Alternate Reality Games

Promotion and Participatory Culture

Stephanie Janes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032338125
• eBook ISBN: 9781351174725
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Using textual analysis, interviews with game designers, audience surveys, and close analysis of player forum discussion, this book examines the unique nature of the producer/consumer relationship within promotional Alternate Reality Games (ARGs).

Historically, ARGs are rooted in advertising as much as they are in narrative storytelling. As designers often have to respond to player actions as the game progresses, players can have an impact on the storyline, on character behaviour, and potentially on the final resolution of the narrative. This book explores how both media consumers and producers are responding to this new reconfiguration of the producer/consumer/prosumer dynamic in order to better understand the diverse advertising experiences available to media audiences today.

With a focus on participatory culture and the political economy of promotional communications, this in-depth analysis of ARGs will appeal to academics and researchers in the fields of games, film, advertising, and media and cultural studies.

1 Promotional ARGs in context

ARGs are not well-known pieces of kit in the promotional toolbox, perhaps due to their brief lifespan. Their use in marketing campaigns began in 2000, peaking towards the end of the decade. This was significantly affected by the 2008 financial crisis, high running costs, diminishing novelty, and the increasing dominance of cheaper modes of participatory marketing through well-established social media networks. This chapter starts by outlining the structure, rules, and target audiences for promotional ARGs. It then sets the games in a clearer historical context of shifting modes of spectatorship and marketing practices. On the way it introduces three case studies and charts the rise and fall of the genre between 2000 and 2010.

Structures and rules of play

This book does not aim to provide a detailed breakdown of ARG design, but a brief introduction to key elements and terms involved may help navigate the case studies.¹Askwith (2006: 10) highlights several formal characteristics of ARGs:

1. 1 Unfold across multiple media platforms and real-life spaces
2. 2 Offer an interactive, dispersed narrative experience
3. 3 Require player-participants to reconstruct the dispersed narrative
4. 4 Often refuse to acknowledge themselves as games (“This Is Not A Game”)
5. 5 Often have no clear rules or guidelines
6. 6 Often require players to solve difficult challenges or puzzles to progress
7. 7 Often encourage/require the formation of collaborative communities

Transmedia designer Christy Dena adds that ARGs:

1. 1 Respond to player activities through human intervention by “puppetmasters”
2. 2 Are played in real time
   (Dena cited in Askwith 2006: 10)

The start of the game is referred to as the ‘rabbit hole’, a nod to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the potential oddities of the storyworld into which players are about to tumble. In promotional ARGs for films, this is often hidden in a trailer, poster, official website, or other piece of more traditional marketing. The ensuing narrative usually revolves around a mystery, set in the world of the film, involving events that occur chronologically before or after the film’s narrative. In many cases to solve the mystery, you have to see the film. For example, Cloverfield’s ARG narrative took players up to the moments before the film’s opening sequence, so players essentially had to buy a ticket to find out what happened next.

To push the narrative forward, players must solve puzzles and crack clues of varying styles and difficulty. These can be online (e.g. Flash games, deciphering website passwords) or offline (e.g. large-scale scavenger hunts). Several live events in The Beast and WhySoSerious required players to solve online puzzles to direct players to real-life locations. Live events were highly prized by players and were often built in as finales (see Year Zero [42 Entertainment 2007] and Flynn Lives [42 Entertainment 2009]).²

Puzzles are deliberately too complex for one person to complete; they require the collaborative work of the hive mind, or what Jenkins might call the ‘knowledge community’ (2006: 57). As a result, online communities gather in forums like Unfiction.com. Where there is already a strong fan following (e.g. The Dark Knight), multiple player communities can spring up within existing forums, which can be difficult to manage from a producer perspective. As the narrative progresses, players can contact characters and companies in the game via email, phone call, and by post. In-game characters can contact players in the same way. These could be characters established in the film (Commissioner Gordon in The Dark Knight) or new characters specifically developed for the game who never appear in the film (Josh Minker in Super 8). The games play out in real time over anything between 3 and 18 months before release. This results in a unique relationship between players and puppetmasters (PMs). PMs must respond quickly to players’ actions (or inactions) to keep the game on track, adjusting puzzles, characters, and narrative details. Their real-time, experiential nature gives ARGs a distinctly short shelf life, despite their lengthy duration.³

Games usually end with the release of the film, but can continue beyond. Cloverfield’s ARG was revived by the DVD release as players continued to look for clues in the film. The game encouraged a mode of ‘forensic fandom’ (Mittell 2009) as viewers paused, rewound, and replayed the DVD to uncover the origins of the creature that destroyed Manhattan – something neither the film nor ARG explicitly addressed. Whether by design or accident, this enabled the game to drive DVD sales post-release as well as encouraging repeat cinema viewings.

Target audiences

The complexities of ARGs might suggest they appeal only to niche audiences willing to invest the time and effort. It is also tempting to think they appeal primarily to a male adolescent demographic. This can be off-putting for media companies wishing to reach wider audiences, yet Michael Smith (CEO of Mind Candy) claimed participants in Perplex City (Mind Candy 2005–2007) included ‘plenty of people over 50 years old, and we know that about half of the people who play the game are women’ (Smith cited in Askwith 2006: 21).

Askwith (2006) identifies five kinds of ARG players: organisers, hunters, detectives, lurkers, and rubberneckers. The first three are actively involved in puzzle solving and moving the narrative forward, whereas lurkers follow the action without posting. Rubberneckers offer ideas or comments on forums but rarely interact with characters or register their details with in-game websites. Approximately 76% of registered Unfiction players had never or rarely posted on the forums. These players were designated as lurkers, leaving 23% of the community labelled ‘active’ and only 1% ‘highly active’ (Figure 1.1). Unfiction estimates the ratio between active players and lurkers to be between 1:5 and 1:20, comprising the majority of an ARG’s audience (Unfiction 2011).

Lee emphasises the importance of designing ARGs that engage players on multiple levels (Lee cited in Irwin 2007), envisaging the audience as an inverse triangle:

The largest broad part at the top is the very, very casual player. There are more of them than anyone else. So, we try to make sure there is at least some easy way into every game we create – a 2–10 minute experience that is rewarding and fun and will hopefully encourage you to come back… .

Table 1.1Unfiction player community activity levels

Player Category	Number of Players	% of Unfiction Community
Lurkers (0–10 posts)	26,074	76%
Active (11–500 posts)	7,600	23%
Highly Active (500+ posts)	317	1%

The middle part is not nearly as populated as the top. Those guys are going to maybe check in every week, every two weeks. We try to make sure they have plenty to do whenever they want to experience it… .

And then the very tip of the triangle. Those are the crazy guys – the hardcore guys… . And the cool thing about this pyramid is there’s a really lovely side effect where the bottom part entertains the top parts… . And that’s just as entertaining. That’s like reality TV right there … but in order for any one of our experiences to be successful we have to have some mechanism to allow all three of those kinds of players.

(Lee cited in Irwin 2007)

There is a sense of dependency here, yet other designers reflected that media companies were not always interested in reaching the core ARG community, but in ‘the ripples that come from what you guys do … the people that are lurkers or are reading the news coverage’ (Clark 2007). These ripples cannot exist without engaging ‘hardcore’ players, but this balance is difficult to strike and 2- to 10-minute experiences are significantly cheaper to run than the complicated experiences required to entertain the tip of the triangle.

Rules

There are few set ‘rules’ to ARGs, but some have developed organically between players and PMs as the genre has evolved, making it somewhat co-creative from inception. Players and PMs agree to adhere to the ‘This Is Not A Game’ aesthetic (TINAG), whereby the game never acknowledges itself as a game. As much a philosophy as a set of aesthetic guidelines, TINAG requires websites to be convincingly real, phone numbers to actually work, characters to be referred to as if they exist in real life.⁴ If PMs have a character do something out of turn to facilitate a narrative twist, the sense of immersion is lost. PMs may not participate in forum conversations as themselves, under pseudonyms, or as characters until the game has ended. If players require further clues, these should be delivered ‘in game’ rather than through direct forum messages. Posing as characters in an attempt to influence players or ‘hijack’ the game is forbidden. These rules were eventually formalised on Unfiction and had implications for the relationship between players and PMs. If either side was unable to trust the other to respond appropriately, the game itself became unplayable – for example, if players cheated their way through puzzles or PMs created impossibly difficult puzzles. One PM put this in a neat sporting analogy:

It’s very much like a tennis match … when that PM team … instead of hitting the tennis ball back they hit a bowling ball, it doesn’t make sense… . If you can’t hit the ball back within the court area then players can’t play your game.

(Kerr 2007)

This mutual trust is necessary to maintain TINAG. Other media may implicitly require audiences to suspend disbelief, but few set this requirement out so explicitly. ARGs demand more than a suspension of disbelief; they ask players to act upon it, to communicate with characters and follow their instructions as if they were real and as if they matter. To do so requires emotional investment and trust – the greater the investment, the greater the fallout if this proves foolhardy or does not provide an enjoyable experience in return:

The whole point of an ARG is to engage the audience member in this bizarre ‘trust dance’, this concept where they want desperately to believe that this stuff is real because it makes it more fun, and the role of an ARG is to do everything in its power to make them not feel stupid about taking that leap with us.

(Lee cited in Siegel 2006)

PMs acknowledged and respected this emotional engagement from players:

You have to believe that the people who are creating the game you’re spending so much time on aren’t going to muck you about and play tricks on you, like creating a puzzle that’s impossible to solve … you are abusing people’s trust.

(Hon 2012)

Players demonstrated reciprocal concerns about solving puzzles in a ‘proper’ manner. ‘Brute force’ approaches to puzzle solving were discouraged or even condemned on forums. This dynamic might prompt us to reconsider how we conceptualise the relationship between producers and consumers of participatory promotional media. This new configu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Promotional ARGs in context
• 2 ARGs as marketing
• 3 The promise of participation
• 4 Promotional ARGs and digital labour
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index