I recently gave a talk for Wellington’s 5th Pecha Kucha Night at the (soon to be demolished) Overseas Terminal building…

I quickly realised that my chances of *explaining* what Alternate Reality Games, or even just what ‘The Lost Ring‘ was all about in 6 minutes & 40 seconds was futile. As a result, I just went for a scrapbook approach – here are a series of extraordinary experiences which came out of this game.

This means of course that if you’re not familiar with these forms of entertainment & collaboration you may be at a bit of a loss – but I hope you find it entertaining all the same…

If you’re interested in finding out more, I’d be happy to fill you in on the details over a beer, coffee or the interwebs.

Gen C don’t distinguish between the real and virtual world, it’s all one experience, so brands need to create narratives where the brand story builds and evolves across different platforms. Blockbuster movies have been creating ARG’s (Alternate Reality Games) to hype films for the past 5 years (The Dark Knight was a killer ARG), and brands like Audie ‘Art of the Heist’ have been dabbling in the space. According to wiki, an alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. The most famous ARG of 2008 was ‘The Lost Ring’ used to hype the Beijing Olympics and subtly sponsored by McDonalds. It was a truly global interactive experience to uncover a lost Olympic sport, with over 2million participants over its 6 month period. In the future, brands will need to create these multimedia experiences which engage Gen C across multiple channels and play to their need to compete and discover new cultural phenomenon.

The Lost Ring is a brand new ARG (which apparently stands for Alternative Reality Game) centred around the Beijing Olympics and jointly sponsored by the IOC and one of the 2008 Games’ official partners.

Bob is no expert in ARG’s and was informed about The Lost Ring by a colleague (thanks Liz), so decided to do some research. According to Liz:

“The internet is aflutter with rumours about a new alternate reality game…The Lost Ring began last week [Bob has a feeling this may be a little out of date], when certain gamers received a package in the post with a web address hidden in a ball of string.”

Intriguing…

Upon visiting the site – www.TheLostRing.com – you are shown a fantastic fantasy video (think Lord of the Rings meets ancient Greece) that sets a dramatic scene but gives few answers…

…so on a mission to find out more Bob found a post on Global voices which lead to the Virtual China blog, which happens to have an excellent introduction to the Game courtesy of Lyn Jeffery.

The Game is centred around eight main characters from China, Japan, Germany, Spain, US, UK, Brazil and France and the big idea is collaboration. These characters have super powers and mysterious pasts and are ‘played’ in real time online so that other players can interact with them – see their profile pages here.

So far there are apparently 15,000 people playing in China alone. According to Lyn:

“The game is designed to be impossible to make serious progress in unless you can figure out how to be part of a collective… It is fascinating to watch how this kind of highly emergent, non-rules-based, collaborative game is diffusing into China. In China, where this kind of gaming doesn’t exist, it’s hasn’t been so easy to engage a distributed community and link it up to a global community of players who mostly don’t speak Chinese.”

A number of issues face Chinese players, including language (much of the content is user generated, and so not necessarily provided in Chinese) cultural (Chinese gamers aren’t used to this kind of collaboration) and political (the Great Firewall prevents access to some resources that the players use, including The Lost Ring’s very own wiki). However Lyn observes:

“What seems to be happening, however, is that the translation problem is becoming a feature of the game, not a bug, which is perfect.  The community is self-organizing to deal with the communication problems, which appear to be most acute with the Chinese language materials.”

So it looks as if this by-product of the Olympics is building bridges of communication between the people of all countries, and particularly between them and Chinese people. That can only be a good thing.

Hier sind die ersten Hinweise:

Die Legende erzählt von einem verlorenen Ring – “The Lost Ring” – verborgen in den frühen Jahren des vergangenen Jahrhunderts. Es ist ein vergessenes Geheimnis.

Gelehrte, Historiker und auch Schatzjäger – keiner hat es bisher gefunden.

[via Papascott per Twitter]

Diese mysteriöse Geschichte könnte auch Martin Oetting interessieren, berufsbedingt sozusagen.

The Olympic Games are proving to be once more a huge marketing opportunity for new campaigns. McDonald’s, the world’s largest chain of fast food restaurants and official Olympic sponsor is proving it with a stylish alternate-reality game .

A while ago 50 players around the world received a box with clues in form of posters, postcards and cryptic messages. The theme was the 1920’s Olympic Games (in Antwerp, Belgium) and a mysterious disappearance.

March 3, 2008 : Find her…

August 4, 2008 : Save the world

(Save the cheerlader, save the world ? sorry wrong serial)

Anyway…

The following week, participants were able to visit the blog of the mysterious Ariadne, a young lady with a severe memory loss and an Esperanto tattoo written on the arm, who is apparently lost in Fellowship-of-the-Ring-the-movie kind of landscape.

Players have to search the internet for more clues on maps, Flickr Photos, You Tube videos and blogs… Ariadne is indeed not alone. Other individuals are lost as well : Diego from Argentina, Lucie from France, Noriko from Japan…

The scope of the game is quite unprecedented. All the blogs (and therefore clues) are in different languages. The characters claim they speak very little English but you can still communicate with them by email and get help from fellow players. A active community (let’s call it a fellowship, it only seems appropriate) is already keeping busy. A wiki has been created here.

The game is meant to end on the 24th of August for the Olympics closing ceremony, hinting that the big finale will probably take place in Beijing. McDonalds wouldn’t disclose any costs but an ARG campaign like that one is not really meant to be a real ROI. Not an immediate one at least. The scope of the campaign and the discretion of the brand might prove to be very effective on a long term especially with the youth market.

So far more than 150,000 players have started deciphering the message.

I just want to finish with the Terms of use for the LostRing Game : “You agree to immerse yourself in solving a global mystery and help us in our mission to bring the world together through play”

Let’s hope it finishes with less bloodshed than the Lord of the Ring Saga. I find the reference a bit disturbing considering the controversy growing around the choice of China for the Olympics.

Source : The Lost Ring, NY Times, Guardian, Avantgame, Despoiler, Wired

Jane McGonigal has been involved in just about all of the major net-based ARGs of the past few years, including I Love Bees, Last Call Poker and Cruel 2 B Kind.  She also turns out to be one of the main forces behind the latest ARG, The Lost Ring.

This is a little bit dated but since my fascination with ARGs is new this interview from CNet was to me.  Whole bunch of good insights.  Here’s a tidbit:

“I create games to change people’s everyday lives; games that let people use everyday technologies and spaces differently–more playfully, more socially, more superheroically. The other part of what I do is study games to see what impact they have on people’s identity, habits and quality of life.”