Alternate reality gaming as viral marketing

Alternate reality games, also known as immersive games, blend fantasy and reality in ways that blur the difference. We are not talking about virtual reality technology that require their users to don special helmets or use kinematic effectors, but games that embed their narratives and interact with players using everyday aspects of the the real world — Web sites, email, instant messages, phone calls, letters and billboards.

The genre has largely been used by conceptual artists, advertising agencies and marketeers. Here’s how Dave Szulborski describes it on his This is Not a Game site.

“Alternate Reality Gaming, sometimes also called Immersive Gaming, Viral Marketing, or Interactive Fiction, is a rapidly emerging genre of online gaming and is one of the first true art and entertainment forms that was developed from and exclusively for the Internet. Alternate Reality Games have been wildly successful when used for multimillion dollar marketing campaigns, such as the 2004 game I Love Bees, used by Microsoft to help launch the hugely anticipated X-Box video game Halo 2, and the game that started it all, the Beast, used to promote Steven Spielberg’s science fiction epic A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001.”

Wired has an article, Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games, that describes an a viral marketing campaign to promote Nine Inch Nails. Muhammad Saleem blogs about the online viral marketing campaign it used to promote the move The Dark Knight. Finally, ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post, Alternate Reality Games: What Makes or Breaks Them? that attempts to deconstruct ARGs.

Alternate reality gaming is definitely unusual, but it draws on many of the skills any student of gaming should be developing: the ability to construct a rich narrative, the capability to design an environment that reveals itself as players explore and gradually discover and solve underlying puzzles, and the skills to exploit the latest digital technologies.

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IBM using Second Life to build online communities

As seen on slashdot:

IBM has an unconventional take on virtual worlds for business use. Rather than strictly adhering to the laws of physics, IBM is letting its employees hold virtual meetings up in the air and under water. Employees are also being given wacky chores, such as kicking a giant boulder 1,400 kilometers. The virtual world, known as the Metaverse, has been in development for two years. Michael Ackerbauer of IBM says, ‘I’d say more people are still finding it a novelty than a business tool. But … if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come.’” IBM seems to be following a trend of involvement in virtual worlds, which we have previously discussed.

UMBC alumnus Pranam Kolarispent several summers as an intern at IBM and brought back reports that IBM was using Second Life in interesting ways.

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Microsoft launches effort to exploit multicore processors

In yesterday’s New York Times, John Markoff wrote (Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust) about a major new effort Microsoft is making to develop their capability to exploit the new multicore processors being developed by Intel, AMD and IBM.

When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the “software spiral” — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.

The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software.

“Microsoft is doing the right thing in trying to develop parallel software,” said Andrew Singer, a veteran software designer who is the co-founder of Rapport Inc., a parallel computing company based in Redwood City, Calif. “They could be roadkill if somebody else figures out how to do this first.”

Games and interactive entertainment are among the first application areas to benefit from multicore processors, primarily through the Sony PS3 console.

The UMBC Games, Animation and Interactive Media programs includes the study of parallel and multicore computing as one of the key technologies in the Computer Science track and in partnership with UMBC’s new Multicore Computing Center. This coming Spring, for example, UMBC is offering a special topics course (CMSC 491s/691s) on the topic — Introduction to Cell Processors and Applications.

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Q&A with Second Life creator

Last week the Feakonomics blog invited readers to submit questions for Second Life creator Philip Rosedale to answer. There is an obvious economics connection, since Second Life has a robust and growing economy, but the motivation was broader.

“You could argue that Philip Rosedale has done more than anyone else to help millions of people live their dreams. As the founder and CEO of Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based company that created Second Life (which we’ve blogged about now and again), he has taken virtual reality to a whole new place.”

The questions asked about many things. I thought that this answer was interesting, and applies to interactive games and entertainment of all kinds.

Q: How do you feel about accusations that by providing a literal “second life,” you’re contributing to a trend of physical isolation that’s damaging the social abilities of an increasing number of teens and adults?

A: Whether sitting in front of a computer is bad for you is a function of whether what you are doing there is more or less challenging than real life. If you are mindlessly shooting monsters, the environment has the risk of making you oversimplify the real world. If, on the other hand, you are confronted with a complex human environment with people from all over the world who are demanding of you in your interactions with them, you could actually be better off in front of the computer. Second Life can teach people new skills and connect them with new cultures in a way that the real-world environments of many places cannot.

You can read the full Q&A session on the post Philip Rosedale Answers Your Second Life Questions.

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NVIDIA + Mental Images = ?

I just saw on Beyond3D.com that GPU vendor NVIDIA has bought Mental Images, the German company that makes the decidedly non-real-time Mental Ray renderer. They’re now a wholly owned subsidiary, so it’s not an all out merger. On the other hand, there are rumors that the Mental Mill shader editor may be incorporated into NVIDIA’s FX composer.

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