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It would be my pleasure, Anne. I need a good dose of theorists in my life to keep the new questions flowing.

One of dearest friends and ex-employees did his Master's thesis at UCF in English on the implied relationship between author and reader in "Moby Dick". There was a period of about three years where nothing under the sun wouldn't make Dan go, "That's just like Moby Dick where." J I have a deeply geeky obsession with how creative synergies get fired between people, how a loose group of artists become a school or a movement. The "Tangiers Period" (Bowles/Keroack/Burroughs/etc.) is one good example and how instrumental it was in cross-fertilizing Beat, another is the "Year Without A Summer" (Mary Shelly/Lord Byron/Polidori/etc.) producing the scientific horror thriller, another is the community of fans that kept Lovecraft's "Weird Fiction" extension of Poe alive.

ARGing might shape up as a similar kind of moment: genre is an interesting way to ask that question, isn't it? In independent film, I'm always arguing "indie isn't a genre, it's a movement." And yet I use genre to describe what ARG is. Curious. In reality, we never set out to make "alternate reality games" - we do immersive narrative, play with the conceptions of storytelling (create ACTUAL relationships between author and audience instead of implied ones.) It was only 4 years that this community of fans suddenly looked at generation 9 or 10 of that and went, "You make ARGs, you are a puppetmaster." Apparently because we told a story that was about puzzlers (so the embraced a non-linear narrative for Sharp Televisions as an ARG, but didn't really think of "Blair Witch" or "Nothing So Strange" as ARGs because they lacked a clear "game".

If you look at most of the accidental practitioners in that space, they tend to have emerged from one of two spaces: game design and filmmaking. It might be that until the Web came along there wasn't quite enough shared language of experience between the two to really make hybrids of those concepts work. So you have people like 42 Entertainment and Dave Szulborski who come at it very much as game designers: narrative emerges from the rule set of the interactions. Others, like Haxan Films and Xenophile and GMD Studios, come at it from the point of view filmmakers: the gameplay is only that you're playing with the boundaries between author/audience/participant/character and embracing some of the emergent aspects from the audience back into the narrative.

The only reason why it feels at all like a genre is because there is a well-networked community of people who have played one "game" or another, and their guts label "what is similar about each of our fandoms of the games we played" as being the definition of ARG. Which means there is NO definition of ARG, or perhaps that ARG is just a flavor of some broader concept. It is that fan community that is in the process of redefining the label to Chaotic Fiction. They have a whole theory they've baked up, hardly a "professional ARG developer" among them - the main architect of the theory is a paralegal! Despite that, they might have very well hit on something · something that tries to define the sub-category as "cohesive narratives that emerge from joint authorship between the audience and the creators that have a level of persistence and leave behind an artifact that other's can experience is that functionally similar to the community experience of the live theater".

Which means they have stumbled smack dab into the swirling rapids of media art versus performance art - what counts as "documentation"? What suffices as mere documentation? A wiki entry? A news article? Oh, how I've seen some knock-down drag-outs between academic performance theorists and, say, filmmakers on the difference of the importance of documentation. What is intuitively brilliant about their proposed structure is that the live gaming experience is "chaotic play" or "chaotic theater" · and the fixed artifact that emerges from joint authorship is the "chaotic fiction".

I guess the meta question really becomes, "who defines and populates a genre?" Have an indie filmmaker who's been corresponding with me - he made a gay Cthulhu movie, and he's been getting a lecture from film festivals and distributors that they don't know what genre he is · will horror genre fans embrace a gay protagonist story? Will gay audiences embrace a Lovecraftian horror story that might in part be about the gay experience? If you asked those festivals and distributors, they'd tell you that no filmmaker can really start or define a genre. It seems, though, that is a definition of genre that relies heavily upon the existence of gatekeepers between the audience and the creator in order to facilitate both revenue and marketing.

What connections are you drawing back to blogging? I'm fascinated by that concept - I've argued blogging isn't a genre so much as it is a collection of tools. Might be another term that isn't really defined too well - I've been accused of making "fake blogs" before, when all I was really doing was using a blogging technology platform for telling narratives (so whether or not www.sentryoutpost.com or www.ronomi.com are "fake blogs" or "storytelling using blogs" depends far more on the reader's state than on the author's intent.)

Just rambling there, and probably using genre in a much looser sense than any individual narrative theorist, aren't I?

Best,
Brian