The Secret To Online Alternate Reality Games: Search And Gossip
from the that's-how-it-works dept
We’ve written a few times in the past about the growth of alternate reality games, which tend to be associated with other brands, such as movies or video games — even when the alternate reality games have little (if anything) to do with the product they’re advertising. jim hanas writes in to point us to an interview he’s done with a developer behind many of the more popular alternate reality games out there, Sean Stewart. If you’re not familiar with these games, most of them involve a ton of “fake” websites with random clues, and they hope that people get involved and try to track down the answer to some mystery. However, in the interview, Stewart gives a perfect explanation for why these games have worked (though, even he admits they lucked into it): “What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.”
