David Emery Online

Alternate Reality Gaming

13 February 2007

Dan Dickinson points out that to promote the new Nine Inch Nails album – which I’m very much looking forward to – they running an Alternate Reality Game (ARG for short).

Alternate Reality Games – if you haven’t come across them before – normally take the form of one clue, placed fairly obviously in some publicly released material, which then takes the player to a web site. Then, by coming through the clues planted in that site you get moved on to more sites, each traditionally telling a part of a story. These clues aren’t your normal riddle type affairs either – ARGs are aimed at a community of players to solve, so are incredibly fiendish and use things like embedding text in the binary file of an image, or using morse code in an audio file.

The NIN game seems to be playing out in a very similar way to the ILoveBees game which promoted Halo 2, which is no surprise considering it’s being done by the same people. For iLoveBees the original clue was planted as a one frame url to the site in a trailer for the game, and for NIN they’ve rather nicely highlighted certain letters on the t-shirt for their forthcoming tour. With both the concept of a story line playing out across multiple sites is key, which has an appeal not unlike what I’ve previously written about regarding modern storytelling.

ARGs – for the right target demographic – are a brilliant way of hooking in to the already existing communities and bringing them into your marketing campaign. I don’t think I’ve seen any other form of advertising that inspires such interaction with consumers – with the ILoveBees game people ended up travelling across the country to get to phone boxes at a certain time to pick up a call. The demographic is key, though – they only work for a target audience that is very internet savvy, that already have forums set up with large communities, otherwise they just won’t work.