However, STEVE, there’s something I’d like to know about who was and who wasn’t at Deathgate Falls when Zerika either “leaped into history” or “made her descent.”

In Taltos, Morrolan said that he was there, helping to fend off a bunch of bandits.

But in Viscount, Morrolan was somewhere else at the time (either at or enroute to his ancestral estate). Tazendra was the sorceress at Deathgate falls, in the company of Piro and some others. We have Parfi’s word on the matter.

One of them, however, isn’t telling us the truth. Which of them is correct?

That’s not the same as saying that the maximum number of people will get involved. Your reader/contributor community may wind up being voracious, but hard for newcomers to push into. (I didn’t get into any of the well-known ARGs on day one, and I always wound up looking at them as an outsider, feeling like I could never possibly catch up. This is even true of collaborative RPGs like Nocturne Alley, where the only audience involvement is reading posts and discussing them.)

My first hint of your big-whatever-it-is was this very blog post, which I first saw this afternoon. I immediately did some Googling, and found your AE2008 presentation. That had a big pointer to a web site (yes I’m intentionally being nonspecific here) and I (plus friends) were able to follow it out from there to find the Twitter feed.

So, there: I feel like I have Found It. Of course I have no idea whether I’ve found *all* of it (who says there’s only one Twitter feed?) Plus, I spent several minutes staring at the “gfire music” web site, trying to decide if it was something real or an ARG element! (”ATX” is not *obviously* a real-world locale, to us East Coasters…)

(My further bloggery on this subject — which is spoilery for all the URLs I found — is up at http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/10/alternate-reality-fiction.html . Do I get “first outside blog post about the project”? :)

The question remains — how do we ensure as many people as possible can have that experience?

If you give away too much, they’ll twig too fast, and if you give away not enough, they’ll never get it. I suppose multiple small hints all over the place would be the way to go.

You don’t want to make it easy… but if you lay out hints, and make it fairly clear that to learn more they’ll have to do some searching, when they finally find it all, they’ll feel very gratified and have a boost to their personal self esteem (look at me, I’m so smart, I figured it out.)

I bet that if it works, it would be like writing a thriller or mystery novel: that ‘ah ha’ moment in the reader or audience must be like getting very high, or very… juiced.

And now, the wait. Wait for them to find it. Because once they do, they’ll spread the fun of it all over the place. Which reminds me of something, but I’ll follow up on that in another forum. :D

For doing it with an entire project, I have no idea. I imagine a year from now we’ll have a lot better idea of what we should have done or not done. :-)