Today's alternate reality game-ish project is another viral marketing campaign around a computer game.
One way into the thing is through the Stop Polarneft page. This minimally-designed page calls on readers to act against a corporation exploiting polar icecaps (a company with no homepage). It offers multimedia documentary content, including a character image, and video clip. There's a mildly hidden code, too (hint: check the white space). It has a link to out-of-game content (no relation to me). There's also a phone number in the page's source code - I haven't had a chance to call it yet.
The content is very ARGish, combining a mystery with a plea for user involvement. And it introduces two characters: Boris Atlasov, the author, and Arkady Simkin, apparently a victim of Polarneft. It aims to be very timely, both with evocations of global warming and a sense of urgency, grounding things in the present moment.
Simkin, in turn, has his own site. It doesn't look at all like Stop Polarneft. You get more information here, especially through text, concerning discoveries in the far north.
There are also pictures, an audio interview, and that video linked from Stop Polarneft.
Another ARGish aspect of Stop Polarneft is its connection with another site, built for different look and feel, and which offers a different way into the project. Giantology is a blog that tracks traces of enormous creatures found around the world. It's embedded in a network of links to other sites, each with different appearances, furthering the ARG documentary tactic. Giantology also hits multimedia notes, such as video clips, and a podcast.
Beyond this web content, some people have been poking at it. Snopes touched on it in October, focusing on the video clip. So did Kotaku, a gaming site. More recently a Digg page appeared, where discussion links this to a new Playstation game, Shadow of the Colossus (which I haven't yet played). That Wikipedia page now identifies this as a viral marketing campaign, dating its launch to October.
Overall, this makes for a nice, small example of an ARG.
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