Örnebring, Henrik
2007
Alternate reality gaming and convergence culture: The case of Alias

Good review of ARG literature!

He doesn’t see consumers empowered at all. To him, ARGs are in the end just marketing for a media property. -> Of course he’s right, but that’s the point of EA: to change that!

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“I would argue that convergence culture does not work to dissolve the boundaries between texts and create trans-media narratives as much as it creates new opportunities to market a specific text or set of texts (such as a feature film, a computer game or a TV series) through other texts – i.e. there is still a ‘hierarchy of meaning’ among texts, where there is a clearly identifiable ur-text (in this case, the Alias TV series) that is marketed through other texts (books, comics and ARGs). The books, comics and ARGs might well refer to characters and events from the fictional universe of the TV series, but flows in the opposite direction (i.e. the TV series taking up narrative threads or using characters from other media texts based on the same fictional universe) are much rarer.”
“This tendency towards the celebratory is also visible in much of the previous research on ARGs [of Jenkins and others].” Consumer empowerment is a dream.