Get off my lawn, ya punks!
One thing I’ve always wondered is when age would start catching up with me. I’ve been told for years about how my attitudes and a number of other things would change. None of these predictions has come to pass except my hair has mostly fallen out. Since I buzz my head like many other cyclists, the fact that my hair doesn’t grow is no biggie.
I’ve never felt I have generation gap with today’s college students until yesterday. Apparently, Alternative Reality Games (or ARGs) are extremely popular. The basic idea is that you plant clues in the real world which makes people seek information on websites.
For example, to advertise a session at a local conference, someone sent me a piece of paper in the mail with nothing but a library call number on it and a web address. I wasn’t expecting this mail, so I did what I do with all unsolicited mail — I just pitched it. Someone in my office saw it and asked me if I was curious. I said no because it was undoubtedly some vendor trying to draw me into a dialogue since they couldn’t sell their products the regular way. I get calls, letters, and emails from people using strange angles to promote things all the time.
Later, I learned that a lot of people that received the same mail that I did wondered what it was and investigated until they resolved what was going on. This behavior puzzles me — I imagined such constructs would appeal exclusively to extremely bored, socially inept, lonely people. Turns out these things are very popular with lots of people even though in the real world, they are often used to promote movies, music, and other products.
I just don’t get it. I don’t even get around to the important stuff, and I’m definitely not going to waste time resolving weird details that appear to have no meaning. If the new way of doing things is to hang out in ARGs rather than reality, I’ll be perfectly happy being a dinosaur.