The tilte

The final version of my proposal was submitted a few days ago. So, it is time to give some more details about my project.

The title of my dissertation is:

Emerging Interactivity: Collective Intelligence and Immersive Aesthetics in Alternate Reality Game.

The main inspiration is from my guru of ARGs Jane McGonigal and partly from her presentation given in TED this year.

The main issue that I am going to explore in my dissertation is interactivity in ARGs.

• I am going to explore the game community as a new rising form of Collective Intelligence.

• I will examine the new form of Immersion called This Is Not A Game (TINAG), created and used by
ARGs designers.

• I will compare and examine connections between those two aspects of this game as main forces creating a new form of interactivity in and outside the game.

These are roughly the main points. However, I feel like I should make it clearer. In a few sentences, the phenomenon of collective intelligence is as long as human history, but at the present time the internet bring it into new, easy and everyday level. As a collective in the Internet we are able to achieve completely new goals, for instance Wikipedia. On the other hand our intellectual potential is still too fragmented, unused on the Internet. I believe, this may seem a little utopian, that if we used a potential which gives us the internet, as a civilization we would be able to collectively solve many problems that plague us. The first ARG community ‘cloudmakers’ had shown that potential. Jane McGonigal did two ARGs which also bring some taste of global collective work on serious problems in the form of games. That is my inspiration.

I will try to analyze the ARGs community from that point of few – Collective Intelligence. I also assume the TINAG as a new form of immersion, has been moved the game through the plane of fiction into the real world, everyday life, and is the main stimulant of formation of giant groups of players intellectually very dedicated to solving the problems and obstacles.

In my research I am going to study this phenomenon from a few aspects. I am going to look at this from sociological, psychological, philosophical points of view and of course from the point of view of new media studies.

I am planning to conduct the online questionairre among the ARGs players, and also I will analyze the ARGs community players on their games group website, and study their progress and behaviour during the games.