Trendsurfing: Alternate reality gaming (The Times)
By David Rowan
Computer games? So last year. The new buzz surrounds games that draw you in through anonymous phone calls, urban treasure hunts, text messages, coded newspaper ads, TV clips - oh, and a few thousand others over the internet. These "alternate reality" games weave intricate fictional plots to absorb players for weeks or months at a time. And now, all of a sudden, they seem to be hitting the mainstream.
Adrian Hon should know. Hon, 22, spent much of the autumn distracted by I Love Bees, a vast alternate reality game (or ARG) in which players worked together to save 26th-century Earth from aliens. There were clues at the ilovebees.com website, of course, but the plot was also advanced by "real life events" such as staged calls to public payphones. "You were given a phone's GPS location and a prearranged time, and when it rang you'd say a password to move the story forward," Hon explains. "We eventually found our phone on Dean Street in Soho. A dozen people had been turning up every day waiting for that call."
I Love Bees turned out to be an elaborate promotion for Microsoft's Xbox game, Halo 2. But Hon isn't bothered by its underlying commercial goal. "People say, 'Oh, you're being used by marketers,' but does it really matter if a well-written game is designed to sell you something? TV's full of adverts, but you can still enjoy watching ER."
Besides, Hon is betting on ARGs for his own future prosperity. In August, he gave up his neuroscience PhD at Oxford to help set up a London-based business entirely focused on writing these interactive fictions. Its first game, whose sponsor he won't reveal, will go live early next year. It is called Perplex City, and already its website offers tantalising clues to lure prospective players: "My people have lost something whose value to us is immeasurable," pleads a desperate letter from the Perplex City Academy. "There is compelling evidence that an unknown party has taken [it] and concealed it somewhere in your world. The finder will be awarded Perplex City’s highest honour and receive a substantial financial reward ..."
What makes these games so compelling is their many-layered complex plots, which move from e-mail clues to hunts for CDs hidden in library books. Perplex City's teaser campaign even had a teaser campaign of its own. Back in March, a mysterious coded job ad appeared in Marketing Week. "GC'VC MVCZOEBJ Z MLFAUCOCUK BCG OKAC LR JZFC", it stated - which patient readers deciphered to mean "We're creating a completely new type of game". Another encrypted phrase led to a mysterious website for "Project Syzygy", built by Hon. Some presumed it was an MI5 recruitment challenge.
In fact, Hon is a "puppet master" - the gamers' term for those plotting the action. He was first drawn to the genre three years ago, when Steven Spielberg used an alternate reality game to promote his film Artificial Intelligence: AI. Since then, interest has exploded, with dozens of games challenging thousands of simultaneous players across both real and virtual environments. Nor are they just teenagers: a third of I Love Bees' players were over 30.
"It's a new kind of entertainment that's only become possible with today's level of internet and mobile phone penetration," Hon says. "That lets you tell a different type of story that ultimately involves hundreds of thousands of people." Alternate reality gaming, he reflects, "is currently where cinema was in 1903. And in Britain especially, we're about to see it take off."
(The Times, London, November 29 2004)
Computer games? So last year. The new buzz surrounds games that draw you in through anonymous phone calls, urban treasure hunts, text messages, coded newspaper ads, TV clips - oh, and a few thousand others over the internet. These "alternate reality" games weave intricate fictional plots to absorb players for weeks or months at a time. And now, all of a sudden, they seem to be hitting the mainstream.
Adrian Hon should know. Hon, 22, spent much of the autumn distracted by I Love Bees, a vast alternate reality game (or ARG) in which players worked together to save 26th-century Earth from aliens. There were clues at the ilovebees.com website, of course, but the plot was also advanced by "real life events" such as staged calls to public payphones. "You were given a phone's GPS location and a prearranged time, and when it rang you'd say a password to move the story forward," Hon explains. "We eventually found our phone on Dean Street in Soho. A dozen people had been turning up every day waiting for that call."
I Love Bees turned out to be an elaborate promotion for Microsoft's Xbox game, Halo 2. But Hon isn't bothered by its underlying commercial goal. "People say, 'Oh, you're being used by marketers,' but does it really matter if a well-written game is designed to sell you something? TV's full of adverts, but you can still enjoy watching ER."
Besides, Hon is betting on ARGs for his own future prosperity. In August, he gave up his neuroscience PhD at Oxford to help set up a London-based business entirely focused on writing these interactive fictions. Its first game, whose sponsor he won't reveal, will go live early next year. It is called Perplex City, and already its website offers tantalising clues to lure prospective players: "My people have lost something whose value to us is immeasurable," pleads a desperate letter from the Perplex City Academy. "There is compelling evidence that an unknown party has taken [it] and concealed it somewhere in your world. The finder will be awarded Perplex City’s highest honour and receive a substantial financial reward ..."
What makes these games so compelling is their many-layered complex plots, which move from e-mail clues to hunts for CDs hidden in library books. Perplex City's teaser campaign even had a teaser campaign of its own. Back in March, a mysterious coded job ad appeared in Marketing Week. "GC'VC MVCZOEBJ Z MLFAUCOCUK BCG OKAC LR JZFC", it stated - which patient readers deciphered to mean "We're creating a completely new type of game". Another encrypted phrase led to a mysterious website for "Project Syzygy", built by Hon. Some presumed it was an MI5 recruitment challenge.
In fact, Hon is a "puppet master" - the gamers' term for those plotting the action. He was first drawn to the genre three years ago, when Steven Spielberg used an alternate reality game to promote his film Artificial Intelligence: AI. Since then, interest has exploded, with dozens of games challenging thousands of simultaneous players across both real and virtual environments. Nor are they just teenagers: a third of I Love Bees' players were over 30.
"It's a new kind of entertainment that's only become possible with today's level of internet and mobile phone penetration," Hon says. "That lets you tell a different type of story that ultimately involves hundreds of thousands of people." Alternate reality gaming, he reflects, "is currently where cinema was in 1903. And in Britain especially, we're about to see it take off."
(The Times, London, November 29 2004)
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