Everyone who was paying attention knew that the sequel to Halo would be big. But Bungie was not content to just let the game disseminate itself to the masses through traditional means. They turned to a company called 42 Entertainment to craft an immersive, viral ad campaign that helped bring Halo into people’s houses by getting gamers out of the house. Thus was spawned the first alternate reality game (ARG) based on a blockbuster video game, ilovebees.

If you’ve never heard of this before now, this Wikipedia article should get you up to speed. Essentially, an ARG is an interactive marketing device used by media producers to build up hype for their products. Participants must collectively collect clues and solve puzzles to advance a story that relates to the game/movie/show. Here is where the “alternate reality” comes in. People participate in ways that go beyond conventional gaming. Or more accurately, they must participate in a variety of older genres of games in support of electronic media. Activities include decryption, pattern detection, deduction, mathematical reasoning, and hide-and-seek. After solving puzzles, players had to find the right pay phone, enter a code, and listen to the next segment of the Ilovebees’s radio drama. The recording would then be made available to all participants via audio files on the main web site.



This application of mixed media marketing to the Halo franchise expands the game’s universe by introducing supplementary story, and it seduces fans by giving them a feeling of agency as they explore an ancillary aspect of the game’s world. People don’t have to access Halo through the Master Chief avatar; they can contribute directly, collectively, by solving puzzles and unlocking backstory. Traditional forms of expanded canon like novelizations and fanfiction may tell compelling stories sometimes, but they don’t integrate the video game’s sense of interactivity. In that way, ARGs introduce different elements that go beyond the source material’s parameters.

However, I can’t decide how I feel about the success of ARGs. At their core, they exist to promote a product. It’s like edutainment except the message is provided by a marketing team instead of a school board. I’m spending my time and effort to invest myself in a product that someone wants me to buy. And another thing: the structure of the game reeks of casual gaming: work with other people at your own pace, do what you enjoy doing and let someone else do the stuff you don’t like. After all, there has to be someone out there who enjoys combing through lines of code to find an irregular five-digit string, right? Is a game worth playing if I have to wait weeks for updates, only to find out that I am either not interested in, not capable of doing, or not skilled at the next puzzle?

But I have to critique those reactions, because I know that there’s some bullshit there. If I have the time to troll around the Internet, read through countless wiki entries and forum posts, and work on a puzzle that would make Professor Layton’s testes shrivel, how much is my time really worth? Not much. And I can’t really muster much ire about a marketing company making money on an ARG. They provide nominally cheap entertainment, just like the companies that contract them to run the campaign. If the game is entertaining, they did a good job, and I may feel more inclined to purchase the related product. Hell, I was probably going to buy the product anyway, and the ARG only helped keep me interested. I would rather not use this post to set forth a definitive judgment on alternate reality gaming. I’m more interested in examining the reasons people play (or refrain from playing) and how this example of Web 2.0 advertising attempts to redefine advertising, gaming, and the consumer’s role in the development of media. It would be nice to think of ARGs as revolutionary means of breaking the old mode of passive absorption, but I’m afraid the reality falls short of the ideal. What are your thoughts, Dtoiders? Have you joined any ARGs? Does the idea sound promising?