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Of All the Gin Joints in All the World: Casablanca Game Goes Live

September 5, 2007 / Michael Andersen

After months of development and testing, the new social networking game Casablanca launches today. As a winner of mtvU and Cisco’s Digital Incubator 2.0 competition, the four NYU University students behind the game received a $30,000 grant towards the development of the game.

Set in the city of Casablanca during World War II, players are assigned roles working for the Resistance or Occupation forces. While Resistance forces are striving to create large networks of contacts, Occupation forces are attempting to infiltrate the Resistance cells. Resistance forces can check to see if their network is compromised seven times during the course of the game. NYU students engaged in the beta-test of the game went to extreme lengths to ensure the sanctity of their networks and communications, including the establishment of password-protected websites. Gameplay can proceed on the website as well as through a special text-messaging service.

The real appeal of Casablanca is its scalability. The crew behind Casablanca encourage groups to play Casablanca as an ice-breaker or for team-building, combining the gameplay with live meet-ups. Anyone interested in facilitating a local running of the game merely needs to contact the staff, load up the email addresses of prospective players onto the site, and choose the duration of the game. Promotional materials are available upon request.

ARGNet <3 PICNIC'07

September 4, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

For the second year in a row, ARGNet is pleased to be partnered with the PICNIC cross-media conference! PICNIC’07 takes place at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam from September 25th through the 29th, during which a wide variety of events and discussion will take place. This year’s festivities also include a Come Out and Play event — London and New York have also been COaP sites. Last year, Sean C. Stacey and Brooke Thompson represented ARGNet at the conference, and provided a number of articles outlining the presentations and events that took place at PICNIC’06, and Sean will be returning this year, so expect more of the same top-notch reporting as last year!

PICNIC at Night, one of the festival’s special features, is a series of concerts and exhibitions that include various aspects of cross-media entertainment, from live music by worldwide artists to virtual worlds and groundbreaking animation. These special evening events are sponsored by companies such as Red Bull and Heineken, as well as the Creative Commons organization, and should deliver enjoyable, entertaining experiences to attendees.

40,000:1–Find Kiyash at Burning Man

August 26, 2007 / Michael Andersen

Jane McGonigal is a busy woman. She has worked on award-winning alternate reality games including I Love Bees, Last Call Poker, and World Without Oil. Along with Ian Bogost, she introduced benevolent assassination through Cruel 2 B Kind to unsuspecting cities around the world. Independently and as a member of The Institute for the Future, Jane has published countless articles exploring alternate reality games and collaborative play.

And now, according to her blog, all she wants is our help finding her husband, Kiyash.

Jane’s husband will be attending Burning Man, an “annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” The event will be held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada from August 27th to September 3rd. Over 40,000 attendees are expected at the festival this year, so finding Kiyash will be a challenge. But then, the ARG community has faced tougher odds before.

Jane’s instructions tell potential participants of the Secret Burning Man Game to look for a six-foot-three man who will likely be wearing an orange jumpsuit, goggles, and/or a white muslin head wrap. Tell him that “Jane says hi” or something equally nice. Perhaps “Jane says you look dashing in your orange jumpsuit.”

And if you manage to beat the odds and find Kiyash, please leave us a comment with the details.

‘Cause Sooner Or Later, It’s Over…

August 20, 2007 / Geoff May

A recently leaked article, supposedly posted to Microsoft’s internal news site, appears to verify the dreaded truth — Halo 3’s Iris “spiral marketing campaign” has come to its official end. The article, which was posted to the Unfiction forums with permission from the author, reveals the end date of August 16th, which coincides with the opening of Iris’ fifth and final server, or “episode”. It also details the campaign’s goals, achievements, challenges and failures. Undoubtedly, the primary point of dissension this article raises is the challenge undertaken to provide a “low-key, low budget campaign [which] does more with less, whetting the appetite of the blockbuster video game’s fanatical followers.”

The article reveals that Iris was developed by “more than 50 people from 20 Microsoft teams [who] contributed time, coding expertise, and industry contacts.” The attempt was ultimately to provide a grand marketing scheme incurring little cost while attaining “critical mass” — defined in the article as getting “interview requests from The Wall Street Journal”. “It’s about breaking out of the hardcore and getting into the mainstream,” said Aaron Elliott, online marketing manager for Xbox Global Marketing (also listed as one of the ‘founders’ of the Society of the Ancients, an in-game organization that appeared at the beginning, but was never heard from again).

Strictly speaking, given the resources used to produce the campaign and the costs (or lack thereof) incurred, Iris may be considered an impressive success. However, if one includes the overall sentiment of the demographic that was actually actively playing or following Iris, one might say that their reach had exceeded their grasp. They seem to have ignored (or miscalculated) an inherent factor in the kind of campaign they were hoping to produce – most players had expectations, whether misplaced or not, of another I Love Bees. That potential was lost, and while the production may have been impressive to some, it failed dramatically in achieving what could have been achieved quite easily.

The Sweet Scent of Mystery

August 16, 2007 / Geoff May

Sarah Jessica Parker is probably one of the last people we’d expect to see in a web-based mystery, or “interactive fictional story”, let alone actually seeing a web-based game promoting a new perfume. However, Sarah’s new fragrance “Covet” is at the center of a game which begins at CaseOfTheCovetedBottle.com (also the perfume’s official website). The premise is this: “You must try to locate the missing bottle of Covet perfume and help prove that Sarah Jessica Parker has been framed for its disappearance. To do this, your goal is to identify the true mastermind behind the theft.”

The game works much like other recently run promotional campaigns where challenges or riddles are released based on a schedule, leading towards an end goal usually consisting of a challenge or draw for a grand prize. In this case, if you’re able to solve each of ten “lead challenges” released over a ten week period (the end date of the game is October 15), you’ll be entered into the grand prize drawing for $10,000, a trip for two to New York to attend Lucky Magazine’s Lucky Shops 2007, and of course a few Covet products. Numerous other secondary rewards are up for grabs, including weekly prize drawings, and prizes for two bonus challenges.

While The Case of the Coveted Bottle seems to follow in the footsteps of similar online ‘treasure hunt’ promotions, a few points stand out about this one. First, the How To Play guide is clear in encouraging community cooperation, even to the point of linking directly to the Unfiction forums as an example of a community to join. Secondly, in solving the weekly leads, not only are you entered into drawings, but the overall story and mystery is also advanced. The game is filled with opportunities to employ numerous research strategies, from googling for information and answers to interacting with characters in their blogs. The two bonus challenges encourage creativity by requiring players to make videos based on particular guidelines, and post them to MySpace or Youtube, where the winners will be chosen by popularity (votes and judging).

Network Outages

August 15, 2007 / Jonathan Waite

Through the course of today, ARGNet may or may not have been unavailable, or may have been slow or sluggish. Our host has had sporadic, random problems with their servers today, especially (we found, anyway) with their SQL servers. We apologize if the site was misbehaving for anyone earlier, but things seem to be fine now, so hopefully they have their problems fixed.