Thanks Dryu and Scarab. I like the title, btw.
This is a long post, but some of you may find it interesting. I'm interested in adapting the approach I take here, linking tropes, questions, and reflections, into whatever formats may be easier to digest. Just like navigating TV Tropes, there are quite a few links, so there are a lot of paths you can go down, reading it straight-through, clicking on tropes and so on. If nothing else, I think the tropes I reference here are worth being familiar with and thinking about. But
YMMV!
I've been trying to apply tropes and other narrative principles to real life for a while, as a tool for myself and others to understand their situations in terms of
long-arc backstory and
multiple-protagonist Sympathetic POV. I think some of what I learned may be relevant to helping with TWWF, as well as to various other forms of interactive fiction, interactive reality, and augmented storytelling.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this ARG, including in terms of the broader storyworld of Echo Chamber and the real lives of the characters -- I mean players -- I mean people -- involved in it, including any public audience or other people who might become interested in ARGs, or how trope and narrative principles might be relevant to thinking of life in general.
In a typical game, the player becomes the protagonist, often acting out the trope
Villains Act, Heroes React -- which expresses the reactive nature of many protagonists in the storyworlds created for them or that unfold in real life. A Call to Adventure occurs, based on some adversity that must be overcome. But who decides what that is? And, when open-ended contributions or gameplay selections are allowed, when the player becomes a co-author, at least within a story-within-a-story, there are nested sets of questions that arise.
This is especially so with this
Mr. Administrator character, who was shown in
Echo Chamber to be seemingly more powerful than the showrunners, who are also GMs on the ARG. Perhaps the exact relationship between TWWF, Echo Chamber, and real life is to be determined, but EC's
Show Within A Show episode made it clear with Tom's Venn Diagram that there's overlap between the show, and real life, which does, indeed, have
mind-boggling implications.How many who are playing the role of metaguards have seen EC, particularly the premiere and finale of S1? After spending much of today watching the chat, I took an information-processing nap and woke up thinking of the Mr. Administrator depicted in Mysterious Employer:
Echo Chamber: Mysterious Employer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkc4DM-II8U [7m]
"the vague motivations, the toying with employees"
This actually has parallels to a scene from the film Devil's Advocate, particularly how Satan characterizes God in this speech:
Al Pacino Speech on Devil's Advocate [2m]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGR4SFOimlkThat speech slides far to the cynicism side of the
Sliding Scale of Idealism Vs. Cynicism, and toward the serious side of the
Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness-- but it's a good point of reference. How is this work
intended to be presented, and how many ways can it be
interpreted by the audience? The tone of the Mysterious Employer episode, and Mr. Administrator videos in general, is at the extreme serious side of the spectrum, even as Twitter interactions with him can be downright silly, at least in the eye of some beholders.
Which tropes are really present in all this?
Who's in charge, when
the creators have created a character potentially more powerful than them, and a
game-within-a-show that many are playing as a
story-within-a-game-within-a-show-within-a-game-within-real-life that has real-world competition from the likes of Ingress?
Okay, that's making it
overly complicated, isn't it?
I'm trying to step back and think about how everyone is thinking about this, including the fictional characters. It's the only way I can think to help coordinate a response, and provide meaningful suggestions on how to solve a very convoluted set of storylines, which have the potential for *continuity* past the end of this particular phase of this particular ARG.
The human psyche understands many things best in terms of story, but most stories have a single active protagonist, a handful (or loads and loads) of more passive and reactive protagonists. It gets harder to cognitively process loads and loads of characters with their own personal agency, Hidden Depths, and perhaps in-progress Character Development.
( Robert McKee has a model of story that expresses that is relevant to the discussion of active vs. passive, single vs multiple protagonists, and classic story structure vs. alternatives :
http://markhaacrit.tumblr.com/page/3#4284987224 -- I'll try to unpack some of that in a later post.)
What are the rules, guidelines, and intentions here? I'm thinking of the Wonka scene, the contract, the magnifying glass, the "you broke the rules!" speech. That also has parallels in tone to the perpetually irate, over-burdened Mr. Administrator. This ARG is clearly experimental, but there are a number of ways you can interpret it.
My idea is, if you take the time to become familiar with a wide set of tropes, noteworthy film and television scenes, and other concepts and references, you can build up a
cognitive toolkit that lets you see the world through a bigger set of lenses. Learning to select the right lens in the right situation is the key to having that be an *asset* rather than a *liability.*
Think of it as a collection of
Plot Coupons --
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotCoupon -- and I'd suggest getting to know that trope and its subtropes, to be able to get a better handle on the possible value of any particular thing you come across. Tropes are actually also examples of models -- mental models -- of which there are many worth learning about, including
decision-trees. A good set of conceptual tools can go a long way to making sense of things, and facilitate
Genre Savviness.As Scott E Page says in his Model Thinking course description on Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/#course/modelthinking"The models covered in this class provide a foundation for future social science classes, whether they be in economics, political science, business, or sociology. Mastering this material will give you a huge leg up in advanced courses. They also help you in life. Here's how the course will work. For each model, I present a short, easily digestible overview lecture. Then, I'll dig deeper. I'll go into the technical details of the model."
One such model is the Decision Tree:
4 5 Decision Trees-Model Thinking-Scott E. Page [14 min]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8n7SRF_3SI"Decision tree models are really going to be useful, in terms of making decisions when there's lots of contingencies, when there's probabilistic events, when we don't know the future state of the world. So a big reason we want to learn to use this model is just to be better thinkers, to make better choices, make better decisions, rather than throw up our hands and say 'I can't figure out what to do, I think I'm going to choose this.' There's gonna be two other reasons as well: one... to infer things about the world, about other people's choices, so we're going to see someone's choice, and from that, we can get some understanding about how that person thinks about the world, so we can use it to explain what's going on, and then a third reason, for fun, is to maybe learn some things about ourselves."
Am I simply making this too complicated? What do you all think?
Always great to see new members, and tyhisis a fascinating dialogue you and Qara ave going here. Allow me to prodive you with your introdfuctory Glomp. 
You're routinely out-Wall-Of-Texting everyone. 
