The Colbert Report: The Most Cunning ARG You've Never Heard Of

The Colbert Report:  Flying Completely Under Your Radar.

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I’ve been thinking about this for months, years in fact, watching The Colbert Report. Launched on October 17, 2005, satirist Stephen Colbert’s portrayal of Stephen Colbert, right-wing pundit (an homage to Bill O’Reilly), and know-it-all Wikipedia editing expert, is so seamless that the ‘performance’ of his faux character is almost forgotten. Search him online (forget Wikipedia today folks!) and it is virtually impossible to find interviews with the ‘real’ Colbert. Think back to his appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner 2006, billed as a Special Edition of The Colbert Report, where he delivered a masterpiece parody of the George Bush era and what he termed the “No Fact Zone.” Now, with his ongoing shaming of the Federal Election Committee (FEC) and the absurdities or criminalities of Super PACs in the US electoral process, he’s done a flurry of interviews this past week, again in character, with George Stephanopoulos and Ted Koppel. In each of these interviews, the extremism of his character is marked by some absurd proposal or claim that foregrounds the artifice of his performance. Watch his exchange with Stephanopoulos here:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/stephen-colbert-runs-president-talkss-geo....

Now if you’ve never thought about The Colbert Report as a transmedia ARG, pause for a moment. What Colbert has done is promote a fictional character with a subversive agenda across multiple platforms: the TV show, multiple websites (www.colbertnation.com, www.nofactzone.net/, http://www.indecisionforever.com/). What he’s doing definitely stretches the model of the ARG (hey! wait! Is there a single model?). But it’s definitely transmedia & cross-platform and he’s had complete buy-in from his audience:  he’s led an activist rally in the 2010 March to Keep Fear Alive (see its companion website, http://colbertrally.com/), and successfully solicited who knows how much $ through the contributions to his Super PAC that, as he repeatedly points out, he will not have to report on legally for an undetermined period of time. Yet this performance is only now being commented on widely as a performance: ABC news just today ran an article on Who is the Real Stephen Colbert? 

Colbert’s control of his performance and the media’s responses to him has been absolute and to get a sense of how he has created a storyworld in which his character exists as unchallenged, watch his September 2011 interview with Al Gore, who does the unthinkable on live TV by commenting on ‘your character.’ Colbert is clearly aghast and in character, crushes Gore with "finger quotes." Or watch Colbert’s interview with Frank Luntz October 2011 on how to set up his Super PAC focus group and sell the message that Corporations are People Too. Here, Colbert slips into his highly racist Chinese character, Ching Chong Ding Dong, and says: “I’m not responsible for anything my character says.” This moment is genius as it reveals the strategy underlying Colbert’s parodic persona. That he is now raising serious debate in the US as to the validity of Super PACs, generating numerous articles and news reports is an indirect homage to the persuasiveness of his performance over time.

Colbert’s application and appearance before the FEC was a fascinating moment in his ongoing ‘alternate reality performance.’ One, for Colbert, he was surprisingly monosyllabic and undemonstrative, whereas outside the hearing, he was emphatically the satiric pundit. That moment in the hearing however, raised the question of who exactly speaking before the Commission. As, if it was the character, then the legality & authority of the FEC were being mocked & challenged - technically a dicey move - yet watch him immediately after speaking outside to the press. Colbert played that moment ambiguously because he had to, but he also didn’t commit or reveal himself as the real Stephen Colbert.

And, given the specifics of the ruling as to what Viacom and Colbert’s Super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, could and could not do, Colbert has neatly circumvented the restrictions on broadcasting outside of his show or network by allowing the net to do the job for him as his Super PAC negative campaign ads can be watched on multiple sites, including YouTube, and as embedded content in multiple news reports (Take that! SOPA!). If you haven't seen them, catch the latest Super PAC commercials here: Mitt the Ripper and Vote for Herman Cain

Colbert has used his comedic position to introduce new words to the lexicon, ‘truthiness,’ ‘anchor baby,’ and now it’s starting to look like his relentless and inventive challenge to the Super PAC might actually galvanize change. If he’s successful, I can’t wait to see what he tackles next.

 

You can read the Federal Election Committee's Advisory Opinion from June 30, 2011 here: 

http://www.colbertsuperpac.com/advisory/Advisory-Opinion.pdf 

And, if you haven't been following this, here's a great recap by Sarah Mimms:

“Federal Election Committee rules on Colbert’s Super PAC application”

by Sarah Mimms, June 30 2011

http://nationaljournal.com/hotline/fec-rules-narrowly-on-colbert-request-20110630

“In filing his initial request for an advisory opinion, Colbert sought to take advantage of an exemption traditionally used to allow media outlets to report and comment on campaigns and endorse candidates without having their work considered “in-kind” political contributions, triggering filing and disclosure requirements with the Federal Election Commission.

The request came down to one essential issue: whether Viacom can legally donate production costs, airtime and use of Colbert's staff to create ads for the so-called super PAC, to be played both on "The Colbert Report" and as paid advertisements other networks and shows.

The commission said no, ruling that once ads created using Viacom resources were broadcast on other networks, Viacom would have to report them as political contributions.”

 

It's a MATH ARG! Whoot! Six to Start and BBC Team Up for “The Code Challenge” Transmedia Experience | ARGNet

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June 28, 2011 · By Kris Nordgren

"Six to Start and the BBC have teamed up to create a transmedia experience tied in with BBC Two documentary The Code, expected to air at the end of July. The Code is presented by Professor of Mathematics Marcus du Sautoy (Horizon on BBC2, The Beauty of Diagrams on BBC4) and explores how the world around us conforms to and can be explained by mathematical codes. Six to Start are next-generation storytellers with plenty of experience creating storytelling projects for different clients, often in the form of alternate reality games or treasure hunts. They’ve worked with the BBC before on projects like Spooks: Code 9 and Seven Ages Quest. As a first for the BBC and possibly a world first, an interactive experience called The Code Challenge has been seamlessly integrated in the writing and filming of The Code since inception. Viewers can participate in an engaging treasure hunt which will take place before, during, and after the series that will extend their understanding of basic mathematical principles.

The Code Challenge begins well before the airing of the actual show. Soon, 1000 people in the UK will receive a secret message with one of the first puzzles of the challenge. For a chance to be one of those 1000, keep an eye on Twitter @bbccode and apply via Twitter or e-mail. A few weeks before the show airs, several Flash games containing clues, puzzles, and more information about the Code will also appear online. The series itself is expected to air at the end of July and will be split into three 60-minute episodes: Magic Numbers, Nature’s Building Blocks and Predicting the Future. Six clues are connected to each episode. Three will be hidden in the programme itself, which can be watched live on BBC Two or on BBC iPlayer. One community clue can only be solved by working together with a group of players. Two further clues will be revealed on the blog and through a Flash game. Players can then enter the six answers they found for each episode into the ‘codebreaker’ to receive three passwords with which they can unlock the ultimate challenge.

The Code Challenge is conceived so everyone can play, even those with no prior understanding of maths or ARG experience, although the final stages of the treasure hunt will be increasingly challenging...."

Read the full post on argn.com

Christy Dena Interviews Jan Libby on her ARG Snow Town » YSA Indie ARGs

Jan Libby is a respected indie alternate reality game designer, whose day job is a freelancer working with brands to create interactive experiences. (Her impressive bio is at the bottom of this post.) Jan has recently run an indie ARG called Snow Town. I unfortunately missed the participating through the whole experience, but I wanted to hear more about how she has moved from doing long complex ARGs to short ones – an approach that would benefit new ARG creators. Wired covered the beginning of Snow Town, and here Jan shares a post-mortem on how she made the “short story ARG”:

read the full interview on Christy Dena's blog: You Suck at Transmedia!

Watch/Play! this one: ARG The Black Helix as crowd-sourced authorship - 4D Fiction

Excerpt:

"...But what if the creators of an ARG, without the agenda of having it promote a brand or product for an existing IP, actually intend to package the resulting story as a product itself? In a sense, the final product would have a distributed authorship.

A new project called The Black Helix, which began today from The Design Zoo, intends to do just that. Their project, funded by the Northern Ireland Arts Council, asks players to “become part of an unwritten story”....

read the full post:

http://4dfiction.com/2011/02/the-black-helix-as-crowd-sourced-authorship/

ooooo = No Mimes, JUXT Use Transmedia on a Global Scale With a New Team-Building Alternate Reality Game

Breakout Interactive Adventure Follows on Heels of Creators' Acclaimed 2009 ARG for Cisco; Social Media, New Tech Entertain While Cultivating Global Collaboration

LOS ANGELES, Jan 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- For the second straight year, transmedia storytelling pioneers No Mimes Media has partnered with award-winning creative shop JUXT Interactive to craft a hugely successful Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for Cisco Systems' annual Global Sales Experience (GSX). This year's GSX marked Cisco's first major hybrid global event, fusing both virtual and physical components into a seamless interactive experience for 21,000 participants around the world.

Cisco wanted to use new forms of storytelling to focus their sales staff on company-wide collaboration, creativity and new products while engaging them in the company's annual sales meeting. Once again, they turned to No Mimes and JUXT, makers of The Threshold, the groundbreaking Alternate Reality Game created for last year's Global Sales Experience.

This year's transmedia story, The Hunt, served as the cornerstone of the event's engagement strategy, which also included a suite of collaborative online experiences. According to Angela Smith, Senior Manager of the Global Sales Experience, "The engagement strategy was absolutely crucial to this hybrid program's success. Giving a highly competitive audience an exciting challenge satisfies multiple goals, including collaboration across boundaries."

Part high-tech thriller, part treasure hunt, part social-media experiment, The Hunt transformed thousands of Cisco employees into active characters in an exciting storyline that unfolded over two weeks and across five continents. The experience utilized action-packed video and audio (co- produced with LiveTribe Productions), photos, email, phone messages, live event, social media and an array of Cisco tools to foster team building, problem-solving and interactive learning. Characters came to life through social media, posting Facebook and Twitter updates to drive the story in real-time, and engaging participants with one-on-one dialogues. Players even used GPS- based geocaching techniques to track down a clue in a real jewelry box hidden in Oslo, Norway. Throughout the experience, participants from around the world, communicated across departmental, disciplinary and language barriers, and immersed themselves in Cisco collaboration technologies that were instrumental in solving The Hunt

read the full post:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/no-mimes-juxt-use-transmedia-on-a-glo...

Great Look Back by ARG Player: Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A. I. Game - Jay Bushman | ETC-Press

Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A. I. Game 12/14/2010
Jay Bushman

Vertices and Vortices

On the evening of May 6th, 2001, I dawdled on the corner of 4th Street and Avenue A in New York City, trying to decide if I really would attend a rally for the Anti-
Robot Militia.

I wouldn’t know anybody there. Sure, I had corresponded with some of them through an online message board. And after chickening out of the first gathering, I’d gone to the second cell meeting the week before – a dozen or so tentative geeks communing in an empty mid-town dining room, gingerly feeling each other out over our shared obsession with a strange series of websites. But this would be different. Even though the rally was taking place at an East Village bar, it was ostensibly going to be in the world of the “game.” Nobody knew what to expect, although speculation was rampant. But this would be more than just kibitzing about an online curiosity. This was the real world.

I thought about going home. It was a Sunday night. I could skip a strange evening with a bunch of weird geeks, turn in early and get ready to face Monday morning. I could read about what happened behind the safety of my monitor. Standing on that corner, I hesitated.

At last, I chose the road with the robots and the weirdoes. And that has made all the difference.

Evan is Dead, Jeanine is the Key

The “game” in question had no name. After the experience was all over, we learned that the designers – we had named them the “Puppetmasters” or “PMs” – had no real name for it either. They called it “The Beast,” at first because an early asset list contained 666 items and later because of the havoc that the ever-expanding experience wreaked on their lives. These days, it’s sometimes described as “The A.I. Game” or “The A.I. Web Experience,” dull monikers that give the bare minimum of information necessary to open conversation with a non-initiate.

In the middle of the scrum we called it “Evan Chan,” after the story’s first victim. Most often it was nameless, too new and multifarious to be contained by any kind of description we could invent. Like religion or art, it couldn’t be explained to anybody who didn’t already get it. Or at least, in the rush of spring 2001, that’s how it felt to the initial converts.

insights from a Master: Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff on Alternate Reality Game

Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is well-known for his insightful books and documentaries about how cultures, people, and institutions shape values in the digital age. Since his 1994 observational book Cyberia, Rushkoff has often been at the forefront of digital counterculture. His latest book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, provides clear, actionable ways to master technology before it masters us.

Recently, Rushkoff collaborated with games production company Smoking Gun Interactive to create an experimental alternate reality game (ARG) and graphic novel “proof of concept,” Exoriare. After chatting very briefly about ARGs at the eBook Summit last week in New York City, I thought our readers would enjoy a more focused e-mail interview with Rushkoff about his experience with Exoriare, ARGs, and play.

Jane Doh: For Exoriare, even though you have the writer credit for the graphic novel, how involved were you in the writing or the design of the Darknet ARG? Was the development of both elements concurrent, or did one come before the other?

Douglas Rushkoff: The initial concept for the story behind the Darknet ARG was already developed when I came on. I ended up writing a graphic novel for which the characters of that story were more tangential than central; their plight was of concern to my characters, but I had another story going on. That story got adjusted a bit to accommodate my timeline, and my intentions for a story that was to span four to six graphic novels.

Where we did collaborate a lot, though, was on the role of the player/reader. It was important to me that my graphic novel end with the beginning of the game – the last frame is to be the computer screen on which the game is played, with the player as an active member of a resistance group, reaching out to others through the Darknet.

I wanted the reader to be more than an uninvolved third person, but someone with a stake in the story. I also wanted the story itself to give the player an idea of his or her own back story, or to be able to imagine one based on the timeline they experienced over the first book.

So the ARG had to support this notion of people coming together to fight a very new kind of war.

JD: What were your impressions of the collaborative creative process for Exoriare? How did the form of the content, its delivery, its interactivity, affect the course of development and creation?

Read the full post on: ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network

Dexter Creates Elaborate ARG to Keep Viewer Interest Between Seasons

dexterShowtime Digital Media has created a way to keep fans of its hit serial killer drama Dexter entertained in the off-season: By introducing another serial killer - one that might not be as benevolent - in an elaborate alternate reality game (ARG).

The point is to uncover the identity of the so-called "Infinity Killer," a serial murderer with a name reminiscent of John Lithgow's Emmy-winning turn as Season Four's Trinity Killer.

The game was unveiled during a street marketing effort at San Diego Comic-Con in July, where attendees were drawn to a faux crime scene, according to Marcelo Guerra, Showtime's VP of digital marketing. Guerra said the crime scene "served as what they call the 'rabbit hole.'" In it, someone had recently been killed.

Showtime used SCVNGR, a game platform with a location-based element, to draw attention at Comic-Con. "As a digital marketer, I'm interested in finding new ways [to provide] compelling experiences as audiences become savvier and savvier," Guerra said.

Once drawn in, fans could interact with the ARG on two main sites with fictional characters and content - Sleep Superbly and Serial Huntress. With the help of Boston-based agency Modernista!, Showtime extended the experience to a variety of other online platforms. For instance, the game has included ads on Craigslist, a classified ad in the Philadelphia Daily News, and a lost jacket in New York. At one point, a watch with a clue on it was listed on eBay and participants had to bid for access the clue. (Showtime did not charge the winner, but the watch was mailed to the winning player.) YouTube and Twitter were also employed.

A marketing campaign of this scope requires a great deal of content, which Guerra says resulted from collaboration among Showtime's marketing department, the show's writers, and Modernista.

"A couple of the writers have really been into this new kind of storytelling and they've been really helpful and supportive along the way," he said.

Dexter fans have so far discovered a connection between the Infinity Killer, the faux crime scene at Comic-Con, and the two fictional websites. Showtime promises an exciting conclusion in the next few weeks, or about a week before Season Five premieres on September 26.

"It takes a lot of time and effort [to create]," Guerra says. "But it's a rewarding experience. And I think as a result, we're going to give fans the kind of experience that will keep them talking about the series and deepen their connection with the brand."

Showtime declined to disclose the number of players who have engaged with the ARG. Guerra describes it as a success, in part thanks to support from alternate reality websites like unfiction.com and ARGNet.com, which verified it as genuine and pulled in alternate reality fans who had not necessarily watched Dexter before.

This is not the first elaborate Dexter marketing campaign from Showtime. Previously, the network dyed fountains red in various cities prior to a season premiere.

Showtime is a wholly owned subsidiary of CBS Corporation.