Typing the movie title Bourne Ultimatum into Google brings up an enticing promotional offer as the first result. Join in The Ultimate Search for Bourne, it demands. This is an alternative reality game (ARG), developed by media company Big Spaceship for Google and Universal Pictures.
ARGs are platform-agnostic interactive experiences that use websites as well as SMSs, phone calls and other media extensions to engage players in a sort of virtual scavenger hunt.
Participants use services such as Google Maps, Google Translation and YouTube to decode clues and enter sweepstakes to win glamorous prizes tied in with the movie. Not only does the game promote the film (and Google gets a product placement in the flick), but it also pushes visitors toward the search company’s lesser-used products. Everybody’s happy.
Or are they? Whereas previous promotional ARGs, such as The Beast for the Spielberg movie AI or Microsoft’s imaginative I Love Bees campaign for Halo II have garnered widespread praise, The Ultimate Search for Bourne drew immediate criticism from Google-watchers. Is the game offer an ad? In which case, by ensuring that it appears at the top of all relevant searches, hasn’t Google broken its pledge not to manipulate search results for its own ends?
Google says no. The company says: ”The Bourne Ultimatum promotion is not an ad, but one of the many tests we run to provide users with opportunities to access Google products … This is a collaboration to develop a new, more engaging form of movie promotion.”
This sort of conflict is going to become much more common as large corporations increasingly employ ARG content to break through consumer cynicism and apathy. ARGs turn a market into a community — and community is the most valuable commodity there is in the digital age. When players engage in a game like I Love Bees, they do so cooperatively, sharing information and expertise, setting up dedicated forums, pulling friends into the experience. And while individual consumers are flighty and capricious, communities stick.
But ARGs operate between reality and fiction and as they become more common, companies will need to go to greater lengths to both engage consumers. Microsoft’s Iris ARG, designed to publicise Halo III, has so far been much less successful that its I Love Bees predecessor. Apathy is creeping back.
We’re too clever, too tired of being told what to think and do. But advertisers aren’t going to give up. In the coming advertising environment it won’t be you playing the game, it will be the game playing you. — Guardian Unlimited Â