Alternate Reality Entertainment

I have decided to begin research in the hope to identify if there is a real and growing trend in what I call “Alternate Realty Entertainment” (ARE).

The first experience I had with AR was in the gaming category (ARG). I played EA's “Magestic” and found it to be very entertaining. After that experience, I loosely followed the emergence of the Alternate Reality Game Genre via such sites as argn.com.

However, I want to gain altitude from gaming and uncover if other genre’s (i.e. literature, cinema, etc.) are leveraging the mass adoption of interactive communication platforms to provide a way for consumers (at a grass roots level) to immerse themselves into a specific fictional world. Is there room to create additional categories such as Alternate Reality Literature, Alternate Reality Cinema, Alternate Reality Television, etc.?

Being a William Gibson fan, I loved finding consumer generated content particular to his latest book “Pattern Recognition” online. In particular, fans have begun to post online their notion of Gibson’s footage.

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About Pattern Recognition: Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected. 

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The below assets (and others) allowed me to step inside the book and experience it as if I were part of the story (regardless how peripheral).

Gibson Dicussion Board Thread

Phootage Forum

Pattern Recognition Reader Suggested Footage Example 

I have begun to wonder whether the producers/screenwriters for the movie adaptation of the book would leverage this fan based material to represent the footage. The thought is intriguing: A book written by Gibson, expanded on by his fan base, who then are brought into the cinematic execution (and probably fueling the fire for more content to be developed). Suddenly what was an interesting concept in a work of literature is brought to life on a mass scale by weaving together both the fictional content and actions taken by its consumers in the real world.

I love the notion that AR is expanding beyond the game world and into simple expansions of literature, cinema, and television content. I further love the idea of how maybe one day, a producer will have the stones to launch an entertainment franchise by weaving studio related work and consumer generated work into a massively multi-fan ongoing/persistent experience. Approaches taken with the Matrix Franchise and the television series “Alias” suggest to me that we are not that far off from this reality.

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