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This just seems a bit weird to me.
From: Micro Persuasion
I’ve been keeping an eye on the ARG Art of the Heist and really enjoyed the player events (eg: players meeting in-game characters and stealing a card from a car in a dealership). I’ve been working on the emails– they are listed out of order and so I think there is some message there. Oh, and here are the Top Ten Reasons to Play Art of the Heist
But I’ve also checked out Perplex City and had a freak event happen for me. I went to look at the
Project Sysygy page, I then clicked and entered the Perplex City page. Then, without any idea what happened, suddenly a page from the Sydney Morning Herald (a paper in my country) was opening up. It asked me to register, which I did, and then took me to an article on Perplex City. That was really freaky. I then checked out a video (which was released the beginning with clues of newspapers around the world to check on particular days for more clues). The article I saw was not on the video — the article is too recent. So I went back to the Perplex City page to figure out what happened and noticed that there are alot of hyperlinks that are hidden (not indicated on the page). Then I read through the forums and found a post saying that players should refresh their page because more links have been added. So, they all know about it.
But gee that was exciting. There were 2 things I really enjoyed about the experience: 1) I thought I may have discovered something that would help the game; 2) I enjoyed the idea that the news site opened up because of my presence at the webpage (popup). I felt like there was an intelligent design out there taking me somewhere important. The adult equivalent of having a person sit behind you acting as your hands.
But anyway, here is an in-game site for Perplex City which is very funny: Whipsmart. And here some others:
in-game media:
‘Blurring the line between games and life’, news.com, 28th Feb
in-game sites:
Perplex City Academy
video
Abbey Road Studios
Mind Candy
Perplex City Newspaper
Scarlette Kite blog
Quirky Acuity blog
Firebox
Open Design Agency
News of a Contagious Media Showdown from GxTA. The competition is for bits of information, a video snippet etc, that is so interesting that people pass links to it and it spreads around the globe very fast. It is contagious. Douglass Rushkoff describes a media virus:
Media viruses spread rapidly if they provoke our interest, and their success is dependent on the particular strengths and weaknesses of the host organism, popular culture. The more provocative an image or icon–like a video-taped police beating or a new rap lyric, for that matter–the further and faster it will travel through the datasphere.
Rushkoff goes on to explain why people are susceptible to a media virus:
Our interest and fascination is a sign that we are not culturally “immune” to the new virus. The success of the memes within the virus, on the other hand, depends on our legal, moral, and social resiliency. If our own attitudes about racism, the power of police, drug abuse, and free speech are ambiguous–meaning our societal “code” is faulty–then the invading memes within the media virus will have little trouble infiltrating our own confused command structure.
It is interesting that apparently a Massachusetts state representative has introduced a bill that requires children (under 16) to get parental permission before joining up with a buzz campaign. A ‘buzz campaign’ is one where a buzz about a product or service is created through word-of-mouth. People are employed to spread this word-of-mouth through employment in companies like BzzAgent.
So on the one hand we have a fun competition to create a ‘meme’ that is spread through the datasphere (for free) and on the other we have legislation coming down on children earning money from spreading news…
Rushkoff, D. (1994) Media virus!: hidden agendas in popular culture, Ballantine Books, New York.