Alternate Reality Games…
July 30th, 2004 at 3:44 pm
…have got to be the coolest form of marketing.
I’ve been following the ARG that’s going on for Halo 2 at ilovebees.com. (WikiPage)
It’s freaking incredible. Over the last ten days or so since I first stumbled onto the page I’ve been watching the *ahem* “buzz” grow. Within hours, sites like Slashdot.com, Wikipedia, and others have done pieces on this phenomenon. This is why I love the web. Information disseminates very, very quickly. Quickly enough, in fact, that major problems can be solved by the collective efforts of thousands of clever people.
This is basically the largest “brute force method” implementation I’ve seen. The obvious drawbacks are that there is no real central place for information. There is a wiki being developed as a repository for all ilovebees knowledge but not everyone knows about it. The main page at ilovebees.blogspot.com has a very active comment section where a lot of information from Bungie comes through, however, the comments are hard to follow most of the time and at least 50% of them are people saying
hey everybody i just figured this out! it’s a big marketing campaign for Halo 2!”
If there could be a SINGLE, easy to find site, with all of the info, then the whole process would become much more efficient.
In related news I e-mailed Biz Stone (THE Biz Stone) about this whole ARG thing and the fact that they have been using Blogger.com to create their marketing campaign. He actually wrote me back. It was a short e-mail that said:
I think it’s pretty cool.”
Short, but cool nonetheless. I love the internet. Bringing people together.
August 13th, 2004 at 5:01 pm
Hey,
I know you’ve found the Wiki for ILB, but have you also been to http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/ or seen the #beekeepers channel at irc.chat-solutions.org? #bk is always full of people wanting to discuss every last detail until your brain bursts. And Unfiction has just about every piece of information and speculation you could want. The moderators at UF have done a great job keep the fourms organized and not allowing all the stupid “dudez this is just a Halo ploy” comments. They know all about ARGs and how to play them and how to keep people from acting like complete idiots (at least in their fourms.)
August 14th, 2004 at 4:23 pm
Thank you. I probably should spend more time at unforums. I’ve perused them casually but mostly I’ve been too lazy and have just relied on netninja and other places to summarize for me.
I’m very new to irc but #beekeepers is teaching me alot about how use it. I’m GloryFish when I’m on.
Thanks again. :)