MB: Yeah, and the reality is we are such a small group of people that we are actively hiring people. So we need more people working with us because if we want to continue to expand this into something bigger, we need more help.
BC: Is there anything else that you want to talk about to start off, and then I figure that this is - I can imagine there are a lot of questions out in the audience? The audience? I'm nodding?
MB: I guess the one thing I can say is sort of where we're headed and sort of the way we think about it, which is that we're really trying to take a lot of ARG elements and merge it with what is really like a serial show on the internet. So I don't know if Lonelygirl currently is, or will ever be, like an "ARG" in the official sense, because I think that our narrative isn't necessarily unlocked by the puzzle-solving, the puzzle-solving is a component of the narrative. So that's really what we're trying to kind of figure out as we go forward, which is how do we enough of puzzle-solving elements, enough of that mystery and sort of crossing the fictional realm elements to make the community happy that already exists, but then how do we also make it accessible enough that we can get a much, much bigger audience into the game-playing elements.
BC: Welcome to the White Whale. What is it called? The White Whale? That was a good play. So we've got about fifteen minutes left? Do we have questions? We have people with questions? Go ahead.
Q&A
Multiple Directors and Storylines
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I remember at the end of the Wired article, it mentioned you had thoughts of expanding the storyline by having other directors do all these little shows. That sounds...really...hard.... <laughter> How would you manage that?
MB: We're doing two things. So what we've done is - we kind of conceive of Lonelygirl now as this kind of universe that we're creating that's a lot like some mythology, kind of along the lines of the Star Wars universe or something like that. So as we flesh out this universe, there's the potential for multiple narratives, and the idea is we will actually go to different countries potentially. We're talking to other countries and mobile phone carriers and things like that to create separate Lonelygirl-style shows in our universe. We would basically go there, hire teams, train those people, work with them, have some amount of creative oversight, but eventually more of a franchise model where they can then do it on their own and sort of fact-check with us against the bible of the universe. So that's kind of the rough idea how we're going to work.
BC: Questions? In the back? Yep.
Quality Control
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If Op Aphid hadn't been so high quality, I can't imagine you would have wanted to merge the creative into your universe. As you're kind of growing and expanding, how are you going to do quality control if you're kind of the creators of that kind of interaction?
GG: The way kind of we envision the show is, at the top-level, we tell the story - and now Op Aphid is integrated as part of that story; and then there is the ability for fans to create their own full stories, as long as they kind of stay within our universe - we've got the Order, and this secret society, and the teenage angst issues that we're telling - every fan can kind of tell their own story. They can bounce off us, or they can sort of be fully autonomous and tell whatever they want. In terms of bringing actual fans into the narrative that we're exactly telling, that's going to happen pretty infrequently. Unless, again, something else just kind of rises to the top and is just compelling, and logistically makes sense for us, then it can happen and if we do that again, it might be another phone call to that person, another sit-down lunch and just say, "You're very talented and we would love to work with you. Are you interested?"
MB: Yeah, we think of it as a layered approach to integrating the universe. Is there a creative user-generated element? We're going to be doing a massive rebuild to our website, which we're currently helping out and starting to design right now. It's going to allow people to truly have the technology to have their own storylines, and the community can vote on the storylines, and that's what will float to the top. So those UGC stories will be part of the website, living right alongside our story. That's one layer of the interactivity. The second layer is really top-quality productions, like what Glenn dide, we will one-on-one contact people and hire them. Maybe that will become the spin-off show. We have, obviously, the resources, we'll have the technology to spin off those shows to help out provided they're telling stories about the faction. And then the final layer is elements of the plot that have fan interactivity. So things like - as we get more staff to do this logistically - live events, meeting the characters, interacting with a person, going to locations, bringing fans actually onto the show in short little narrative loops and things like that. So those are kind of the different layers of what we approach.
GR: One thing that's interesting about the fan-fiction - we've kind of talked about this, Miles and I, initially - compared to some of what we see out there, a lot of people seem really afraid to tell their own story, in a way. I still watch all the fan videos, and I've been in contact just to sort of say "good job" to some people or there are times when I want to say something because they're making assumptions about something in the universe but it's like, "Aww, man, you're so wrong. So wrong." And you feel bad because you see how much people put into this. I guess we haven't seen a lot of griefing, like people like doing their own...
MB: Yeah, we still have a lot of people trying to guess our plot, which is cool and all, but we hope that as we make it easier to create your own stories, people will truly just say, "I'm going to take what I know about this universe and create my own narrative and I don't want it necessarily to relate to the mainline plot you're telling."
GR: That's the point I was at. Before we were in touch, I developed my own character Tachyon, that was like a secret agent that was essentially on the run from the Order. All the puzzles and the method in all of it was that her coded messages - you know, she's a twenty-something girl who loved pop culture - so puzzles would be a music mash-up. Or you'd hear one time song names and band names with numbers in them, and that would lead you to one phone number. And then there would be a hint within that message to maybe go back and point you to a URL and that would give you complex math problems based on the lyrics to the different songs. People really had to sort of dig into that and decode it. It was in the realm of trying to keep these things sort of credible and believable but it technically seems like an elaborate system that an agent would try and use to communicate.
Really, before my involvement with Lonelygirl15, I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that it was a great launching pad, but I needed to tell my own story. It's just interesting how things work out.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So you're doing like an Angel to the Buffy.
MB: Yes, yes. That's exactly my model. The model is like we're creating the universe, there's Angels, Buffys, and hopefully ten different ones, either housed on our own site - we're not exactly sure how we're going to lay it out, but we'll link to it and then potentially we'll get different languages in different countries.
The LG15 Law & Order Episode
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How did you feel when a network television show took your idea. Did they actually contact you guys?
GG: Are you talking about Law & Order?
MB: Law & Order?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.
GG: Yeah, that's funny, they contacted me because they wanted Jessica--
MB: They wanted Jessica!
GG: --For the part. Which makes...no...sense. If you're going to spoof something and then use the character in the spoof, you're just going to confuse the entire fanbase, they would've thought that was us doing it to them. But I was insanely flattered, I mean I always am. When you become that - like, when you've become the answer to a Who Wants to be a Millionaire question or something - the whole thing is totally mind-boggling. I can't even begin to tell you how weird it is that I'm sitting here today when eight months ago I was taking depositions probably, in San Diego. So in context it's all very weird and kind of inspiring and awesome.
MB: But I will say on the Law & Order episode, they got it wrong, because you'll notice they actually have a slow zoom in one of the parts, which you can't do with a webcam! So who's filming it?! <laughter>
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's the lighting!
MB: It's the lighting, I mean it's constantly about that, like everything is shot by a character on our show. You know who is filming this. That's one of the key elements to the believability of the show. I thought it was funny that they got that wrong.
Nickie Bauer
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you speak a little bit about Nickie Bauer?
GG: She's - I don't know how many of you guys don't know - Nickie Bauer is a fan who is actually a friend of ours, who plays basically an investigative journalist who, every time we put out a video Nickie will go and kind of investigate, you know that the Order was at this location or Jonas was over here, making sure he doesn't get kidnapped or whatever. So she was basically a friend of mine growing up that, when we came out in the press, called me up - she's an aspiring actress who does posting, and was really interested getting involved and I said, "Awesome! Do like everyone else in the world can do. Go out and get a camera and take footage of yourself, publish it to the website, and kind of make yourself a fictional character, and if you do it well people will embrace it and that's kind of what she's doing. So there are pressures of friendship and she sort of has access to things that other people probably don't, one of them being my wife - she did that video where she got footage of her - but she's as removed as - closer than everyone else would be but not so much on the inside of that kind of like unfair advantage type of thing.
BC: Who is it that gave us the harder question? Other questions? How'd you guys get so shy? It's those In-n-Out Burgers. <laughter> They're like lead weights in your stomach right now. <laughter> Drawing all the blood away. Okay, go ahead.
Other Media Opportunities
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you been approached by other media except for the Law & Order? Your rep is CAA?
MB: Well when we came out, our rep was CAA at the time and we sort of went on the grand tour of all these studios, and talked to different TV heads and whatnot. We had some offers to do different production deals and for different companies. We actually ended up saying no to them, because ultimately the reality is that most of these studios have their own attempts at internet properties that are pretty crappy. <laughter>
GG: It's horrible.
MB: It was a tough decision at the time, especially since we were going completely broke and running out of our own savings and things like that. But we were going to have to create shows for like Intertube or something like that, that no one literally goes to. I think that the way we sort of do it again is that because there's a lot more power now in the creative process, because the channels of distribution are sort of opening up, we really just want to create our own shows that have a huge internet component and then if there's a TV component to it, fine, we'll go to five different networks and then sell it to the network directly. We don't want to have to work within the studio system, as little as we have to.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You can always take spin-offs in comic form, or--
MB: Yeah. You know, we've thought about all of that. We have lots of aspirations to do things like that--
GR: A million ideas.
MB: --Yeah, a million ideas and not enough people to help us execute it, number one. And then resources and you know our primary focus right now is to make Lonelygirl profitable on the internet because we have to, because we have ten employees at this point. Once we can make it profitable on the internet, then to start branching out into the other properties. Plus we just love finding it on the internet, so if we can't make it profitable on the internet then that sucks.
BC: Let me do a follow-up to that. So what do you think your core strategy is for that? Does it look like advertising? Does it look like ticket sales?
MB: No one would be interested I think. <laughs>
BC: Or does it look like--
<CROSSTALK>
GG: You know I think there's probably a three-prong approach which - one is going to be advertising, either like on our website now, we use Revver so we have the cultural advertising. Certainly as fans of internet video, we hate pre-roll so we're never going to do a ten second pre-roll. There might be curtain, Lonelygirl brought to you by Diet Coke and something opens up and goes right to the video. The other kind of cool thing with our show is because we tell it from the perspective that these kids are real kids, living in the real world, that you can talk to, that they talk back to you...they have to drive cars. They have to use cell phones. Like if they held up something and it said "Soda" on it, it would be bizarre. The can has to say Coca-Cola. So there's that type of brand integration from really high-level ones of having the brand come in and almost being a quasi-character in the show, you know having an evil corporation-type thing, to these kind of one-off product placements.
BC: Sign me up. I want to be an evil corporation. <laughter>
MB: You want to be part of the Order?
GG: That's certainly one approach. As Miles was also talking about, mobile is another thing we're talking to a lot of these short-form videos that are kind of elegantly tailored to the mobile applications.
BC: Is the franchise model that you talked about part of that internet possibility too?
GG: Yeah, and that's what's our third prong, which is a franchise model where someone else essentially licenses the format. We're certainly not going to do a Koreangirl out of our own pockets, so we'll need help with the finance end of that. This space is so new, on one sense it's really exciting to be having these meetings and getting these opportunities. On the other side, you see a lot of people kind of reluctant to say, "I don't even know what this is. Like, a serialized show on the internet, two minutes at a time, on YouTube and your own website? How many ratings points should shows like that get?" And I'm like, "Ratings points?! That's not...what we do." But we have an intense dance with all the stuff on our site and that stuff has value. So there's going to be a growing period for us, for the whole infrastructure.
Discerning Reality From Fiction
BC: I think we have time for one more question from the audience?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to know if there's a difference between when people thought it was real as opposed to now that they know that it's fiction? Is there a difference in the fans perception of it or how you guys write it? What kind of happened after you came out with that?
MB: That's a great question and that was sort of our biggest fear of all. What is going to happen when people find out that she's not real? And we had no idea. We had a feeling, because it seemed like a lot of people were saying, "This probably isn't real." That when it was finally revealed, it would turn out that most people kind of knew anyway, and so they were cool with it. Which is basically what ended up happening. But we were really worried that all of that interactivity would disappear, which we thought was the coolest part about it, people writing to Bree like she was real, because they thought she was real. The amazing thing is that that has not gone away at all. In fact, people a hundred percent interact with these characters as if they are real people. It kind of makes sense; when I watch TV shows, I think about people on Monk kind of as if they're real people. So if I had the ability to yell at Jack - and I do - this time, he'll talk back. We still get tons of people sending messages to the characters, we still respond to those. We had actually an interactive chat, a live interactive chat session on our site. I don't know how many people saw this, but basically Bree's room was ransacked by the Order, and she then went on camera and said, "I'll be at Lonelygirl15.com in the chat room at such and such time on Friday." And 35,000 people came to the website to talk to her as if she was a real person. Several thousand ended up in the chatroom - our software at the time was horrible - and were talking to her as if she was real. And we actually had a plot point occur in the chat room and followed up in the videos. So the answer is the intensity is the same, and it's really cool, and especially coming and reading a lot about the ARG community, where it's treated as if it's real and that's sort of the throughline. We didn't know if we could get away with that, but it seems like people are still going after it and that's cool.
GG: To kind of add another thing, we got certainly lucky to do all of the press that we were able to do, after coming out as being a fictional show. And we made sure to convey the message, which was absolutely true, that the fan participation affects what the characters do. It's not a choose your own adventure where you can say to Bree, "I want you to turn right," and she's going to turn right. The way we look at it, and you're getting into how we write the show and think about it, is that if Bree were a sixteen year old girl, living her life on the internet, and she had 35,000 people sending her messages, writing her text comments, making their own videos, that would affect you. If there was a boy that you had a crush on or if you didn't know that he liked you, and 35,000 people said, "Yes, he likes you," so you'd do something about it-- <laughter>
So we'd have Bree say, "I've read all your comments. That's really cool. I'm gonna go make the first move." So for us, as kind of the creators, it completely affects how we write the story and for the fans, they kind of feel that validation of, all of my participation, these people listened to.
GR: And all these curtain issues, that was the stuff that I picked up on a lot before sort of adding myself as a Puppetmaster behind this. What really seemed interesting was seeing that there were companies like 42 that, obviously people know they're doing a game, but on the grassroots side, your anonymity is everything, it sort of works more in your favor. And in my case, I'm surprised the game has actually improved and people went right back into playing it, but what was nice was that it freed up the distraction, much like them with the Lonelygirl proper, where no longer was there the distraction of the question of "Who is behind this?" So in some ways, I think that it's a trade-off and it seems like it allows you to refocus the attention on the story, on the narrative, which is where you want, not who is behind the scene.
Epilogue
BC: So at this point, thank you guys. <applause>
We've got about a five minute break, and then come back in and be ready for the next panel.
ROSE: Before the break, we all need to give Brian Clark a hand because-- <applause>
GG: I would like to say one thing. I want to thank the community, especially Unfiction and everything. I know you guys don't follow Op Aphid and what I do as much as the Lonelygirl fans but that's the stuff that I read, that I pay attention to, and has sort of kept me really grounded through this whole process. I understand why one person should never do an ARG. <points to self> I have one person doing an ARG with everything on it. I understand why you should not do a game as you go. It's a horrible, terrible idea because unless you can give your life over to it, it can't happen. And in fact in my head has always been, "Don't implode." That has always been-- <applause>
I just appreciate it because it's just a great community and it's a great resource.
BC: Thank you.
--SpaceBass 18:28, 9 March 2007 (PST)
