Chapter 1.0 of The Martin Aggett Story Launches

This is so exciting!  The first chapter of The Martin Aggett Story will be told this weekend during ARGfest.  The story will be told over the next year through mini Alternate Reality Game (ARG) sessions lasting 2-4 days and taking place about once a month.  We decided to forgo the typical 6-8 week ARG campaign because,quite frankly,as an indie storyteller we don’t have the resources to sustain a long campaign and still tell the epic story we want to create.  Breaking the story into chapters and telling it through mini-ARGs solves a lot of problems inherent in traditional ARGs.

One of the biggest complaints about the ARG storytelling format is if the audience doesn’t discover the story in the very beginning they feel like it would be too much work to get caught up on the narrative.  It’s like walking into a movie after it has been playing for twenty minutes.  By telling our story in short bursts and then putting the game in intermission we’ll make it easy for players to get caught up and hopefully they’ll be more willing to participate in future chapters.  This also solves another problematic aspect of traditional ARGs –most people can’t commit 6-8 weeks of their lives to a game that runs at the pace of real life.

This new format also allows us to adopt an iterative approach to game design similar to software development.  We’ll be able to take what we learned from Chapter 1.0 and roll that into Chapter 2.0 while keeping the same storyline.  It will also allow time between chapters to incorporate player actions into the plot of the story.  The story already has a very strong outline,but there are several places along the way that will be heavily affected by how the players interact with characters and interact within the storyworld.  It also gives us the opportunity to reward the most dedicated players with “guest appearances”as official characters in the story.

The last thing I’ll tell you about is our points system.  Players who register at MartinAggett.com will be able to earn “Facilitator Network Experience Points”(FXP) and climb the ranks on our leaderboard.  We’ll use the leaderboard rankings to reward the top players with character interaction,swag,guest appearances in the story,and other benefits.  If players also fill out the optional survey they will have a chance to get phone calls,packages,text messages,chat,tweets,or emails,from characters in the story.

We can’t wait to get this next phase of our project jump started!  Join us.