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 Forum index » Meta » General META Discussion
ARGs and Marketing -- A Discussion with the AotH PMs
Moderators: imbri, ndemeter
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HaxanMike
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Joined: 03 Jan 2005
Posts: 76
Location: Brooklyn, NY

 		Sorry for being away so long. I've been battling a nasty winter cold brought on by an extraordinary amount of air travel the last few months. I'm sure I infected the entire plane on my flight back to Orlando Friday night -- hopefully no one here was on it!

Phaedra wrote:
Is there a certain "critical mass" that you plan on as far as the size of the player base when you design a game? Is there a minimum necessary number of players required for the game to work that you factor in?


What Brian said.

When I think about a game or interactive narrative, I don't think so much about a collective mass as I do individuals. I am constantly thinking about the individual experience and how they relate to the media, the story, and ultimately the community.

I do consider paths that can be taken once a critical mass is established, and the direction of the games will always change based on how large the community is and how they are reacting, but I think it is important to always keep the individual experience in mind when concepting the program.

Phaedra wrote:
And another, sort of unrelated question -- how much did learning that what you were doing with Sacred Urns was "ARGish" and that there was a preexisting ARG community affect how you designed AotH? Did the fact that there was already an organized core community out there become a selling point at all?


It had no impact on story and big concepts, (audience interaction, multimedia approach, community, etc), but it had a big impact on design.

AotH is much closer to previous work like Freakylinks and Beta-7 than Sharp -- a great deal of contact and communication with characters, writing "live" and changing things based on audience interaction, mixing photos, graphics, audio, video to tell the story, different points of view, building community, even the live interactions/communications existed in very small parts in Beta-7 -- all are hallmarks of previous campaigns of ours.

Where knowledge of the ARG community did affect me was in execution. I was much more confident setting up lastresortretrieval.com as an "intranet" that you had hacked access to, knowing that you guys would have no problem diving in and piecing the story together yourselves. I really wanted LRR to be an individual experience for everyone who visited, based on what you chose to read and click on -- reading only part of it would give you only one take on what was going on, thus leaving room for discussion -- who are these people, where do their allegiances lie, etc.

I wonder what the game would have been like with Nisha and Ian blogs or some other communication tool...
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 20, 2005 5:32 pm
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HaxanMike
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Joined: 03 Jan 2005
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Location: Brooklyn, NY
MageSteff wrote:
The issue I would have with this, is that many PM's plan the number of websites and extras based on what they can reasonably (and sometimes plastically) afford to set up. We have lots of resources that Grass roots are loaned (websites/hosting etc.) that if they were to get corporate backing after getting those resources would not be viewed in a positive light.


Why? If you helped some grassroots games get off the ground and then they got corporate backing and could grow and become something really great (and afford to move over to their own web servers, for example) why would that be unfavorable? Isn't that the ultimate objective -- to help grassroots PM's develop great games? Wouldn't that be considered success in your goals as a member of the community? Perhaps those PM's would open new doors for the community and contribute in some way, either with money, knowledge, more resources, etc.

MageSteff wrote:
Would it be wrong for the community to ask the buy-in corporate backers to fund resources that could be used by other struggling Game Designers/Puppet Masters -

Are these resourses (free advertizing) valuable enough that the Marketing department could send a small fraction of the small fraction of the XX Million dollar budget to help these resources remain open and available? A thousand dollars might be laughable to a marketing department, but to a person who is paying for stuff out of his own pocket, that thousand dollars just bought a new server to help handle demand, paid for electricity, paid for Domain registration, etc.


I don't think it would be appropriate or good for the community if companies with something to gain out of ARGN started dropping money there (beyond advertising on sites). I would imagine as a community you WANT some separation between the people making games and the people writing about them -- isn't that what gives the news and reviews on ARGN credibility?

I think the community needs to support these things because the community finds value in them, and then they will serve the community and not other interests.

MageSteff wrote:
Do you see Marketers willing to speculate on the media in the hopes of keeping it available and growing? Even if there is no product placement, it will garner a lot of good will in the community if on the meta site there is a small "Our thanks to XYZ corporation for sponsoring our game." Even if there is no direct or implied tie in, it would still generate chatter about the company.


Worked for Sharp! There was no direct tie-in or product placement in the Sharp campaign at all -- no characters owned an Aquos, etc. The commercials contained clues and the character's crossed from commercials to the narrative but otherwise you could have experienced the whole thing without reading about the TV, but it worked to change people's perception of Sharp as a company that does cool things and can rise to the level of creating an expensive HDTV, verses a company that makes inexpensive microwaves.
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 20, 2005 5:44 pm
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Ethernull
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Joined: 23 Jan 2006
Posts: 47

 		I remember a discussion during WIBS regarding whether or not the campaign was considered "successfull" from a marketing perspective and wanted to share the following google stats comparison of traffic for "benjamin stove", "flex fuel" and "go yellow".

You'll notice a serious spike on the "go Yellow" terms during the middle of the sotve campaign, just about the time that they announced the plug to the go yellow campaign.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=benjamin+stove%2C+flex+fuel%2C+go+yellow&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

PostPosted: Thu May 11, 2006 8:13 pm
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Ciaran_H
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Joined: 11 Nov 2004
Posts: 123
Location: England, UK

 		Nice find, but those searches could also have been because of the launch of FlexFuel. Also, adding "ethanol" to the searches brings us to another news story that says that GWB was due to talk about ethanol as an alternative fuel in his State of the Union speech.

Of course, WIBS could well have participated in that surge, but the campaign was obviously specifically timed to coincide with both these things. As a result, it's hard to tell what search traffic came as a result of WIBS and what came from these other events, but on the whole I'm inclined to believe that the GWB speech probably had more to do with it.

I do love Google Trends, though.

PostPosted: Sun May 14, 2006 6:01 am
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