[arg_discuss] Introduction

[Rafael Kenski]

I was an editor for Superinteressante, a brazilian science and general interest magazine (with sales of 400 thousand issues a month, it is the biggest monthly magazine in Brazil) up until january 2006. That was when I edited a one page arcticle on ARGs and, together with a designer, we created a very simple and low budget ARG to illustrate it. We published a message that said "The illustration of this arcticle was stolen. Help us find it in super.abril.com.br/arg". It was the rabbit hole for a short trail that involved web pages, telephone numbers, posters and past issues of our magazine. We had around 15,000 players, it was the most commented piece in that edition of the magazine and it pretty much sparked ARGs in Brazil (for instance: the ARG community in Orkut, the main online social network in Brazil, was created in this event). The success made us dream about a bigger ARG. We got a sponsor in Guaraná Antarctica, a major brazilian soft drink, and that was the beggining of a game called "Zona Incerta". I believe our (incredibly great) writer Andre Sirangelo has already outlined most of it in this list. In a nutshell, it was a 5 month game and, among its main events, we could list a treasure hunt that consisted in a map hidden in bottles buried all across Brazil (which took 2 months for the players to find, some of them travelling more that 300 miles to get to a hidden bottle) and "guest appearences" by two brazilian senators, one congressman and one governor (who all fell for this video, made by Arkhos Biotech, the game's antagonist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGpVgfrYlXU ). Even George W. Bush participated, when some in-game characters, disguised as trees, decided to fight Arkhos during Bush's visit to Brazil. (A nice photo of Bush's limo with our "protesters", as reported by the biggest newspaper in Brazil, can be seen in: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/galeria/album/p_20070309-bush03.shtml  <http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/galeria/album/p_20070309-bush03.shtml> ). The game ended in May 2006 and we have been planning other crossmedia initiatives and ARGs ever since, some of them will hopefully come out in 2008. Thank you all for the great ideas you've been exchanging in this forum.



Respeite o Meio Ambiente. Imprima somente o necessário.

Planeta Sustentável - O futuro a gente faz AGORA.
www.planetasustentavel.com.br 
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