Advertising Through Arg (Alternate Reality Games)

Advertising through Alternate Reality Games

Imagine a world of mystery and excitement, adventure and fantasy, waiting for you to explore. A world that reacts to your every move, with characters and companies that talk to you, send you messages, and even give you items to help you in your quest. A world so immersive that you can no longer tell where the reality ends and the fiction begins. Welcome to the world of Alternate Reality Gaming.

www.immersivegaming.com

Definition:

According to the definition of Wikipedia, an Alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

In other words, it is the fact that participants are interacting with the fictional world using things that you use every day to interact with the real world. That is to say, one may visit websites, send or receive emails, give or receive phone calls, as well as using newspapers as support or places in cities. The most common supports of real life used in the games are the following:

Emails

Websites

Phone calls

Mails

Press articles

Postings in newspapers

Chat or Instant messages

Forums

Objects of the real world linked to the game in play

Events of the real world involving actors, interacting with player that are assisting the representation

Among the terms essential to understand ARGs are:

Puppetmaster: the individual involved in designing and/or running an ARG (but here in our case of advertising, it refers more to the company that is promoting its product). Puppetmasters are simultaneously allies and adversaries to the player base, creating obstacles and providing resources for overcoming them in the course of telling the game's story. Puppetmasters generally remain behind the curtain while a game is running.The real identity of puppet masters may or may not be known ahead of time.

The Curtain: it is generally a metaphor for the separation between the puppetmasters and the players. This can take the traditional form of absolute secrecy regarding the puppetmasters' identities and involvement with the production, or refer merely to the convention that puppetmasters do not communicate directly with players through the game, interacting instead through the characters and the game's design.

This Is Not A Game (TINAG): Setting the ARG form apart from other games is the This Is Not A Game aesthetic, which dictates that the game not behave like a game: phone numbers mentioned in the ARG, for example, should actually work, and the game should not provide an overtly-designated playspace or ruleset to the players.

Rabbithole: Also known as a Trailhead. A Rabbithole is the first website, contact, or puzzle that starts off the ARG.

More concretely, ARGs are a kind of mix between an online game and treasure hunting. However one thing very important is that users and publishers never mention the term "Game" and they do not consider that it is a game...

History:

We can consider that ARGs are coming from traditional role games like the famous Dungeons and Dragons of 1974. Then Wizards of the Coast developed one of these first kinds of game (before the term ARG was actually invented) to promote trading cards in 1996.

During the same year we had Dreadnot, a web-based product from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996. This play included working voice mail phone numbers for characters, clues in the source code of the website, character email addresses, off-site websites, real locations in San Francisco and real people.

We can also quote, in 1997, the movie The Game where a wealthy businessman receives a strange gift for his birthday: a role-play game where he is part of it.

Finally concerning the history of ARGs, the first big success of ARG has been the game developed for the promotion of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence of Steven Spielberg, in 2001, by a team of Microsoft. Later on this game has been called The Beast and we still consider that it is the very first popular alternate reality game.

Consequently we can see that ARG have their roots the marketing as the essence of their existence, meaning that it is made from the marketer for the customer.

Today's ARGs:

Actors and recent games:

Due to the success of the early ARG genre, many big companies paid attention to ARGs to both promote their products, and to enhance the image of the company in the eyes of the community, by demonstrating their interest in innovative and fan-friendly marketing methods.

A well-known actor of this environment is 42 Entertainment, which created the buzz for the launch of the Xbox game Halo 2, and also the Beast (game related to the movie A.I.). Therefor 42 Entertainment made up "I Love Bees", with website-hunting and puzzle-solving, already used for "the Beast". The game also made players go outdoors to answer phones, create and submit content, and recruit others, and received as much or more mainstream notice than its predecessor, finding its way onto television during a presidential debate, and becoming one of the New York Times' catchphrases of 2004. Then came what is linked to any success, some imitators, fan tributes and parodies.

42 Entertainment also produced "Last Call Poker", a promotion for Activision's video game Gun. It was designed to help modern audiences connect with the Western genre, Last Call Poker was through a poker site, and there were also games of "Tombstone Hold 'Em" in cemeteries around the United States, and sent players to their own local cemeteries to clean up neglected grave sites and perform other tasks.

Another example also frequently quoted in the world of ARGs is Audi which launched "The Art of the Heist" to promote its new A3. The game was developed by Audi ad agency McKinney+Silver, Haxan Films and GMD Studios (creators of The Blair Witch Project), the Art of the Heist used live events as supports. GMD Studios kept