[arg_discuss] is ARG just a marketing technique to the press?

[Brian Clark]

Hey, SIG,

It's been quiet around here, but there's been a ton of recent press (not all
of it very flattering) about the successes and shortcomings of the genre for
the year.

I thought this Wired article was interesting for how it avoided the phrase
ARG and substituted it with "the marketing ... has been a long process of
hoax sites and real world games":
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/12/the-joker-sends.html

I'm sure it isn't helping when the majority of cinema blogs are also calling
it "infecting the web with viral sites" and opens with disclaimers like "I'm
always hesitant to report on 'viral marketing' sites for movies":
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Dark-Knight-Infects-The-Web-With-Viral-Sites-
7015.html
 
Alice at least gave a more thoughtful discussion to the labels in her blog,
but even she says "But if we're talking short, buzz-focused stunt-based
stuff designed to promote a car sale, or a movie launch, then I think
there'll inevitably be a backlash of some sort, because there seems to be a
lot of repetitive behaviour going on at the moment":
http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/12/one-problem-wit.html

She's kinder and more thoughtful at least than the blog at the Guardian,
which called the whole "alternate reality game circuit" as the gaming
disappointment of the year because it didn't "transcend the filthy lucre of
corporates":
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2007/12/14/games_of_2007_part_2.h
tml

The Escapist manages to somehow mix abject optimism with scathing implied
criticisms that academia is where the interest is since "in these new games
the product being advertised isn't a movie or a car - it's simply
knowledge." This is actually the one that I personally think has the worst
factual errors as well as the perceptual issues of the prior ones :(
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_128/2730-Where-to
-From-Here

I love the way "promote a car or launch a movie" has become a code phrase
for talking about a little group of practitioners ;)

Ultimately, though, this coverage is intensely interesting to me
specifically because we don't have a horse in the race -- we didn't do any
marketing ARGs this year, so aren't really the subject of the critique (even
if I recognize how the brush might be ready to paint me as well.) There's a
push and pull around the idea of "ARGs as stunt marketing" though that is
new from last year, when perhaps the perception was still more about "ARGs
as branded entertainment or gaming form".

At ARGfest back in February, I tried to express some of my concerns that I
saw this trend bubbling. Maybe I even felt a little responsible for part of
that "car and movie" cliché. Unfortunately, there really hasn't been a clear
positivist statement from the players, the developers or academia on what
the hope for the genre is to counterbalance the inevitable "filthy lucre"
dilemma that faces every art genre.

If the world believes that an ARG is a marketing format, does that means it
has become one already so much that people are having to reject the genre in
proxy as an extension of their rejection of marketing?




Brian