Second Life has made people familiar with virtual world, but one of the presentations at the TV Un-festival was about Meigeist, an alternate reality game bringing together blogs, online video and even eBay auctions with real world interaction. Licorice Film wanted to experiment with different ways to tell a multimedia story across the web.
Now, Hazel Grian, one of the creators of the game is working on Bebo's Kate Modern project.
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One thing that struck me in the presentation was the amount of time and effort the team at Licorice Film put into interaction.
It was a full time job for them e-mailing people, sending messages in the post and even having an eBay auction for items that were clues to the games. They rang up people and asked them to perform specific tasks. They wanted to keep up the level of interactivity. Hazel and John Williams did most of this outreach on their own. It was a lot of heavy lifting, but it helped Meigeist become the largest non-commercially funded alternate reality game in the UK.
All of the main characters had blogs such as Eva McGill. The characters had video and text posts that were backdated.
The villains in this interactive world were KenKon. They wanted to kidnap Eva because she had special powers. Participants were asked to solve problems to break through the security systems at KenKon.
The story had clues sprinkled all over the web including a couple of conspiracy theorists at a site called Timehole. "They were a bit like the Greek chorus," the game developers said.
The players were about a 50-50 split of men and women, and they weren't just young players. A strong sense of community developed around the game. They had '30,000 separate internet addresses logged' from all over the world. Some of those internet addresses could have been the same users logging in at different times. Someone in the audience was really involved in the game and said that people would also communicate via online chat using IRC. They broke up the problems for solving so that "crossword geeks would look for clues and HTML geeks would look in the webpage code", he said.
Some of the players were so dedicated that they played for three to four hours each night. Players would communicate on a forum on ARGNet - Alternate Reality Gaming Network.
They spent £30,000 for a 10-month project.
Rachel Clarke, who was attending the conference and is a Digital Strategist with JWT New York said that Unfiction is holding a conference in New York later this year for agencies who want to advertise in these games and developers of these games. (She also has a very thorough blog post of Hazel and John's talk).
Rachel said that CourtTV in the United States run very successful alternate reality games. This year, over 8 days, the Save My Husband ARG attracted 30,000 players. Not everything went smoothly, the bloggers at Behind the Buzz said:
Unfortunately the game makers, Deep Focus in this case, Court TV or the other agencies, underestimated the skill and passion that is out there. Very early on in the game, the URL structure of the site was discovered and all the daily videos were revealed.
It sounds like they were a victim of their own success
Kate Modern and Bebo
Hazel Grian is now working on Kate Modern, a lonelygirl15 type project with social networking site Bebo. She says it is not an alternate reality game as much as an interactive drama programme ala Heroes.
The Kate Modern project has some big backers including Orange, Proctor & Gamble and Microsoft. Bebo hopes that this will be another way that advertisers can connect with their users. Mark Sage on 1to1media.com describes the novel ad strategy:
Bebo's Kate Modern also takes product placement to another level. She can chat about a specific sponsor's product with her friends on the network. She can find out what they like and don't like about it--and in the process she can test the whole concept of product placements.
Bebo is trying to differentiate itself in the crowded market of social networking sites as a content provider, just as MySpace has become known for music and Facebook for its application platform.
