A Good article that I found over at: MattShaw’s Blog. You should check out some of his other stuff.

Every so often you come across one of those strokes of brilliance that makes you ask the really important questions: Is there another way of doing things? Is everything I know about XYZ-topic completely wrong? Why aren’t we all doing this? (And, of course, why didn’t I think of that?)

Recently I came across one such idea. HubSpot, thought leadersextraordinaires in the inbound marketing realm, recently became the first B2B business ever to launch an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to promote their products.

The premise is simple: HubSpot invented a company, Kronus Media, and told all of their followers that Kronus had issued a Cease & Desist order that forced HubSpot to shut down inboundmarketing.com, their thought leadership arm. The same day, HubSpot launched a Ning network — captaininbound.ning.com — dedicated to solving the mystery behind the evil Kronus Media and their motivations, and eventually to get inboundmarketing.com back up and running. To solve the mystery, the proprietor of the network (who goes by the name “Captain Inbound” to protect him/herself from violating a non-disclosure agreement) points out “clues” left on HubSpot’s various social media sites and asks people for help figuring out what they might mean.

Here’s why this is brilliant:

1. It’s instantly engaging. The Inbound Marketing University is shut down?! How could they do something like that?!
2. It requires subscription. Part of the fun of the game is discovering clues. Where are these clues? On HubSpot’s Facebook page, in their Twitter updates, on their blog, etc. In order to find these clues, you have to be actively monitoring HubSpot’s social media accounts.
3. It promotes followers. There is tremendous incentive to be an active part of a game like this for several reasons. First, it’s reasonably high-profile, which means that there are lots of eyeballs scanning your content. Second, participating in — never mind winning — the game gives you a chance to show off your analytical skills. And third, it levels the playing field for exposure. Anyone can find a clue, anyone can solve a riddle, and anyone can win the game. So why wouldn’t you participate?
4. It promotes an ideology. The very nature of this game is to pit those people interested in the Inbound Marketing University — who are, for the most part, modern and forward-thinking marketers — against Kronus Media, a company that represents the exact ideology against which Inbound Marketing rebels. The success of HubSpot as a company revolves around their ability to make people understand that this dichotomy exists, and that HubSpot’s side is the side to be on. This game helps to reinforce that idea.
5. It creates a positive sentiment. I don’t know what this game will do to drive business for HubSpot — I’m thinking it won’t drive much, but that’s me being skeptical. To be honest, though, I don’t know that HubSpot is thinking about this game in terms of ROI. Any return that they’ll get from this game will be entirely metaphysical in nature. There is an unspoken value in the number of times someone says, “Hey, did you hear about that cool game that HubSpot’s running?” To have the words “cool” and “HubSpot” in the same sentence, multiplied by a couple of thousand, adds up to the kind of achievement that they probably couldn’t have accomplished otherwise.
6. It happens in a natural environment. HubSpot isn’t asking you log into some third-party website to access the game. You don’t have to download anything, you’re not using some kind of game widget. You’re doing things that you were probably already doing: interacting with HubSpot on their blog and on Twitter and Facebook. You already do that (or if you don’t, it’s really easy to start doing it). So there’s no barrier to entry.

There are a lot of people who were upset about the way HubSpot launched the game. I’d like to address some of those concerns on Monday, if you’ll give me the weekend. In the mean time, tell me what you think about www.captaininbound.com — A cool game or a spectacular failure?

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So, it looks like Iron Man 2 is joining the ARG movement.  The rabbithole for this appears to have been a Stark Industries recruiter wandering around Comic-con.  Here’s a link to what was on the business cards she was handing out.  This will take you to the website: www.starkindustriesnow.com which has a letter from “Tony” and a link to apply for employment with Stark Industries.  Some of the questions are fairly stereotypical like employment history, but others like this: “What term describes the superposition of two or more waves resulting in a new wave pattern?” are a little trickier.  I applied, but have yet to receive anything, maybe I didn’t get the physics questions rights… In addition, several ‘news articles’ have been released: link and here.  The best people can do is look at what words are darkened, and the clipping below of the man walking on air.  Is it related?  This is definitely generating some buzz, but from an ARG perspective, a LOT of people are scratching their heads trying to figure what the clues mean and what to do with them. If anybody has any clue please drop me a line, in the meantime we can memorize what’s been released and hopefully a new clue will emerge that we will lead us in the right direction besides in circles…?

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Great article that summarizes ARGs, found here.

In July, Logan received a notebook in the mail, along with news that his friend Matt Selby had committed suicide. Logan started posting pictures of the notebook’s pages to his blog, attempting to decipher its meaning. But in September, Logan disappeared, and now his friends are all trying to find him. There’s only one problem: Neither Logan nor his friends exist.

They’re characters in the Alternate Reality Game Just Another Fool. Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, blur the lines between reality and the game by telling the stories through various on- and off-line media, such as websites, social networks, mail, video, phone calls, and even real-life events. The players have to solve puzzles contained in these media in order to advance the story.

The Future of Entertainment

ARGs started out as a form of viral marketing for various products. The first big ARG was The Beast, set in the fictional world of the movie “A.I.” There have been highly successful ARGs for movies like “The Dark Knight,” “District 9,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” One of the most famous ARGs was called “IloveBees,” which was a promotion campaign for the massively popular video game “Halo 2.” Even though these ARGs were essentially giant advertisements, the players still found them incredibly entertaining.

“If a ‘Halo’ fan hears about an ARG about ‘Halo’ or a ‘Terminator’ fan hears about the [‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’] ARG, they would jump at the opportunity to participate in a story,” said Tyler Parrott, a first year student at Colby College, who has been playing ARGs for over three years. “ARGs have gotten me in touch with some incredible stories. Enitech got me watching [‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’] and now I love the series.”

Steve Peters, who has been developing ARGs professionally since 2005, sees ARGs as a new art form. Peters is the Chief Experience Architect for No Mimes Media and has worked on ARGs for “The Dark Knight” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “What hooked me was when the game called me while I was at lunch,” Peters said. “It’s the future of entertainment.” In recent months, there has been an explosion of grassroots ARGs run by fans, for fans. These “unofficial” ARGs have met differing levels of success. This is largely due to the fact that the people working behind the scenes, known as “Puppetmasters” in the ARG community, are required to balance the game with real-life obligations.

On the Unfiction.com forums, the largest online ARG community, these grassroots campaigns now outnumber the “official” games 2-to-1, and they have a comparable number of players. “ARGs sort of blur the line between creator [and his or her] characters and the players in a way,” Regina Erbs, a webmaster from Lima, Ohio said. “Being a part of the action is a lot of fun.”

Riddle Me This, Riddle Me That

When “Logan” disappeared, his friend Joshua hacked into his blog and started updating on how the search was going. Following Logan’s advice, he got rid of the notebook by mailing it to Tyler Parrott, .

Parrott then posted a YouTube video of the notebook’s pages. That was when Erbs spotted a pattern of numbers that turned out to be a phone number. When players called it, they heard “Logan.” Using the information he gave them, they were able to correctly answer a riddle, and the players were each sent pages of a new notebook. It was through their teamwork that they were able to advance the story.

“Ultimately, the main pull is the interactivity, the challenging puzzles, and the community that forms as a result of these games,” Parrott said. Parrott, who goes by the online persona of Dav Flamerock, is a community leader on the Unfiction forums, and a highly prominent player of the fan-created “Just Another Fool.”

Online Family, For Better or For Worse

According to Parrott, the large interest in these games is due to the player community’s involvement in the story. “I have made some amazing friends through these games,” Parrott said. These games are simply impossible to play by yourself, according to Erbs. The community is all-important to figuring out riddles and advancing the story. “So much of these games are about sharing information,” Erbs said. “If Dav hadn’t posted the video of the first notebook, he might not have noticed there was a phone number hidden in it.”

But it’s not all roses and butterflies. The community can create problems as well, particularly in grassroots ARGs. The stories are often inspired by conversations on other forum sites like SomethingAwful.com, which is where “Just Another Fool” and a related ARG, “Marble Hornets”, started. Because these games start in public forums, there tends to be a lot of what ARG players call “gamejacking,” which is when people who aren’t playing the game attempt to divert the course of the story by pretending to be characters.

When Peters was running a game for Cisco Systems, Inc., they created profiles for several of the game characters on LinkedIn.com. Someone attempted to “gamejack” them by creating a profile on LinkedIn.com, claiming to work at the same fictional company. This person then sent puzzles to players while claiming to be an official part of the game. But despite these annoyances, most players still find the games very rewarding. “Challenging puzzles … engage players and make them feel accomplished when they complete a seemingly impossible task,” Parrott said.

Immersing Yourself

ARGs are always evolving, as the Puppetmasters discover new ways to deliver their content. And though the community is much more mainstream than it was ten years ago, Peters says it isn’t quite enough yet. “The next step is for [ARGs] to go mainstream in a big way,” Peters said. “What does a movie look like when it’s not limited to the screen?” But with the amount of media that we are inundated with, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a legitimate website and the beginning of a game. The easiest way to find a game to join, according to Erbs and Parrott, is to check out http://unfiction.com orhttp://argn.com.

“Go to the News & Rumors section of Unfiction.com and find a trailhead that looks promising,” Parrott said. And from there, as ARG players say, go down the rabbit hole.

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