io9 ran an interesting article yesterday about alternate reality games as marketing platforms, citing recent campaigns for The Dark Knight and Lost that had fans flitting around the web (and sometimes out in the real world) solving puzzles connected to the shows’ characters and storylines. “It’s more than just advertising,” writes Annalee Newitz. “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.” Her criticism gets more specific:
“ARGs seem to have no lives of their own—they feel like they exist solely to advertise another story… With a few notable exceptions, ARGs are basically treated like walk-in commercials a lot of the time. But commercials can’t really masquerade as games: It’s foolish for entertainment companies to assume that they can get audiences to forget that they’re being virally marketed to… Getting people to run around and do things is not the same as inviting an audience to enjoy a compelling narrative with a bunch of pals.”
Over at the Orbit Books blog, Alex Lencicki discusses book-related ARGs, focusing on the campaigns science-fiction author Jeff Somers created around his novels, The Electric Church and The Digital Plague. Those puzzle-narratives, Lencicki says, are “as much an extension of the world he’s created in the novel as a piece of marketing.” And while he acknowledges that authors can’t necessarily expect to be able to attract a crowd of ARG players on the level of the Dark Knight game, he says the world-building aspects of the game are a great platform to spotlight the unique elements of the author’s fictional creation. “And if [the games] are compelling enough,” Lencicki observes, “the dedicated groups of players who work to unlock the stories can become the book’s best advocates.”
What do you think?