Sample investigation page, with collapsible local navigation for wayfinding. Evidence page, with hover actions revealing more information about the item. The site can be found at WhySoSeriousRedux. Here are reactions from other game players:. Along the way, I made friends with several game designers at 42 Entertainment who had produced the campaign itself.
Here are their reactions:. Amazing amount of work there. This is amazing. You are a genius, Anita! Wow…You have an amazing eye for detail and accuracy — you are able to put the puzzle pieces of a real-time narrative back together again with elegance. Anita Cheng. Work About Blog. Introduction Why So Serious?
For Beach and her fellow members of this ad-hoc army, that meant applying Joker makeup to their faces as they raced around completing puzzles and carrying out the bidding of their new leader. In a " Gotham City Police Report " that can still be found online, those acts include forming a "dangerous roaming mob" and terrorizing "a Girl Guide" and stealing "her cookies. Beach, who at the time was writing about alternate reality games for the website ARGNet and eventually filed her own account of the events, had a more pressing issue as the day's festivities wound down: She had to get the damn makeup off.
It was starting to run in the heat and she needed to head back to the convention center. So she ducked into a beauty salon with her melting Joker face intact, walked up to the staff, and asked to use the bathroom as the customers looked on in confusion. The Nine Inch Nails frontman and industrial music pioneer was looking for a way to tell the story he'd dreamed up in correlation with his record Year Zero , a project set in a dystopian version of the year defined by political upheaval and domestic terrorism.
As he told Wired at the time, he was aware of both the "Lost Experience," an ARG centered around the popular ABC series Lost launched in between the show's second and third seasons, and "The Beast," a groundbreaking piece of digital storytelling created to promote Stephen Spielberg's film A. Artificial Intelligence.
Always looking to confound and confuse, Reznor wanted to create an online narrative with a "hoaxish feeling," like Orson Welles' radio performance of War of the Worlds. Naturally, he reached out to 42 Entertainment , the Burbank-based company founded by "The Beast" creator Jordan Weisman. In the mids, ARGs and the larger world of transmedia -- an umbrella term used to describe stories that unfold across multiple platforms -- were in the middle of a big mainstream moment, particularly in marketing departments at movie studios, record labels, and video game companies.
The low-cost, high-reward viral campaigns of projects like 's The Blair Witch Project , which cleverly blurred the the line between fact and fiction, had given way to far more ambitious, expensive operations like 's "I Love Bees," a dense, award-winning ARG produced by 42 Entertainment that bridged the gap between Microsoft's best selling video game Halo and its sequel.
When Reznor's email arrived in the company's inbox, Alex Lieu could not have been more excited. Now his hero was sending him an email at his job. I was like, 'If we're not doing this project, I'm leaving the company. The company took on the project, whipping up media attention and fan excitement with a tale that remixed Philip K. Dick-ian paranoia for a post-Y2K age. A sprawling fiction incorporating psychoactive drugs, religious fundamentalism, and quantum mechanics, "Year Zero" caught the attention of Jonathan Nolan, the younger brother and frequent creative partner of Christopher Nolan.
He was working on the script for The Dark Knight , and soon Syncopy, the production company founded by Christopher Nolan and producer Emma Thomas, set up a meeting with 42 Entertainment. They loved "Year Zero. Once 42 Entertainment was on board, the studio presented them with another challenge: The casting of the Joker was still considered to be controversial. The appearance of the clown-faced killer teased at the end of Batman Begins immediately inspired fantasy casting -- Robin Williams, Adrien Brody, Steve Carell, and Paul Bettany were all rumored to be up for the role -- but Nolan had his eye on year-old Heath Ledger, still best known for his heartthrob turns in films like A Knight's Tale and 10 Things I Hate About You.
Nominated for an Oscar for his stoic, emotionally wounded turn in 's Brokeback Mountain , he became the target of homophobic jokes on comic-book forums and in the comment sections of movie blogs. Before principal photography began, the studio was looking to shift the conversation away from the debate around Ledger's casting; instead, they wanted people talking about how excited they were to see the new Joker. So they gave us a picture they had taken.
Bucking the traditional promotional route of publishing the first glimpse of a major character in a magazine like Entertainment Weekly , the image was unlocked by fans who had discovered a Joker-vandalized version of Harvey Dent's campaign website after Joker cards were left in comic book shops in select locations. Sharing your email address with the site would remove a pixel from what was eventually revealed to be the Joker's first big close-up.
You've probably seen the photo. It's striking: Ledger is glaring from the shadows, the scars on his cheeks and the red on his lips popping against the white makeup and the black background. This wasn't Jack Nicholson's slick, dandy-ish Joker. He was messy. The studio was looking to shift the conversation away from the debate around Heath Ledger's casting. Given the unceasing critical adoration and enduring popularity of Nolan's Bat-trilogy, it's hard to remember that The Dark Knight was not guaranteed to be the obvious, slam-dunk mega-hit we now think of it as.
The Dark Knight , which self-consciously mimicked Michael Mann's Heat in attempting to tell an epic crime story on Gotham's gray streets, took a bigger swing for the fences.
From a marketing perspective, it needed a competitive edge. This push-and-pull between Batman and the comic-book hero's passionate fanbase is partially baked into the history of the character. As critic Glen Weldon writes in his book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture , there's long been a group of "hard-core enthusiasts" who only accept "the darkest, grimmest, most hyper-masculine version of the character imaginable.
At the same time, this was a summer tentpole that, at least theoretically, needed to appeal to anyone. Tangible rewards like the Joker photo were central to the audience's relationship to the ARG -- "You can't just exploit them to make content," explains Bonds -- and the larger "pulsed" structure of the game played into that tricky, malleable dynamic.
How do you keep a growing global squad of players involved with a campaign while still attracting new thrill-seekers with each interactive stunt? It's a balancing act. Drawing inspiration from The Long Halloween , an acclaimed issue Batman comic released in and , Lieu and his team purposefully spaced out puzzles, missions, and challenges to mimic the way the mysterious killer in that series only killed around holidays. Ideally, those ink-stained pages would spill out into the streets via the ARG.
They drew up plans, typed out scripts, and scribbled designs. Lieu handled all the Joker's writing himself, scratching out the bloody letters with brushes and ink quills. They didn't want people climbing up on rooftops to take pictures. When I ask Lieu if they ran into any conflicts with the studio about the severity of the subject matter, particularly the violence of the Joker, he admits there were some ideas that never made it past the brainstorming stage.
One Long Halloween- inspired concept involved Santas dressed up like Jokers around Christmas time -- basically, a child's nightmare and potential PR disaster waiting to happen. The studio nixed that. There were other safety concerns. Both Lieu and Bonds were reluctant to speak too freely about certain aspects of the process -- non-disclosure agreements still linger -- but Lieu did mention that at one point there were discussions about having Batman sightings all over the world where the Caped Crusader might appear on windowsills and rooftops, or hanging off gargoyles.
You can't have people scaling walls to swipe movie tie-in merchandise. In the design of ARGs like these, safety is the top priority for all the events staged in the physical world. Berlin Alexanderplatz 3. Pixar's Soul 4. Pieces of a Woman 5. Feels Good Man 6. Another Round 7. The Truffle Hunters 8. Sound of Metal 9. Lovers Rock Nomadland Click Here for Thoughts. Adam's Top 10 - 1. Spontaneous 2. Promising Y. Woman 3. Nomadland 4. The Vast of Night 5.
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