Interesting story from Reason on how the BBC (deliberately? inadvertently?) went too far in promoting its ARG - alternative reality game - Jamie Kane (yes, I'm a little chilled). ARG's are a form of public marketing strategy - pioneered for Spielberg's A.I. - in which clues are left across a variety of media (from fake sites to code words in ads to graffiti on walls) for avid fans to pick up, and construct into an 'alternative reality'.
The outrage amongst digerati was that the Jamie Kane story - where a pop star is killed in a helicopter accident (or is he?) - appeared as a legitimate entry in Wikipedia. Cue horror of ethical hackers, and notable apologies from the BBC. The ever-clever libertarian writer Jesse Walker puts a nice conceptual framework around all this:
At mid-century several psychologists and psychiatrists, notably Eric Berne and the pre-psychedelic Timothy Leary, pioneered the theory of transactional analysis, which treated social roles as gameplay and social behavior as a series of games. Leary took this further than most: Profiled in The Realist in 1964, he referred casually to Harvard's "verbal game," his guests' "visiting game," and his countrymen's "nationality game"; describing his first trip on magic mushrooms, he declared: "The space game came to an end, then the time game came to an end, and then the Timothy Leary game came to an end."
This summer the Jamie Kane game, aimed at telling a story and attracting public attention, came into conflict with the Wikipedia game, theoretically aimed at presenting truths rather than fictions; it also laid bare a tension within the BBC game, which has departments devoted both to news and to entertainment.
