ARGhhhh.
By Dan O'Connor August 6th, 2008
In Stories
Is it time for a moritorium on Alternative Reality Games? Io9, the sci-fi arm of the Gawker Media empire, 
seems to think so. Incensed with the (indisputable) poorness of the Dark Knight ARG, Io9 editor Annalee Newitz and her colleagues decided to invent an ARG that was so quiveringly generic, people would think it was related to pretty much any or all of the superhero movies coming out in the next year. The game, ‘You Are Being Decieved’ had all the usual hallmarks - a fake blog, a phone number to call for other clues, shadowy corporations and an apparent global conspiracy. They even handed out suitably mysterious postcards at ComicCon to generate interest.
It was a cute idea and, as the blog post confessing to the whole thing explains, it was doomed to failure. Nobody played, nobody linked to the blog and, crucially, no-one was inspired enough to generate any of their own digital content about ‘Are You Being Deceived’. As Newitz notes, ARGs require just as much money, time, and audience management as any other type of mass corporate branding. Her concluding insight into ARGs merits lengthy quotation:
“ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is. I don’t mean to disparage the cleverness of ARGs — a lot of them are terrifically fun. But the ARGs that get noticed at a media event like Comic-Con are always going to be the ones with lots of resources behind them. To create a “grassroots feeling,” you need to have a top-down corporation with wads of cash. So when you play an ARG associated with a commercial property, you are in some sense being deceived. You’re being made to feel as if you’ve discovered something, as if you’re part of a community spontaneously coming together to play at something, when in fact you’ve been targeted by an extremely well-funded marketing campaign.”
So, what do you think? Are ARGs really no different to the Daz doorstep challenge? Moreover, does Newitz point hold true for all supposedly ‘empowering’ consumer-generated-content campaigns?
1 olishaw // Aug 7, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I wonder if the article would have been different if their arg was successful,
ARG’s have their place, if they are being used to promote something commercial then they may well need more investment. But thats not to say a good idea wont just work on a limited budget
I still (want to) believe that an independent ARG could be started grassroots style
2 Dan O'Connor // Aug 7, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Hey, Oli - I hadn’t thought about that but you’re right; I imagine the tone would have been slightly different if people had started playing. I wonder though if that tone would have actually been ‘mild panic’ as Annalee and co. realised that a) they had interest and b) would now actually have to manage the damn thing with time and resources that they simply didn’t have. Part of me suspects that a certain element of confession-inducing obsolescence was built into their ARG.
That said, I agree that good ideas can work with limited budgets (see every interweb meme ever). For ARGs, however, the ‘budget’ constraint is time - for a grassroots ARG, someone/s would have to be willing to give up quite a bit of their time for free (not that this is without precedent online, ie: the lolbible), not to mention their creative energies. I’m not saying that they wouldn’t do that per se, but I wonder if such a person might be more likely to expand such energies storylining an MMPORG game (better support, quicker feedback etc.)?