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A Fond Farewell to “This Is Not A Game”

February 6, 2012 / Michael Andersen

This Is Not A Game. This seemingly simple mantra, coined by a collective of Microsoft Game Studios employees, has served as a rallying cry for alternate reality gaming fans and developers alike. And yet, it is also one of the most misunderstood aspects of the genre. As alternate reality games have evolved, so too has its nomenclature: puppetmasters have gradually given way to game developers and transmedia producers, and “this is not a game” itself has fallen into disuse. Perhaps it’s time to make the term’s retirement official.

Everything Starts with The Beast
The Beast was not the first alternate reality game: the term was coined months after the game’s conclusion, with the launch of Lockjaw. Similarly, promotional campaigns for The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project introduced many of the storytelling elements that would later be embraced by the genre. What sets The Beast apart were its players, who referred to themselves as Cloudmakers.

Jay Bushman, a former Cloudmaker who now works at Fourth Wall Studios, compares The Beast to the Sex Pistols’ concert at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976. There were only around forty people in attendance that night, but something magical happened, and those few attendees went on to form Joy Division, The Smiths, The Fall, and The Buzzcocks, creating a renaissance for the genre. The Beast has sent similar ripples through the community as Cloudmakers and developers alike have gone on to found many of the companies and resources dedicated to the genre. And one of those ripples was the phrase “this is not a game.”

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Legends of Alcatraz Takes Fox’s New Series to The Rock

January 20, 2012 / Mildred I Lewis

Image courtesy of Geoff May at Wikibruce

On Monday, January 16, Alcatraz premiered on Fox. The time travelling drama focuses on the mysterious disappearance of 256 prisoners and 46 guards from Alcatraz in 1963. In 2012, the inmates suddenly begin to return. To kick off the premiere, Fox partnered with Ford to produce Legends of Alcatraz, an alternate reality game set to run throughout the show’s first season.

Approximately a week before the show’s premiere, a number of blogs including /Film, Collider, ComingSoon.net, The L.A. Times’ Hero Complex, Wikibruce, andÂ 5.0 Mustang Magazine started receiving mysterious metal boxes containing a series of artifacts offering a glimpse into the world of Alcatraz. Circled letters on one of the pages, a magazine clipping, led to the LegendsofAlcatraz.com website. Ford’s promotion of the 2013 Mustang throughout the campaign so far is overt: one of the newspaper clippings received by bloggers promoted a Mustang commercial that aired during the series premiere, while the Legends of AlcatrazÂ url redirects to a url prominently featuring Ford branding.

The first puzzle references the notorious 1950 Alcatraz Spaghetti Riot. Solving this puzzle, sends viewers to GPS coordinates for the first drop or live event, set to commence next weekend at Alcatraz between January 27th and 29th. Viewers are directed to the alcatrazlegends Twitter account for additional puzzles.

2011 Year in Review: The Final Chapter

January 11, 2012 / Michael Andersen

In 2011, I tried an experiment: rather than write a single article attempting to sum up the year in alternate reality games, I’d split the daunting task up into four parts and pen my thoughts as the year progressed. This is the final installment in that series, covering the final quarter of the year: if you’d rather begin at the beginning, feel free to do so.

Looking back at the year as a whole, 2011 was defined by the experimentation that took place in the realm of alternate reality games. While the puzzle-ridden romps through conspiracy theories that Ian Bogost so cleverly lambasted in his Cow ClickARG are still a staple of the industry, game developers are experimenting with new models of storytelling, gameplay, and revenue generation to create sustainable projects and business models alike.

Greater Definition in the Industry
Until recently, meetups for people involved in alternate reality games and transmedia storytelling centered around conferences, with gatherings at events like ARGFest, Power to the Pixel, DIY Days, Futures of Entertainment, and SXSW. This year, StoryWorld joined the list with a strong first conference that included its own alternate reality game, Zoetrap, that used a custom-built app for the conference to guide conference attendees through an occult mystery as seen through the cellphone of a missing person. While these events continue to bring fans and creators together, an alternate method of discussion has grown in prominence in recent months. Local meetup groups are increasingly springing up around the world to provide more frequent opportunities to discuss the state of the industry.

The New York and Los Angeles meetups in particular have transformed from informal get-togethers to entities in their own right, boasting hundreds of members: the New York meetup has incorporated as StoryCode, while the LA group launched a website aiming to provide resources and news for the community. However, groups have formed in cities including Toronto, Austin, Vancouver, Paris, and SÃ£o Paulo.

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Reality: Transforming USC Film Studentsâ€™ Freshman Year Into an Addictive Game

December 29, 2011 / Nathan Maton

Image courtesy of Ben Chance

By Nathan Maton and Rebecca Thomas

School changed this year for the majority of freshman at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Driven, talented future media makers normally waited until their sophomore year to produce any major media through the program, but this year USC partnered with Ph.D. candidate Jeff Watson to produce Reality, an alternate reality game focused on media creation.

Reality, which just completed its first season, is one part trading card game, one part media creation tool, and one part web portal. Three hundred unique cards, color-coded by type and designed to fit together, were handed out to students who unraveled a series of clues leading to the gameâ€™s secret campus headquarters or tucked away for discovery as the game progressed. As students discovered other students who were playing, they made “deals” by trading or pooling cards that led to collaborative projects and then published their work to Realityâ€™s web portal so other students could rate and review the projects. Winning projects earned interesting rewards, like meeting industry professionals, for the creators.

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World Gold Council Takes Lost Ring Hunt to Twitter

December 25, 2011 / Michael Andersen

On Miranda’s recent vacation to New York City, she lost her gold wedding band in Times Square. And she’s so desperate to recover the band, she’s offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to its safe return. Miranda is encouraging good samaritans across the country to turn to Twitter to help her in her search.

Miranda’s lost ring is part of the Lost Ring Hunt, an interactive contest sponsored by the World Gold Council. Starting tomorrow, a billboard in Times Square will display Miranda’s desperate plea, kicking off an adventure that will have both New Yorkers and online participants interacting with the characters to uncover clues leading to the ring’s location. And while the missing ring might not be real, the reward most certainly is: the first person to submit the proper response to the email address disclosed though the story will win a $5,000 cash prize and a trip for 2 days and 1 night in New York City to participate in a promotional shoot for the campaign.

Interested in following along? Keep an eye on the game’s Twitter account, LostGoldRing, as well as the Gold Ring Hunt tab on the World Gold Council’s Facebook page, which houses the official rules for the contest. And if you’re in the area on Boxing Day, feel free to take to the streets and see what information you can drum up on Miranda’s lost ring.

Mouth Taped Shut Wraps Up Final Package

December 12, 2011 / Mildred I Lewis

Image by D. Christensen

Columbia Pictures’ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will have its wide-release premiere on December 21st alongside two other blockbuster films, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the UnicornÂ and Mission Impossible â€“ Ghost Protocol. Embracing its self-proclaimed status as the “feel-bad” movie of the season, David Fincher’s adaptation of the best-selling Stieg Larsson novels developed an elegiac, mysterious transmedia campaign to help break through the clutter centering around the Tumblr account, Mouth Taped Shut. The campaign came to a conclusion last week, rewarding players who saw it through to the end with free advance screenings of the film in select cities.

A number of websites branched off of the Mouth Taped Shut tumblr account, most strikinglyÂ What is Hidden in Snow, a collection of photographs featuringÂ 47 artifactsÂ from the film recovered by players over the course of the campaign. The site takes itsÂ name from a translated Swedish proverb, â€œWhat is Hidden in Snow, Comes Forth in the Thaw,â€Â and captures the filmâ€™s central mystery. In the movie, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires Millennium journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) along with investigator and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) to find out what happened to his niece Harriet. Harriet was murdered 40 years before the start of the movie. Her body was never found. Vanger has since received a beautifully mounted framed flower from the dead young woman each year on his birthday.