Alternate Reality Gaming
January 10, 2008
Wired is one of those magazines that I always look forward to picking up at the bookstore. I suppose I really should get a subscription, but it’s nice to stumble upon the latest issue wherever I am. There’s without fail interesting content, but usually for me one stand-out article amongst all the others.
In Wired 16.01, "This buzz for you" is one such example. It features Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) who not only is one of my favorite artists, but just groks technology and the Internet in a way that few others of his industry do. The article discusses how Trent and 42 Entertainment developed and run an Alternate Reality Game as "marketing" for Year Zero (NIN’s latest album), but Reznor would like to make one thing perfectly clear – "it’s not f***ing marketing" – which is just a continuum in a long line experimentation his is known for against the "main stream" and corporatism.
Why does this article stand out for me? Putting aside the marketing/advertising factor (which interests me separately, so I’m going to write about on it’s own at some point), to me a lot of ARG’s rely on steganography in various ways to engage the players into a community working together and to slow the game down a little. Whereas finding a hidden message relies on the recipient knowing one exists, as well as where to look for it and how to decode it, such information is usually unavailable to those following the game; clues for the next stage of the game can be hidden anywhere and revealed at any time. Instead it relies on lots of people collaborating online, which with band like NIN and the veracity of their fans, easily numbers in the 100,000’s. Within this group its members effectively have "unlimited resources, unlimited time, and unlimited skills" – how Web 2.0 (3.0, n+1.0, whatever) is that! Through this "feature" the game can never be too "hard" because out there is someone (or group of people) that have what it takes (skills, resources, time, geographic location, etc) to solve any puzzle set, and if the game gets "stuck" or the players start heading in the wrong direction, it often only takes a very small nudge, via an idea from either the community or the game’s operators, to set things right again. Otherwise how, for example in this game, would someone know to run part of an MP3 file through a spectrum analyzer to slowly reveal a phone number? (as was part of this game). There’s a "security" theme to this as well that backs up the "security by obscurity doesn’t work" – eventually (based on the unlimited time, resources, etc, out there on the Internet) someone will stumble on the flaw/secret/backdoor, which could be sooner rather than later based on the "value" of the goal and the number of people attempting it (which in many ways is why Microsoft is such a target for hacks/viruses).
Alternate Reality Games certainly aren’t new – I remember taking part in The Nokia Game back in early 2000/2001 (and who else remembers "I love bees"?) – but it feels to me that this encapsulates a lot of what the future is going to look like. We already have concepts such as "crowd sourcing" and targeted advertising (with implicit privacy concerns), so this isn’t completely un-trodden territory. Where ARG’s and the ideas behind them do become interesting though is how they integrate personal entertainment, marketing, and community, along with the possibly of getting real-world problems/issues solved as part of the game. This has to be where "media" is headed – a move away from the passive entertainment (and its partnered advertising/marketing models) towards a much more engaged experience for both sides. For consumers as well as producers working together in the "new media" this is an interesting, and exciting, future.
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