Greg, Miles, and Glenn at ARG Fest

[surrealisticpill]

Here's a video of the panel that Greg, Miles, and Glenn did at the ARGFest 2007, last weekend in San Francisco.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fPoHiAbuAE

--
edit by milo: old link is bad ('video removed'), try this one
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9kGQx42aUE

[milowent]

thanks sur.pill! (and i welcome you from the world of lurkers!)

this looks interesting, i plan to listen to the whole thing. is glenn allergic to the lighting?

[hyemew]

He's gotta maintain that cool rapper persona! Even if it means the ultimate faux pas of shades indoors I guess...

[hyemew]

Interesting, one kid asked about the quote in the Wired article where they say they have other filmmakers making other shows connected with the Breeniverse, just that nobody knows which they are.
I am not sure if they were hooked up with OpAphid yet, but I doubt they referred to Glenn, since I believe it was written at the end of September. Even if they did, they used the plural.
When I heard it I thought of NikkiB, though she is "just fanfiction" (despite the appearance of a canon character in her video. That just isn't fair people!), so apparently they didn't mean her either.

What Miles basically answered was some thing about "going to other countries" (with what money to get you there?) to work with people to set up other lonelygirls to be a part of the Breeniverse..
Perhaps that's what Bree meant when she mentioned in her growing up episode that there could be other girls like her in similar situations re: the Order. I guess that line was meant to be a future launch point, however I am reallllly skeptical of them just being able to "set up" lonelygirls in other countries and have em go like that. Perhaps if they do it in some non-English speaking country (I was actually thinking Turkey as a good one, because there seems to be a huge number of YouTubers from that country-- but turns out the Turkish government banned access to all of youtube today because there was a video on there insulting their founder!) where few people have heard about lonelygirl... but I am really skeptical of setting up a girl talking to her webcam in any western country. Much of their internet communities and certainly all of the vlog-watching one knows all about LG15, and often accuse people of being "lg15 ripoffs". Seeing anything like Bree will automatically make them thing of LG15, and I don't forsee something like that catching on so much again, since it's already been done.

[milowent]

some comments:

At around 8 minutes, Glenn starts talking, and mentions CiW and that he got the idea to start his own ARG after the Creators said they weren't involved in CiW.

As we have talked about here, he says that CiW shot itself in the foot because it was based on predicting where the lg15 story was headed, and CiW stopped completely when Bree's story took a turn. (I don't really agree with this - I would think Cassie could have done a lot of different stuff, but i didn't follow it very closely to judge)

At 20:20 Greg is asked about Nikki Bower. She was a friend of Greg's growing up. An aspring actress, she said she interested in getting involved, and he suggested she make her own fanfic. He admits she has access to things other people don't, like his wife (who played lucy) in one of NBR's videos. But she is pretty much removed otherwise.

Around 23:30, they begin to talk about their strategy for making a profit.
"3 pronged approach"
1. advertising. but no 10 second pre-roll commercials under consideration, but a "brought to you by" would be considered.
2. product placement.
3. franchise model - ? mobile phones, etc.

25:50 "was there a change" when you were found?

We thought most people already knew it wasn't real, but we were worried about loss of interactivity. but we still get tons of messages to the actors. and had a live interactive chat, "and 35,000 people came to the website, and several thousand ended up in the chatroom." (i don't know about several thousand, but i saw over 700 in the chat rooms i believe at its peak).

at 30:10 - Greg says he realizes that unfiction does not follow opaphid/tachyon as much as the lg15 fans do.

[milowent]

Here is a ARGNET article summary of the conference:

www.argn.com/archive/000559im_a_whatmaster_the_lonelygirl15_creators_appear_at_argfestocon_to_tell_us_why_they_love_their_fans_in_spite_of_themselves.php

"I'm a WHATmaster?" The Lonelygirl15 Creators Appear at ARGfest-o-Con to Tell Us Why They Love Their Fans in Spite of Themselves
by Marie Lamb

A week before a much publicized appearance at SXSW, Lonelygirl15 creators Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, and Glenn Rubenstein, the Puppetmaster for the official Lonelygirl15 ARG, OpAphid, appeared at ARGfest-o-Con to talk about the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon and their introduction to the alternate reality of fame, fans, and the internet community's dogged pursuit of information.

The Creators (as they label their forum posts on the Lonelygirl15 website) never intended to get into ARGs at all. Miles said they just wanted to "tell an interesting story on YouTube." There were no puzzles at first, just the mystery about whether Bree was real, and if not, who was behind it all. They didn't count on the fan community's voracious appetite for information--"Is this a game, and if so, what are we supposed to solve?" Since there weren't really any clues in the story itself, the community focused on finding the people behind the story, trying to figure out who they were. [milo adds: i don't agree with this characterization. there were people looking for clues to bree's religion and such as if that were a game, but the majority of people were trying to figure out who was behind lg15, not because it was a game, but because they wanted to know the agenda of those behind bree.]

In Greg's case, this meant a surprising amount of information about his personal life was dug up and posted online. The first thing found was the registered trademark Greg's father had applied for as the team's lawyer. Then within a few weeks, it was his father's name, his mother's name, his sister (who superficially has a lot in common with the character of Bree), and eventually even his wedding pictures became the stuff of internet posts. "It became frightening," he admitted. "I'd wake up wondering what was going to be on the website next." [milo adds: in terms of greg, this actuallly all happened pretty fast. the trademark application, which is public record by law, was unearthed on sept 1. using ken goodfried to file this was a huge mistake on their part, frankly. the creators first post was on sept 7. the creators revealed their identities on sept 12. as far as i am aware, all the information posted on the phorum and here was publicly available on the internet.]

His wife, who was the person answering Bree's email, was caught in an online trap and revealed to be an employee of Creative Artists Agency.

Around this time the team "realized there's something out there called an Alternate Reality Game" and decided to give the community the content they were craving, to refocus the goal of the hunt on the story's mystery, not on digging into the lives of the production team. [milo adds: this is where i see a disconnect. i never got the impression that the people hunting for Bree were involved in ARGs. I know I wasn't. What the creators did find is that CiW started on Sept 12 and got a lot of attention. But the CiW community was a lot of new people, though some bree-sleuthers got into it.]

Miles felt this fit in well with their goal of creating a new show with as many interactive elements as possible. "We have this community that has kind of come to us, we should engage them more. And we should give them more things to do...rather than stalking us." The problem at the time was they didn't have the experience, resources, or the time to do it themselves. Luckily, the community again provided an answer. [milo adds: again, i disagree with this. CiW brought most of the ARG community, not the hunt for bree. Many, many, people thought lg15 was a viral marketing scheme or a front for some religion, and could not handle those messages being spread while portrayed as real. This is a big fallacy in their argument that lg15 naturally led into the ARG format.]

Glenn was watching Lonelygirl15 as a fan, and also following CassieIsWatching, which was the first fan attempt at an online ARG. When the Creators posted a disclaimer about Cassie, Glenn realized that if no one was doing anything officially, then anyone could do it if the quality was good. He got sucked into the role of Puppetmaster by launching his own fan fiction ARG, OpAphid, and "the rest of my life pretty much ground to a halt." While CassieIsWatching eventually faded away because it tried to follow the Lonelygirl15 plot too tightly [milo adds: is this really true?], and made some wrong assumptions about what direction the producers were going in, Glenn tried to keep OpAphid flexible by having several different possible ways its story could go, depending on what Lonelygirl15 did with her story. And the watcher was being watched. The Creators were following OpAphid as fans, and they were impressed with the quality of what they saw. Greg decided to send an email to Glenn, in character as Bree, to express the team's admiration of OpAphid, and to discuss working more closely with him. Eventually Glenn was invited to story meetings and given scripts. OpAphid became the Official ARG of Lonelygirl15, and Glenn has even written and directed new Lonelygirl15 videos. He has moved from being a fan, to writing fan fiction, to becoming a full-fledged member of the Lonelygirl15 creative team.

So what's in the future for Lonelygirl15? While no one is telling what's going to happen to Bree, Daniel and the rest of the characters, the production team has many ideas about how they want to expand her universe and give fans more opportunities to create content. Miles feels that while Lonelygirl15 will never be an ARG in a strict sense, there is the opportunity to incorporate more ARG elements in the storytelling. "Our narrative isn't unlocked by the puzzle solving, the puzzles are a component of the narrative." He wants to make sure there is enough content to keep the ARG fans happy while still building the wider, general audience for Bree's story. [milo adds: in theory, i think this could work.]

To that end, the team is working on a "massive rebuild" of their website, and will introduce tools to allow people to produce their own stories in the Lonelygirl15 universe. He envisions other directors producing videos as well as fans, and hopes to find more talented people to work on all the projects the team has ideas for. Yes, that's right folks--Lonelygirl15 is hiring. They need more help to expand, and they don't discount the possibility of finding more talent in the fan community. "We have lots of ideas and not enough people." Greg added that if they see something good submitted by fans, they will contact those fans to discuss working together.

One thing that will definitely continue is fan participation in the Lonelygirl15 universe. Besides looking for talented people to bring on board in an official capacity, the Creators include live events in their plans, along with character meetings and putting fans into the storyline as characters themselves. The intensity of the fan base has not diminished at all with the revelation that Bree and her cohorts are inventions and not real people. 35,000 people showed up on the website when Bree mentioned she would be online there in a recent video, and fans continue to email her and comment on her videos in character. Greg is quick to point out that those fans influence what they do with the story that unfolds. "If Bree were a 16 year old living her life on the internet, and she had 35,000 people sending her messages, writing text comments, making videos, that would affect [her]."

At the end of the panel, Glenn expressed his appreciation for Unfiction, and the online resources of the ARG community. He took to heart especially two key pieces of advice: "I understand why one person should never do an ARG" [by themselves] and "don't implode."

[hyemew]

"[milo adds: this is where i see a disconnect. i never got the impression that the people hunting for Bree were involved in ARGs. I know I wasn't. What the creators did find is that CiW started on Sept 12 and got a lot of attention. But the CiW community was a lot of new people, though some bree-sleuthers got into it.]"

Exactly milo. I really wonder if they were "playing to their audience" so to speak... making an ARG mountain out of a molehill. I know personally as one of the lead sleuthers, I didn't even know what an ARG was, and don't think any of you other fellow leaders ever even mentioned that term until CiW. They're talking to a crowd of ARGers, so they tried to frame the whole experience more down the lines of an ARG rather than what it really was. That said, I hope they don't actually BELIEVE what they said there, because that of course could lead to the consuming of LG15 into an ARG which we have been sometimes seeing and dreading. Fans that came to watch came to watch because they enjoyed the video, NOT because they expected a game.
I mean that whole notion of "we're here, where's the game?" is utterly ridiculous! In no place did anyone EVER expect a game, nor do I think LG was meant to be seen as one either. We came and we made it a "game", if you want to call that, because we wanted to know who was behind it. A somewhat interesting sideplot was the mystery surrounding the character and her religion, but instead of ARGing it, the Creators basically revealed all via Gemma (to much criticism, as the answer to this "riddle" was nothing like what any of the clues suggested.) So that was essentially solved for us, and like I said all along attempting to figure out which religion was hers was stupid anyway because, as it turned out, the "religion" was not even a religion (idiotic) and was something they made up themselves! So how could one ever guess that?
I don't know, like I said, I think they were playing to the ARG audience and giving themselves a reason for being there by hyping the perceived ARG aspects of LG15, when in fact it was Glenn and Glenn alone who actually should have been there if this was just about ARGs.

[hyemew]

"While CassieIsWatching eventually faded away because it tried to follow the Lonelygirl15 plot too tightly [milo adds: is this really true?], and made some wrong assumptions about what direction the producers were going in"

I never followed CiW, as you know, but I really don't see how CiW ever presupposed plots or wrote themselves into holes. In fact, the first two and most famous episodes had nothing to do with the plot except that they took place at the same location as LG episodes. All I know of later episodes is that there was a computer animated Cassie and lots of stupid clues involving calling strangers' phone numbers and cutting up Bibles. I don't think there was even any real coherence with the plot but just a lot of random clues leading... somewhere?

Furthermore, I don't even know how mere fans even discerned those phone numbers, as I remember the way they did it was some extremely convoluted method, like piecing together numbers and then in the end REVERSING IT to get the right number. I don't see how anyone would just inherently think "ok, here's a string of 10 digits, I think I'll flip them around and call it! Oh what do you know, Uncle Frank is talking to me now!" It was just so random, what is it that would make anyone know to put numbers together in that certain order and then to reverse it to get the number of all things? It always seemed to convenient that people were able to solve those things.

I really think they are trying more and more to distance themselves from CiW, but deep down they know they had something to do with it. How could they not? I don't care WHAT you say, I will never be convinced that random "fans" were able to make those first two videos. The first one takes place in some river valley at the exact spot of the swimming hole. Are you willing to tell me they hiked around a national park until finding the exact spot? Second episode, I don't know if the location of the park had been revealed prior to the episode, but I don't think it was, and there were NO context clues from that episode. It was so dark and all you saw was Bree at a payphone. How can a RANDOM FAN track down some park based on that alone?!
It's not like the Creators haven't smudged reality before. Who is the only other "just a fan" to have filmed herself at plot locations without them having ever been revealed? Nikki Bower. The Creators still maintain Nikki is "just a fan" as well, despite the irrefutable evidence she's their friend. They even admit that now, but she's still "just fanfiction". She might have made those videos on her own, but she HAS extra knowledge, whether it's the locations of filming or some hints about future plots (ex. in episode 4 or so when she hints at winds of change and then stuff changes, even more blatantly the CU SOON episode). No matter what they say about Nikki not having insider information, it's clear that she does and that it comes from the Creators, therefore in my opinion violating the line of fanfiction (and when Lucy showed up in her video? Forget it!) So being that Nikki is the only other fanfiction person to ever find their filming locations, I find it downright impossible for CiW to have found that stuff on her own.
I am pretty sure that, if Nikki/Alli wasn't involved (which I doubt she was, mainly because she's an aspiring actress and so presumably she would have been in it- unless she was planned to appear later as Cassie but changed plans after Mansongate) someone getting their information from the Creators HAD TO BE. There is NO other way to spin it.

[surrealisticpill]

quoting hyemew:

"Furthermore, I don't even know how mere fans even discerned those phone numbers, as I remember the way they did it was some extremely convoluted method, like piecing together numbers and then in the end REVERSING IT to get the right number. I don't see how anyone would just inherently think "ok, here's a string of 10 digits, I think I'll flip them around and call it! Oh what do you know, Uncle Frank is talking to me now!" It was just so random, what is it that would make anyone know to put numbers together in that certain order and then to reverse it to get the number of all things? It always seemed to convenient that people were able to solve those things."

I'm not trying to discount what you're saying about people having inside info, because I think you make valid points, but I think I can shed some light on this particular circumstance. It was the people in #operationaphid that figured this out. I was there to watch it all play out. The number Bree gave in the video was called and it was a dry cleaner's VM. There was a suspicious mention of numbers, specifically 10 numbers. We wrote those down and looked at them. Something that jumped out right away was that if you look at them backwards, it begins with a California area code. Someone called the number and that was that. It might have been a challenging puzzle for the lg15 fans, but for those of us who had been following the ARG, this puzzle was a piece of cake. We had been trained to look for phone numbers from the beginning.

edit: Sorry, Hye. I thought you were talking about the phone number in bree's video, where she called her uncle and then fans dialed that number and reached the 'secret' VM. Terryrific pointed out that you were talking about the Cassie number. my bad.

[hyemew]

Ahh interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I never actually actively followed any clues, and so I'm not sure if this particular one was one of them that really made me think "HOW can anyone figure that out or not", but I seem to remember there being some others, perhaps in the earlier days or Cassie, which seemed like people would figure out without any real reason to think what they got. I don't remember any of them well enough to tell if this was the case or not though.
This was just a random tangent which had little to do of my main point that CiW definitely had inside knowledge, and that the Creators have been known to fudge the truth to meet their own desires, and I think all this "Cassie was just a fan" stuff smacks of "Nikki is just a fan". Except in this case Nikki being connected to the Creators or not really doesn't have any serious repercussions, while CiW being found to have a connection to them would be pretty huge.

[curiousgeorge]

Once again I have to exalt Hye for long rambling posts that I just lurve to read. (I do miss Joss', PG-rated versions anyway, posts also) Still the Dauntless Dean after all this time...

And thanks for the counterpoint surrealisticpillow, glad to have an enthusiastic ARG'r on board who can bring on that POV.

I still say the ARG is on hold until they resolve the "Who Sees What..." debacle. On that front, don't the Orderites just have to consult any number of online resources to track down the Trio at this point. Surely they know Joan's last name and it isn't a big stretch, given their connections, that they could find his aunt's house in just a few minutes?
(sorry to go OT: but I bet they didn't address this issue at the conference and to me this is a major flaw with the "game")

[milowent]

hyemew said:

Except in this case Nikki being connected to the Creators or not really doesn't have any serious repercussions, while CiW being found to have a connection to them would be pretty huge.

well, playing devil's advocate here, why exactly would it be huge? the creators have denied being involved in CiW, but have they publicly denied knowing (or even now knowing) who was behind it? i think they usually avoid being pinned down on that.

the fact is that who was behind CiW was unknown to fans, and people were afraid after the 1st two videos about it being run by some nutcase and that people shouldn't be going to drops in the middle of the night. and the use of the manson murder image, i can't imagine the CiW PM expected the reaction he got to that.

[Terryfic]

I believe Hye was talking about the second CiW drop, the one that included a bible page which eventually lead to a phone number that was later ‘hacked’ by Glenn. This public act of committing what I imagine must be a pretty serious felony has never sat well with me, but that is getting off topic.

As to CiW predicting the LG plot, wow, I’m surprised how little you did follow it Hye. After CiW was pointed out to not be official (as to whether it truly was unofficial before being labeled as such is still debatable in my mind) it started to become ridiculous and clearly was no longer trying. The big mistake they made was predicting something significant to happen on 10/12/06 and when nothing happened that ruined their plot. As to whether the author of CiW actually went from making an ok ARG to a completely incompetent one in a matter of weeks, or if CiW purposefully self-destructed after being disavowed, because there is nothing to destroy your viewership like being labeled not canon, is also still up for debate.

I will also agree with those above me that people approached solving who was behind LG as a game as much as how people approached that anti-Gore video which was proven to be astroturfing. People were interested in the truth, and not in fictional answers. I despise hidden advertising and was all for outing people that were trying to deceive the public for their own gain. It turns out they weren’t really doing it for any hidden gain, but ironically I believe there is now a fair bit of LG\OA astroturfing going on and I think that it’s really pathetic and kind of cowardly that someone would pretend they are a fan just to prop themselves up. But now I am getting really off topic.

[curiousgeorge]

terryfic said:

I will also agree with those above me that people approached solving who was behind LG as a game as much as how people approached that anti-Gore video which was proven to be astroturfing. People were interested in the truth, and not in fictional answers. I despise hidden advertising and was all for outing people that were trying to deceive the public for their own gain. It turns out they weren’t really doing it for any hidden gain, but ironically I believe there is now a fair bit of LG\OA astroturfing going on and I think that it’s really pathetic and kind of cowardly that someone would pretend they are a fan just to prop themselves up. But now I am getting really off topic.

I have said before that I don't want to turn our little Cove into a political forum, but that is the kind of sleuthing I would LOVE to be on board for. Revealing these kind of hidden agenda YT/TV/Media ad vids, from any ideological perspective is right up my alley. Perhaps a few of us ought to start another forum for just this kind of thing... Sorry to go OT also.

[Smashing]

I second what CG said.