“ARG” vs. “Viral Campaign”

These days, if a show gives off even the slightest whiff of fantastic leanings, there’s bound to be a supporting ARG floating around the net as a way to generate buzz. IO9 recently published an article titled “The Argument Against ARGs” that goes over a few of the more popular offerings.

While the author has some good points about the games she describes, she also writes, “I feel like the ARG is just a fancier term for guerrilla marketing.” Honestly, I wouldn’t really categorize these as ARGs – they’re really more like “multimedia viral campaigns.” But if that’s where the vernacular is heading, so be it. I think the genre’s been around long enough that it’s fair to start loosely categorizing these games.

There are two obvious, general categories, and the first paragraph of the io9 article says just about everything there is to say, about the first type:

If you’re making a new piece of pop culture and you expect it to reach a mass audience, or even just a subcultural audience, you’d better have an ARG. What’s that, you say? ARG stands for “alternate reality game,” and it describes a wide range of interactive puzzles that generally involve getting you to visit various websites, call phone numbers, and go places in major cities in order to get free shit related to a movie, TV show and even occasionally a book. Why are popular titles like Dark Knight and Lost using ARGs? It’s more than just advertising: It’s a way to build an instant fan base without working at it for years like Star Trek did. But so far, ARGs have few of the benefits of a fandom, such as a friendly community of like-minded people; and they have all of the bad parts of fannish behavior like pointless obsessiveness and fetishization of dumb swag.

This first type is deliberately short-lived and revolves around promoting, as the article says, a film, television show or a book. It adds a supplemental layer to the thing it’s promoting – you can report crime in Gotham to the police or help Harvey Dent’s campaign for The Dark Knight game, or learn more about the mysterious Dharma Foundation in-between long-awaited episodes of Lost.

But at the same time, these stories are meant to lightly penetrate a large audience. They offer a few websites to play with, some email and text message alerts, and perhaps a few puzzles, and seem to be largely intended for an individual to be able to complete without any community effort.

And, that’s fine! I loved being able to click through the mysterious, shifting newspaper articles and internal airline documents that were posted to the Donnie Darko website, and the Memento special edition disc had the pre-film medical records and letters of the patient. All of these enhanced my engagement with the films, making them a lot more “real” in my head – which I understand could make me more enthusiastic about sharing the experience with other people.

But it’s not really fair to compare this type of game to other “alternate reality games” as a whole. I think this is probably why unFiction owner Sean Stacey recently switched to the term “chaotic fiction” as a way to describe the genre.

The games I am drawn to are plotted, require lots of community coordination plus individual attention from the characters to get things moving, and often generate a lot of player content (videos, photos, and so on). I’ll stop short of say that they exist just for the sake of themselves (the money’s got to come from somewhere), but I do appreciate that the games I play don’t really shove any sponsorship in your face.

Find The Lost Ring is a perfect example of this, as the only time we’ve seen anything slightly related to McDonald’s has been 1) a tiny golden arches logo on the end title screen of a trailer, 2) a McD’s press release, and 3) a Japanese McD’s website advertising the game generally. The characters haven’t been taking photos of themselves eating Big Macs, nor has the Hamburglar turned up as an ancient Greek oracle for us to contact. There are no prizes or McD’s swag, and we’re playing to…well, save the world.

(That said, Perplex City was my first real ARG experience, and it was created to be self-sustaining, through revenue generated by puzzle card sales. It finished out a two-year-long first season and couldn’t get a second one going, so I don’t know if that represents a realistic model for non-corporate-sponsored games or not – but it was certainly an interesting and beneficial experience.)

Ultimately I think it comes down to my own investment in these games, and their payoff. I would be hard-pressed to get out of the house for a Harvey Dent political picket (though if I was in the area I’d stop to take photos) – that game is over as soon as the film hits theatres. But I have no problems driving to Austin and Marfa to retrieve a Ring sculpture. The game may be over with the closing ceremony of the Olympics, but it will resonate a lot longer than that.

Anyway…I haven’t been particularly interested in any of the recent viral campaigns but there are a few upcoming that I’m into because of the subject matter:

- District 9, related to a film due out a year from now, directed by Peter Jackson’s protege
- Imagine The Possibilities, a game for the leaked TV show Fringe which is totally the new X-Files (go watch it right now if you haven’t already)
- Seek the Six, a viral campaign for the upcoming AMC six-part miniseries remake of The Prisoner (complete with “I AM NOT A NUMBER!”, Jesus as No. 6 and Gandalf as No. 2)

I will be keeping an eye on them as their action starts to unfold, but I might have to come up with a new category to keep them distinct from the other alternate reality games that I play.