As promised, here's the article I wrote on the Alternate Reality Game phenomenon for this week's Technology section. For more from the developers of Vanishing Point, Microsoft's ARG campaign to promote the launch of their new OS Vista, head to The Daily Social where I published the full trasncript from an interview with 42 Entertainment's Joe DiNunzio a couple of weeks ago. Here's a snippet:
There are a couple of things that I can tell you very publicly are part of the secret sauce: Respect your audience. Know that you've got to create things that are going to be interesting and compelling to them and speak to them very directly.
The second thing is, never perpetrate a hoax. Never try to make something that's not real real. What we do is like every good form of entertainment: we're creating an opportunity to suspend disbelief, and that's fun. We're not trying to convince them of something that it is not. And that is an extraordinarily important rule because if you break that rule, you've broken that trust. You've created a conflict as opposed to an opportunity for conversation with your audience. Ultimately it reflects badly on you, it reflects badly on your client. It's just not a good thing.
As far as I know, there are no hidden clues in any of his comments. But you never know...
