The survey was split into two basic sections. The first was demographic information for players and developers, and the second was a survey of salary and other work conditions for professional ARG developers. A lot of the results confirmed what we already knew or suspected, but we found some were pretty big surprises, as well.

The demographic data was a little surprising, and not in a good way. For players and developers alike, women only make up about a third of the population. It’s better than the representation found in traditional game development, but not as close to gender equity as our industry reputation might indicate. Likewise, the ethnic diversity found by the survey wasn’t what I had expected, and I’m personally very disappointed by this. I’d love it if we, as a community, could brainstorm some ways to welcome a more diverse base of players and developers into our fold.

The professional information confirmed what I’ve long suspected already. The majority of work in our field is done by freelancers working for a flat per-project rate, and the rates themselves are across the board. We come from several different disciplines, with half our respondents coming from a background in games or new media. There are also very few people earning their sole income this way — but there are definitely some. And probably because so much of the work is done on a freelance basis — or possibly an unusually biased sample — a full 60% of our respondents said they own their own studio, agency, or other legal business entity.

The actual work is, as one might suspect, highly varied — over half our respondents said they’d participated in game and narrative design, writing, consulting, and production or project management. The one thing the fewest of us do is acting, and a third of us have done that, too.

I’ve also put the original Excel document on SlideShare, if you’re interested. I’ve edited the document from the original in two ways; I’ve removed timestamps on some replies in order to prevent any privacy issues via cross-tabulation; and I removed the many, many countries with zero responses to make the data easier to understand.

Thanks to all of you who participated. Let’s do it again next year!

Congratulations to all the attendees of the 2009 argfestocon in Portland Oregon.  After much debating and sharing, the writers, web designers, artists, academics, film producers, directors, puppet-masters, and players have created a 26 bullet point list that clearly defines the ARG genre as a whole.

Beginning Monday, July 20th, 2009, all ARG designers must adhere to the aforementioned bullet-point list before “going live” with their work.  All present ARGs are excluded from the bulleted list adherence requirement, except unless “beginning a new chapter”.  In such case, the new work will be required to comply.

Read the rest at Friartech — it’s definitely worth the click.

To be fair, what you describe is the same here in the US market (but I don’t think it is innovation they fear, it is perceived riskiness.) Over the years, I’ve found a few techniques that can be helpful in making that case.

1. Lead with measurement. An ARG (or other innovation) shouldn’t be something that’s unmeasureable, or means buying into some alternate metrics schema. Find out what bell the client wants to ring (perception, awareness, sales, etc.) and show how you’ll show them you’re ringing that bell.

2. No ARG is an island. No one should be pitching to an agency doing an ARG instead of an advertising campaign: focus on how the ARG element of a campaign to help every other channel produce more results. After all, that media spend is where you’re going to build your audience.

3. Explain away the chaos. Help an agency understand that they’ll be able to manage you managing the chaos, show them the kinds of documents you’ll use to do that.

4. Evangelize the power of iteration. Help an agency understand that unlike traditional campaigns, those metrics and processes will allow you to improve the chances of success from direct audience feedback.

None of those things necessarily solve all the problems for every agency and client and market, but if I go in anticipating those kinds of concerns I find I can derail a lot of the more common fear-based objections. And, to be honest, that advice is more general than ARGs (as similar rules work for other places where you’re helping an agency innovate outside of their core practice.)

We recently completed the final pilot of the European Union funded education project ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0..  This project has built an ARG to promote language learning in secondary school students called ‘The Tower of Babel’…We will be presenting academic papers on the project at the forthcoming  European Association for Games in Education conference in October, Graz, Austria and will be placing documentation on the project website as well.

Check out the ARGuing summary video if you’re interested in ARGs in education, or ARGs in Europe, or ARGs in general!

Future-Making Serious Games has more ARGuing coverage.

Part 1 of the interview
Part 2 of the interview

Part 2 is particularly interesting (for us) for its mention of ARGs, including the question “As you note, there is now a rush towards corporate sponsorship of Alternate Reality Games. What factors should a company consider before entering this space?”.  There’s some weighing in by Jordan Weisman, and later on in the interview is a mention of Superstruct.  So, check out the interview and see if you’re interested in the book!