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I suspect there will be some people wanting to jump in - Jane McGonigal SMSed me last night saying that her work with the Institute for the Future is looking a lot at Monte Carlo and narrative. But there seem to be precious few people I've found in the academic space that approach this from a narrative perspective (I find myself surrounded by game theorists.)

Love your break down of the question "who defines and populates a genre" in this email - you've captured the meta-meta question perfectly:

Question: what is an alternate reality game and what makes it different from other forms of gaming or narrative?

Meta-Question: what is the role of chaos in all storytelling processes, and how does The Question reflect what academia is already pondering?

Meta-Meta Question: who gets to define what the genre is anyway?

Love your definitional questions too. I think part of what seems different about "chaotic fiction" is the high degree of uncertainty in the narrative outcomes. As an author, we know we'll be significantly rewriting the story as we go alone - the comparison might be to improvisational theater or jazz, but one in which the audience had an implicit role. Sometimes we hone in on the definitions of theater genres like "theater of the oppressed" or "invisible theater" in an effort to find something similar, but there is peer of mine who claims the only real comparison is 18th century "science in the round". So the outcome, the artifact, the documentation - that's collaboratively authored with the audience, who are also characters in the story.

Here's the interesting wrinkle on why this seems like such an important definition to the player community. Jane McGonigal would describe it as "alternate reality gaming is in part about gaming the barrier between what is in game and what is out of game". There is a sense of discovery - that a pay phone might ring, or a strange package might arrive in the mail. In fact, that is how we started our current story - with strange packages mailed to about 48 people, all of whom we were able to research on the Internet (and thus make the packages very personalized and thus just a little bit creepy.) That creates a trail they start following and investing energy in, but without ever having an explicit statement from us as creators that it is okay to trust us, that their investment of energy will pay off.

At least half the time, the community seizes upon something as the "next big ARG" only to discover that it isn't. That it lacked player agency. That it didn't have a storyline. The sponsor does a press release about how great their viral marketing stunt was, and the sense of betrayal among the fan community that cemented around it (primarily because they were hopeful of what it MIGHT UNFOLD INTO) is so palpable, so personal. They are left with the gut sense that, "This was never an ARG in the first place, was it?" Most of their guts agree with that statement, but like a film goer can describe the film as "not good" but not be able to put their fingers on the aesthetic reasons why, this sense of betrayal gets funneled in a meta discussion Š about the genre, about what defines, about how to communicate that expectation to others. By people with no real language or theoretical structure to frame that back into the rest of creative theory.

Can't wait to here your thoughts on genre, let me where you want us to continue this.

Best,
Brian