Well this is a whole new level. A Benrik super-fan agreed to have himself pasted to an advert on Old Street for as long as it takes. For all I know he may still be there…the diary clearly did change his life.

David Blaine eat your heart out.

This Diary Will Change Your Life.

ARGs are maybe seven or eight years old, if we take The Beast as a starting point. A few things are becoming clear: they are, conceptually at least, one of the hottest things around; they are a genuinely exciting web native form of storytelling; there is the glimmer of a business model behind them and paradoxically there is no one thing that can be called an ARG. The term itself is slippery and expansive.

We have now seen ARGs promoting films (like Cloverfield and The Dark Knight), TV series (like Lost) and even albums (like Nine Inch Nail’s) not to mention charitable causes (like the Red Cross and Cancer Research). It seems that the promotional model is well established and provides a workable raison d’etre for many ARGs.

However my concern is that this is not sustainable. ARGs are still new and interesting enough so that the simple fact of their existence is sufficient to garner publicity. However as even this list demonstrates there must be a saturation point on the horizon where this is no longer the case. What happens to the business model then? I made the point that if one looks at the genesis and early years of the form then it coincides with a boom. As marketing budgets are slashed in the bust, what happens to ARGs?

A related point is that I suspect more people are talking about ARGs then actually playing or following them. Most of them require considerable investments of time and initiative- I freely confess they are beyond my feeble powers- that most people don’t have. They are still niche, difficult and in many cases overly complex.

Dan made two good points in response. Firstly that ARGs, if done well and tailored to the product and audience, can actually offer a higher ROI than conventional advertising and hence are ripe for growth. Secondly he likened an ARG to the FA Cup final: you might only have 22 players on the field, but you can then have thousands in the ground, millions at home watching on TV, all participating.

This makes sense, up to a point. I managed to follow the We Tell Stories ARG without strictly “playing”. However the forums and discussions at places like Unfiction and ARG Net can feel like a demi-monde of impenetrable geekery. Nothing wrong with that, natch, it just makes it hard for ARGs to reach a critical mass.

Perhaps that is the point, perhaps ARGs are meant to be small scale, light weight, free thinking, anti-corporate entertainments. Perhaps, but I can’t help but feeling that would be only half the story.

Round Abouts

For me there are two really exciting possibilities in ARGs. Firstly is how they could be used to produce second order products that would augment the existing business models. Secondly how they can, in both complex and simple ways, form part of what Henry Jenkins calls transmedia storytelling.

By creating new products or gathering valuable data the proposition of an ARG changes. It can become a crowd sourcing application, an engine of content creation with a ready made fan base. This could be a union between entertainment companies like us and the grass roots explosion in creativity (or distribution depending on how you see it) engendered by the web. It allows an ARG to be somehow packaged or archived without detracting from the unique nature of the ARG, whilst also providing a strong rationale for the initiation of the ARG.

Stories are increasingly transmedia, which is to say they exist across platforms. This is not to suggest they are ARGs, but ARGs too are cross platform and so the have a resemblance. Fans like to get deep into a fictional world and transmedia storytelling is an enabler of this. ARGs point the way in terms of creating engagement in this fashion. They have pioneered the seamless use of mixed media integrated into a conceptual whole. Many of the biggest cultural phenomena of the past few years have been fully transmedia- think Potter and the Matrix, and this trend will become ever more the norm.

For publishers then I think these two strands are especially promising. Smaller scope projects like the Young Bond adventure will have their (ever growing role). These big two tap into emerging trends in what was traditionally publishers back yard and add economic incentive while they’re at it.

No one truly knows where ARGs are going, least of all me. I do know, however, that they are seriously cool.

And being cool counts.

Congratulations to Peter James, the police and the Pan Macmillan marketeers on this idea and making it happen (always a good trick).

Have been asked by James – a colleague here at Nature Publishing Group – to take a look at a trade publishing web project that he is setting up at Pan Macmillan, our sister company. Met with Benrik Ltd and Jon Butler from Boxtree at turkey curry buffet. Could a Facebook application be used to help market This Diary Will Change Your Life online? Yes! But not sure how. Diary is chock full of funny, reuseable content, exactly type of thing that you might want to share with your friends…

Donuts consumed: several. Walked briskly to tube station instead of taking bus.

6th Nov: Formulating a plan

James and I have come up with a spiffing plan: users who install the application get a new task displayed on their profile each week and can keep a mini-diary of how they are getting on.

Benrik are particularly progressive when it comes to the web, pleasant surprise after dealing with (some) scientists at day job. Everybody promised night of free cocktails, gambling and dancing on tables upon completion of application by Macmillan representative, hooray!

19th Nov: What the application does

Basic application is up and running. Working on polishing the functionality. Benrik are providing design assets and copy – good designers missing from a lot of Facebook apps, pleased that they’re keen to get involved.

Developing for Facebook is very quick, which is partly why there are so many rubbish applications. A lot of the work is in the design process – what will capture the attention of Facebook users? We want to make things as simple as possible and yet be interesting and varied enough for people to come back regularly.

Two Benrik followers – Mel and Joel – are going to record themselves performing the weekly tasks. Users will be able to vote on which video they like best and at the end of 2008 the follower with the most votes will be crowned Benrikian of the Year.

To help motivation and to speed up production in time for xmas Diary buying rush we are reminded of free cocktails promise by Macmillan representative.

26th Nov: Facebook ToS

Have been spending time so far testing how different things will work but now it’s crunch time – we launch next week. Things have come together nicely but some major bugs remain… we use YouTube to host videos (saves bandwidth and why reinvent the wheel?) but their API doesn’t meet our requirements.

There’s also the issue of the Facebook app screening process: to be accepted into the application directory your app must abide by the Facebook Terms of Service. Some of the diary’s tasks are a little close to the edge – does encouraging readers to breathe heavily down the phone line at the Dalai Lama count as relgious intolerance? Is scolding other people’s children illegal nowadays?

Macmillan representative pleased with progress. He suggests that I start building up my tequila resistance in anticipation of the glittering launch party.

Donuts: too many. May have to actually watch Davina McCall fitness DVD from birthday last year.

4th Dec: Budgets

Joyent have announced free hosting for Facebook applications. After some testing we switch over to them. Scaling is an issue with Facebook applications – overnight success can easily backfire if your server can’t handle it. Running costs of application now approx. £0 and we can scale up to a paid plan during any spikes in traffic, hooray!

Hopefully people will learn about Benrik then go out and buy the book. We stick an Amazon link on the bottom of each page to make it easier.

Macmillan representative has disappeared.

6th Dec: Launch!

D-Day! Application is mentioned in Benrik’s newsletter, which gets the ball rolling. Proves popular, gets a thousand installs over the first weekend.

Macmillan representative in Vegas launching app at ‘trade show’. Free drinks sadly no longer in budget for project despite Joyent coup but he has promised packet of crisps and a pound for the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? machine upon his return…

30th Jan: Wrap up

The app is still growing, though now relatively slowly. Growth is not exponential but linear. Exponential growth is based primarily on invites – one user invites ten friends, they invite ten friends etc. but nobody pays attention to invites any more on Facebook.

Would a Facebook app work for other books? Probably depends on the book. Is there a hook into the content? Is that hook something that you would watch, laugh, and then forward on to your friends on a Friday afternoon?

Apps are certainly quick to build once you’ve got a concept, and they require no or very little marketing budget to grow (though a marketing budget doesn’t hurt). Though we developed the Benrik app formally new tools might make app creation easy enough for marketing departments or tech savvy authors themselves to experiment with.

I know other publishing companies are using Facebook, sometimes in interesting ways (Penguin & Harper Collins both have Pages, for example – do a search). Does anybody know of any other RL-product specific applications?

At the time it (Cloverfield as we now know it) caused a sensation. As the producer of Lost people knew that the Abrams signature was an invitation to find out more, that this trailer held out the promise of a rich, involved information mine that would gradually reveal some answers to the many questions prompted even as more were posed. Media interest in the trailer was piqued and soon USA Today was arguing that the film was based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft while the Guardian claimed a definite tie-in with Lost (the Observer followed up the story here).

Viewers were first directed to 1-18-08.com, a website that consisted of a photomontage manipulated by the user. Soon other sites were up and running, including those for Slusho!, a fictional softdrink familiar to fans of the Abrams produced series Alias, and Tagruato, a huge mining conglomerate. Both sites were convincingly done and soon a metanarrative was building that encompassed speculation of all kinds about the as yet un-named film and a tantalising trail of clues as to its plot.

As well as personal pages of characters on myspace and this site (log in jllovesth) the viral evolved an internal logic, so before long an anti-Tagruato environmentalist site for a group called TIDO was found. On the site TIDO deny responsibility for destroying a Tagruato oil rig, a denial which was followed by the release of this trailer showing a rig collapsing into the sea. All of this gives only a snapshot of the overall complexity: as this analysis demonstrates most of the viral work, often taking the form of news reports, was done in languages other than English. Gradually a picture emerged from the dense network of clues and puzzles that pointed to the major events of the film, giving the plot background and substance whilst garnering near priceless acres of newsprint and becoming one of the dominant memes of 2007.

Four days before the films US release and almost everything about the film has been leaked. However in the process of publicising the movie it’s content has become part of a narrative that the film both describes and yet which also supercedes the film.

However the team working with Abrams wasn’t done yet. As described in this Read/Write Web article Lost fans in the Mid West started to see billboard ads for Oceanic airlines with a URL that directed them here. As fans of the show will know Oceanic Flight 815 is the plane that crashes thus prompting the subsequent drama that is the show. Anyway the site was a provocation and a new ARG, Find815, was launched. The iconography used in the game was consistent with that in the program; new characters have been introduced in the game that harmonise with those on TV and key mysteries from the series are inextricably worked in to the ARG. Find 815, which is currently in full flow, follows Sam, an Oceanic engineer whose girlfriend was aboard Flight 815, as he attempts to find out what happened to the craft when the official investigation is abandoned.

A new model of storytelling is on offer here, a model that just so happens to engage large numbers of people on the internet and generate press interest. As Cloverfield director Matt Reeves has said “All the stories kind of bounce off one another and inform each other[...]To us, it’s just another exciting aspect of the storytelling.” Publishers and writers are in the business of storytelling and given the ravages of the writers strike on moving image media are presented with an historic opportunity to explore this new, metafictional, ludic, reality bending narratology. Artistically and commercially, even philosophically, a new frontier has been opened in this most fundamental of human attributes.

A series like Harry Potter is already transmedia in that it exists in virtually every media on earth, and some. What it doesn’t have is a sense of unity between the different media; the film doesn’t complement the book, it is the book; the game doesn’t complement the film, it is the film. There is one story set down in the books that is then the template for everything else. There is no Harry Potter myspace page other than what is essentially an advert for the film, for example.

Imagine say the new Dan Brown as intimately conceived with a viral ARG. Brown’s novels have a very definite sense of place and this could be used to fascinating effect (Google maps mash ups etc). Dan Brown tours already take place in London, Paris and Rome; what about if they became an integral part of a wider mystery? The gap between the story and the world would vanish as people become part of the story. Its post-structuralist literary theory, literalised.

There are some indications that writers are embracing this model. Boing Boing reported on Shadow Unit, who are creating “a fan site for a show that never existed”. The SF writer Elizabeth Bear and mastermind of the project gives a rough outline: “Over the next couple of months, the site will be updated on a weekly or biweekly basis with new information, vignettes, character sketches, character bios, a community message board, and other exciting things”. Moreover “there will be a series of novellas and novellettes, and one complete novel”. Shadow Unit works through a mixture of free and subscription content and breaks ground in terms of offering publishers and writers an example of how to radically expand their storytelling.

Creating fictional myspace profiles is not uncommon for books now and last year the publisher Canongate gestured more fully in this direction on the website for The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

In his famous discussion of simulacra and hyperreality the philosopher Jean Baudrillard cites Disneyland as being the ultimate simulacra, a copy for which there is no original. Building Disneyland isn’t exactly easy and is probably beyond the marketing budgets of most publishers. However as Jeff Gomez points out in a recent post on Print is Dead, writers today have, via the internet, a means of getting involved with their texts beyond writing them. Creating a fictional myspace profile is do-able and adds an intriguing twist to a reader’s relationship with a character. Whilst the resources required for an ARG on the scale of the Cloverfield virals is vast, as are those for full on ARGs like Perplex City, conceptualising, planning and executing interesting metafictional elements and the creation of a web based narrative are within reach for many publishing projects.

Doing this requires commitment from writers. What works so well about the Lost ARG is how perfectly it coheres with the vision presented in the series, and this sense of unification is necessary for building a transmedia story. Otherwise its just stories.

In summary then, I think we are seeing a new breed of story emerging that blends viral marketing campaigns with alternate reality games to produce a narrative that forms part of the story told in traditional media formats. In doing so many old distinctions, between say fiction and reality or marketing and content, are being challenged or breaking down. Recent examples spearheaded by the producer J.J. Abrams have demonstrated the complexity, artistry and publicity boosting potential of the model and publishing companies are making steps in this direction. Our understanding and definition of what stories are and how we tell them are shifting in new and exciting ways. The terms of this post’s title are blending into one, a concept we have, as yet, no other word for than the neverending constant that is “story”.