After hours Toolkit

Alternate Realities: The future of marketing?

John Borland CNET News.com

Published: 16 Dec 2005 14:55 GMT

Sean Stewart leans over his laptop in the little garage he's converted to a home office and joins an online poker match, posing as legendary gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok.

He's in the game to win virtual chips, of course. But the other gamblers want more. This "Last Call Poker" Web site he has just entered hides a complicated story that players have to figure out in stages, and they've guessed the Hickok character that Stewart is playing might help. But the 40-year-old novelist turned virtual game maker can't resist teasing them a little first.

"We can't ever know a man's heart," he answers one player's probing question, a sly grin on his face as he types, "until we put a bullet through it."

Last Call Poker
Stewart, on a sunny November afternoon in Davis, California, is improvising inside a sophisticated online game that has put him and his co-creators squarely at the leading edge of the digital entertainment world. The fact that he has almost no experience with traditional video games makes his pioneering role here all the more striking.

For three years, Stewart has been the chief writer at a game development house called 42 Entertainment, the leaders in a nascent gaming genre of alternate reality games (ARGs).

Part puzzle-infused scavenger hunt, part interactive fiction, ARGs are among the first entertainment forms genuinely native to the Net, culture watchers say. Unlike the online cartoons or games that differ little from their offline counterparts, ARGs like 42 Entertainment's just-completed "Last Call Poker" are woven from the fragmented, deeply community-driven fabric of the Web itself.

"Anytime you have a new medium, people copy and paste old media onto it," said Bryan Alexander, director for emerging technologies at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a group that helps colleges integrate technology into their curriculum. "But eventually people figure out what the medium can do itself."

This is not a game
Like most big ARGs before it, "Last Call", which recently ended for active participation but can still be seen online, was an extraordinarily complicated marketing campaign, in this case for Activision's just-released "Gun" video game. It was free, whether people wanted to play poker online, join in the community, or just follow a story that has remained archived even though the live events are completed.

Behind the poker game was a rich saga of violence, greed and family ties, told through video clips, hundreds of pages of text written by Stewart and co-writer Maureen McHugh, comic books, audio clips, improvised online poker chats, and in-person "Tombstone Hold 'Em" tournaments that have drawn players to cemeteries around the country in the search for clues.

Players had to earn story updates, often by working together to solve puzzles online. For example, on the day Stewart was playing Hickok, players were asked to track down a specific, real-life church hymnal in order to decipher a code, the novelist said. (As usual, it took just hours before one of the players, a librarian, found the book on microfiche and solved the puzzle.)

Stewart didn't invent this kind of game — that honor goes, as much as to any one person, to the chief executive of his company, Jordan Weisman, who first brought the team together while at Microsoft in 2001. Elan Lee, a former...

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