Interactive Games Become Marketing Tool

Not to toot my new horn, but the Technology Review has a piece on the popularity of Alternative Reality Games written by noted MIT professor (and video game defender) Henry Jenkins.

Jenkins does a nice job explaining why players are attracted to these improvisational games, which often require the help of hundreds of people who haven't met outside of virtual space:

One puzzle required them to decrypt GPS location data, send participants at various times to hundreds of phone booths scattered across the continental United States, and respond within a matter of seconds to unanticipated questions delivered by a live actor. To give proper answers, each person had to trust an ad hoc group of strangers to instantly provide the information they needed.

It's surprising, though, that the two biggest games were designed as marketing tools: The Beast (for the movie Artificial Intelligence: A.I.) and ilovebees (for the Microsoft Xbox game Halo2). In other words, games became something more than just games. They became a way to draw people into fictional worlds, and create a sense of "community" around a product (without ever actually pushing the product).