ARGs And The Female Gamer

Gamasutra has a feature up by Andrea Phillips examining the world of Alternate Reality Gaming, musing that finally designers seem to have found something that works for both genders. From the article: "At the end of this road, you don't find an exclusively female audience and a disenfranchised male ex-playerbase. Instead, you find a gaming audience that looks a lot like the world we live in every day. Welcome to the gender-balanced world of Alternate Reality Gaming ... In the most successful ARGs, the game and the story are inextricable from one another. In an ARG, there simply isn't a way to devise a game without simultaneously devising the story, and the quality of the game lives and dies based on the quality of the writing. In every ARG team I'm aware of, the lead writer is a crucial part of the dev team. Poor characterization, bad pacing, or lack of plausibility are showstoppers just as much as a blue-screen would be. The action item here for conventional gaming: Make the writing an integral part of the development process, and not an afterthought. "