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[Yxkull]

Help needed

[Mikeyj]

Art of the Heist would satisfy the requirements of a non-entertainment promotion, it was for the Audi A3. The forum archive is here

[myf]

Have you checked the Wikipedia entry for ARGs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
That seems to give a good list of games, and what they were promoting (eg Art Of The Heist was for an Audi car, etc). It might be a good starting point for your investigations.

I don't think I can be much help with following a trailhead, as I've not got the hang of it yet either

There are various games going on at the moment. Odina Nova seems to have stuck again recently, but you might want to look at London Operations, Briefcase from a dead guy, Eldritch Errors (moving at a rapid pace, having only started a week or two ago), or hang on for the launch of season 2 of Perplex City (main sites WeLovePuzzles and Perplex City Stories). I think World Without Oil starts soon as well, but I know nothing about that one. I'd suggest reading through some of the threads, and see which (if any) take your fancy.

Hope this is some help.

Happy ARGing

[Yxkull]

Thank you

[Phaedra]

Well, it's connected to the entertainment industry in the sense that it was created to market a video game, but Last Call Poker (for Activision's GUN) remains one of my favorite ARGs, even though it didn't have the audience of games like ILB.

Who is Benjamin Stove? was more an awareness-raising game than one marketing a product -- it was done for General Motors' ethanol campaign.

Legend of the Sacred Urns marketed Sharp Aquos TVs.

Hmm....that's all that's coming to mind at the moment...

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Non-entertainment related... Hmmm. That does make it harder.
Would Vanishing Point count? It was for AMD and MS Vista.
Around here, we wouldn't consider it an ARG in the true sense as there was not much of a story and interactions didn't have any impact on the outcome, except for the winners of the prizes.

There are lots of periodic diversions (hunts, trails, etc.) for products like Dr. Pepper, Volvo, General Motors, Dominoes Pizza, Marlboro, etc., but again, not really ARGs.

[sixsidedsquare]

[Phaedra]

Regarding TLE, Regenesis, and Heroes 360, in all three cases, but especially in the case of Regenesis, I'm not sure that they're "marketing ARGs" in the sense of, say, AotH, because I think they're intended as much to extend the entertainment to different media as they are to advertise the "product." I mean, take another element of Heroes, there's an online comic. Would you consider that "marketing" for the show in the same sense that a prime-time commercial is?

Granted, most good "promotional" ARGs are also art in their own right, and examples like ILB also try to extend the universe of the entertainment they're promoting across different media, but I'm not sure I'd use TV extended experiences as examples of marketing ARGs.

[sixsidedsquare]

Ahh, quite right Phaedra, I was too focused on putting down corporate ARGs with a 'product' tie in that I completely forgot about that distinction. I guess the obvious difference between the two is that one is made for the existing audience, the other to attract a new audience itself (although still targeted to an existing one to an extent normally).

But the problem is this distinction seem to get kind of fuzzy for something like Ocular Effect, but the puttering out of it makes it not such a good example. If say you have a new TV series coming up and an ARG starts up beforehand to promote it and create a buzz this is still a marketing ARG right? But what is the the new series is some sort of a spin off from another series or existing universe? (Fallen was a novel being turned into a TV series) Does the distinction then arise from whether the thing is targeted towards an open audience or the existing one?

And what about a marketing ARG for a series or movie that continues on, overlapping with the release of the 'product'? Where does the line fall between promoting a 'product' in a form of advertising for a larger audience and extending an experience? I guess every ARG that promotes an 'entertainment' product (such a game, TV series or movie) is always going to extend the experience. But then is an ARG like Last Call Poker pre-extending the experience, as it extends the Gun universe before you even have a chance to experience the Gun universe itself.

Awww jeez, now I'm just all metaish and feel like I'm running in circles. I could go on editing this for ages and slowly adding more but I think it'd be better just to chuck this out there, see what gets said and mull it all over a bit more. And sorry for all the misplaced ''s.

[Phaedra]

I agree that the line was ever blurry, and getting more so.

Take Year Zero. At first glance, it looks like it's designed to build hype for the album. But Trent Reznor insists it's not "marketing" -- it's part of the experience. And in looking at the reactions of people who didn't really know about the ARG but listened to the album (Exhibit A: my mother and sister; Exhibit B: lots of reviewers), I think the game functioned less to try to build "hype" for the album than it did to provide context for the music. If you followed the ARG, it's very clear that the songs are from different perspectives in this dystopian future scenario. If you don't know anything about the ARG, the album can seem kind of incomprehensible. I don't know if it reached a significant number of non-prior-NIN-fans. But I'm also not sure that it was intended to.

So is that a "marketing ARG" in the traditional sense? I don't know: to me it looks different from something like AotH.

AotH is, to me, the best example of A Classic Marketing ARG. Unlike the Beast, ILB, LCP, MHC, Eldritch Errors, or most of the other games with marketing ties, it wasn't promoting entertainment. It was promoting a car company. So there wasn't a world for it to extend to muddy the waters.

Was it stand-alone art? I'd say yes. But one thing it wasn't was an extension of an existing fictional world into different media. As you note, any ARG that promotes an entertainment product is probably going to do that.

I don't think it's possible to draw a bright-line distinction between ARGs as marketing and ARGs as extensions of entertainment. But, when looking for good examples of "marketing ARGs" I guess one way to go about it would be to look for statements from the clients for corporate ARGs. Do they seem to consider it marketing? It looks like Microsoft considers ILB to be marketing. It looks like Nine Inch Nails feels differently about Year Zero. So, in looking for examples of marketing ARGs, I'd say that ILB is a solid example, while Year Zero is an iffy one.

The intent of the people who paid for games (if you can find statements to indicate it) seems to me like one reasonably clear way to categorize games.

[imbri]

Six: you should read Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, if you haven't already. It takes a good look at storytelling in the modern media age - what happens when the story spans multiple formats and when fans get involved.

Don't be scared off by the fact that it's written by a big time academic. It's *very* readable, plain text, filled with theory but not hurt your head make you go back and reread sentences ten times theory and has great examples from Survivor (and the Survivor Sucks spoiling community) to the transmedia storytelling giant that was the Matrix (films, shorts, games, comics, etc etc) to the fans and fan fiction of Harry Potter. (and loads of other stuff)


The Matrix makes for an interesting discussion, not only because of the complexities but also because, I think, it's one of the most universally known transmedia projects. There were the three movies, the animatrix shorts, the comics, and two games. The movies are, most likely, the most well known of the bunch. They tell a very specific story about a learning of the Matrix and that he is the One. The other pieces of story telling go beyond that. Were the just advertising the movie or were they extending the universe?

I watched the Animatrix before I saw the movies - they stood on their own and, really, told me nothing about the movie other than the universe it was taking place in. Watching those made me want to watch the movies. As advertising, it worked. It worked because I wanted to know more about the universe and the stories that lived inside that universe. I haven't talked to others about this really, but to me, the Animatrix is where I'm the most connected to that world and I enjoy them far more than the movies. (the reverse may be true for people that saw them after they saw the movies, I don't know)

I haven't played Enter the Matrix or looked into the comics, but I imagine that much like the Animatrix they stand on their own. They bring people into the universe which may entice them to dig deeper and find other pieces of it - so, theoretically, each piece advertises each additional piece.

But they don't, fully, stand alone. The things that happen in them, individually, spread throughout the various forms of media - The message being delivered in the Final Flight of the Osiris (Animatrix) is retrieved & delivered in Enter the Matrix (video game) and discussed in The Matrix Reloaded (movie). If you only watched the Movie, you didn't get the full picture. It didn't fully matter because you didn't have to see how that message made it to the crew, but for those that knew and saw it, it helped flesh out the universe and also add to the deeper message the authors were trying to make. (What's real? We're all connected. etc etc)

I don't mean to say that this much thought or interconnectedness goes in to all ARGs that run alongside tv shows and movies and I didn't play Fallen/Ocular Effect. But the point is that while it might not be directly touching the story that's taking place on screen, I don't think that we can just call them simple pieces of marketing. And making a slightly educated guess at the number of players, I would think the studio would have been most disappointed in the game if it was purely a marketing attempt. It was not an inexpensive effort and for the reach that it got, they probably did not have a great return on the investment. That may be why it ended in the way that it did - the marketing team might not have been on the same page as the storytellers and so when the numbers weren't coming in, they got frustrated. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen that and, if that was the case, it won't be the last.

[FLmutant]

Really good notes here, but thought I'd pop in a few more thoughts.

First, it is probably dangerous to make assumptions about games currently running (in terms of the topics in this thread.) While Metacortex was running, you might have mistaken it for a marketing ARG related to a new The Matrix property. Conversely, "Who is Benjamin Stove" didn't get branded with the sponsor until near the very end of the game (in part because educating about ethanol was a higher priority than branding it with General Motors.)

Second, there is probably less distinction between product marketing and entertainment marketing than you suspect (of course, maybe I see those similarities more, because my product marketing clients are always asking for entertainment marketing solutions and vice versa.) I agree, though, that there's a difference in objective between entertainment marketing and extending a fictional reality from another genre -- but personally, I'd put The Beast in the entertainment marketing (movie marketers are very focused on putting butts in seats and moving DVDs off the shelfs, financial activities) and Regenesis in the extended universe categories (where the behavior goals are less likely to involve opening your wallet.)

All that said, no ARG is really a marketing campaign in the classic sense: Art of the Heist wasn't trying to sell Audis to Unfiction members. They are branded entertainment experiences in really the most classic sense of that term, hopefully invoking the relationship between soap manufacturers and soap operas, or Mutual of Ohama and "Wild Kingdom", or the way Home Depot provides the funding for "Trading Spaces". The whole dynamic falls apart of they are unentertaining: then they become just marketing.

Which means another way you could slice up the marketing ARGs from the non-marketing ARGs might be based upon who, at the end of the day, owns the intellectual property of the ARG. You end up with three piles: ones that were a work-for-hire where the sponsor/funder owns the game (corporate ARGs); ones that really don't care about intellectual property and business models (grassroots ARGs); and ones that are trying to build an independent business out of the platform (property ARGs.)

Like any genre in its early days, those first two categories are the most populated -- some artists get patrons, some artists do without. The third category is the most sparsely populated (Perplex City and a few minor others), but probably the most critical one to get growing (from the POV of the whole ARG community) so that ARGing is seen as a subtype of storytelling and entertaining instead of as subtype of marketing or advertising.

[Yxkull]

Thanks