Two new alternate reality games (ARGs) have emerged this month. This collaborative, distributed, cybertextual genre continues.
"The Haunted Apiary" is what Unfiction calls the story beginning with the launch of the I Love Bees site. That looks like the home page for an amateur beekeeper, but it's been curiously hacked, as text messages spill across pages (try refreshing each page a few times) and an ominous, time-sensitive message intrudes upon the homepage:
A blog, purportedly kept by the beekeeper's niece, is also in play. This game features a cyberculture culture clash, as ARG players picked it up, then ran into Halo players who noted a strange clue in the Halo 2 theatrical trailer. I'm delighted to see first-person-shooter mayhem players interacting with ARGers.
Here's the Unfiction forum.
Urban Hunt offers another ARG approach, as it pretends to be a reality tv program. We have the now-traditional panoply of Websites: the show is produced by Tomorrow's Talk Studios. Those who apply to be on the show received an email containing a puzzle, which led to a site for urban legends. That offered information about a doomed reality show called Dread House, which was supposedly staged in the abandoned Cambridge Mental Hospital (sometimes visited by the curious). We also learned about a technology which screens dreams (videos 176, 246353, 521, 017). Naturally enough connections between content on these sites are beginning to appear.
A note about ARG evolution: ILoveBees looks like it's part of Microsoft's marketing strategy for the new Halo game. And last week The Beast's writer, Sean Stewart, posted a description of his experience under the Microsoft banner. To what degree is ARGing becoming a marketing tool?
(thanks to Jason Mittell and Wolf)
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