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Of more interest to me would have been the possiblility that we can use the different ways that different people think not in order to arrive at consensus, but rather to encourage further inquiry (and so extend her claim that "given an answer, we stop thinking").

Anne, I totally agree, and I think the above is a good summary of what we find interesting about community media forms in general. Maybe I'd in one more element, which is creating a "love of inquiry". I'm backing away from ARGing here for a second to broaden out to other forms, but back DURING the Clinton impeachment we did a small group dialog exercise ABOUT the Clinton impeachment. We knew the goal wasn't to get people to all have the same opinion: in fact, we stacked the deck in each of the small groups (geographically, politically, ethnicly, etc.) to ensure that consensus was nearly impossible to create. We gave them starter topics, but they were free to ignore them and talk about what they wanted.

The biggest learning from that, the most common experience (so the closest thing to a consensus) was "I haven't changed my opinion, but I understand how a rational person could have the opposite opinion." We worked as facilitators more than deliverers of "correct answers". What that project (reality-check.org) didn't have was a fictional narrative, it was a news or documentary piece.

Certainly don't take my description of why the ARG community finds puzzles engaging as anything less than being an ambassador of a good description of the genre. There will be some practitioners who feel very strongly about puzzles. I personally find the puzzle aspect relatively un-interesting, or just one example of an "activity that can be done collectively." I have been criticized from time to time my some community members for developing what they call "non-puzzles" -- something that they mistake as a puzzle but for which there isn't a solution.

I find myself wanting to say back, loudly and clearly, that I'm very much interested in community-buildiing, but not if it stops thinking, and the having of wonderful ideas.

If I conveyed anything other, my apologies. The value of a community experience is never consensus. Or perhaps I should say, the Internet is full of those kinds of "communities" (formed out of consensus of perspective) and they seldom if ever produce surprising results.

Instead, I always explain to collaborators and team members that the audience is smarter than we are. Always. If you spend 8 hours as a team hunting down and hiring someone to translate something into Urdu, you can rest assured that the audience community will recruit someone similar in about 8 minutes (probably from India, probably calling them and waking them up) who will translate it in 1 minute and catch 4 poor choices of the other translator to boot.

This is MUCH more closely related to what I personally find interesting about the style, learning to tell a story with a group that is relentless like pirhana and smarter than any team of storytellers you can put together. This creates the need to treat that audience community as a collaborator, as a joint author in something collective, as someone with which you as an author are exploring a topic and a story.

why is this range of connectivity, and the necessity of such a range, a *sad* thing?

I think I used "sad" with more of a wry wink and rolling of the eyes. In the world of the practitioner who has to secure funding from somewhere, the really complex ideas that seem to fall into the border zones between disciplines are the hardest ones to sell. It also means that even the smartest practitioners in the space really should be well outside of their comfort zone of expertise when exploring this, but the natural tendency for people to look for their lost keys under the street lamp is a universal human experience.

Now, if I could find a nice academic conference that focused on "chaotic group processes in fictional narrative expressions" I'd be set. And we certainly are seeing more and more academics showing up at ARG-related events (which used to be dominated far more by the audience-bonding-with-audience-bonding-with-creators dynamic), but it is just as likely that a conference puts a really brilliant theorist from our space on a panel alongside a corporate suit who dreams of filling call centers in Second Life and convincing that staff they are just playing a game. At the same time (at least from my perspective here in Orlando) that space is also being filled by more military/industrial complex concerns as well -- "strategic simulation" as a way of training troops through immersion (I hear researchers building tank simulators tell me, "Oh, we're storytellers too, just like you".)

So the space has a lot of growing to do fast, or it will get swallowed up into a hundred little unrecognizable pieces. We're seeing part of that go on right now. When we've managed to convince major brands to fund these kinds of art pieces by building their brands into it (yup, art as commerce ... oh the tradeoffs we make as practitioners), it has never been without trepidation. Part of that about the word "game" which to them implies zit-faced kids with PS2s. Now, those ad agencies and marketers are starting to call it "alternate reality branding" -- get rid of that pesky "game" word that gives us ulcers and replace it with something sexy for our ad award submissions and ebook titles.

When a community has problem defining its own terms, they typically wake up one day and find that idiots who aren't a part of the community have cemented the definitions for them ... and gotten them horribly, terribly wrong.

So my turn for a question: in the collaborative reading experience that you're describing, one that increases inquiry instead of just collapsing to right or wrong answers ... what is the role of shared experience? Can a group discuss Moby Dick without having read Moby Dick ... or only having read it a decade ago in college? Does that change the nature of the experience?