Keep coming across different ideas and platforms verging on the ultimate manifestations of the new entertainment this week - ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games.
Looking back over two years of blogging I can't quite believe that I have never fully discussed the ARG genre (although two of my more abstract posts in September 2007 and April 2008 on the direction of entertainment as a whole have touched upon them).
A cross between theatre and gaming, but taking place across real-world spaces and blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, actors, gamers and oridinary people, marketeers and interactive theatre nuts have been getting excited about the phenomenon for years but they have yet to really deliver - at least beyond the niche.
The most famous have been to promote other forms of entertainment - I Love Bees for Halo 2 was a hugely complex multi-platform story starting with a hacked bee-keeping website and ended ia stranded artificial intelligence trying to pull itself back together through email, mobiles and real-world meet-ups.
Then the Cloverfield games actually had a purpose, and integrated puzzle solving across sites as disparate as the prophetic Ethaanhaaswasright and kitch japanese drinks franchise site www.slusho.jp into a wider teaser campaign that even held back the name from the early trailers and posters.
Other examples include Do you Believe in Harvey Dent for Batman Begins and even the Lost Rings campaign by Mcdonalds for the Olympics (if ever there was a less convincing partnership??)
All of these campaigns to date however have either been firmly ensconsed in the hardcore online gaming, puzzle-zolving, forum-posting niche, or supported by a sizeable above-the-line campaign.
However, the bigger problem is that they apply the same rules dictated by the traditional campaign and apply it to the new medium. Namely that the trail is there only to be discovered and discussed, and not added to by the community discovering it. It is 'interactive' only in that there elements to be solved and not in the true sense that those participating can have an actual effect on the way that it turns out.
So, with all that background I havent really left enough room to talk about the intended content for the post - the new elements cropping up around ARGs on this side of the pond and taking it in a deeper more convincing direction . These will have to feature in the next post...
Image from Mscapers
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