Why so serious alternate reality game

Initially people turned up to take part in the first scavenger hunt in San Diego and each person was teamed with an online partner. As with most viral marketing campaigns, this initial elaborate event gained a lot of attention after players started talking about it. Select participants were given mobile phones hidden in cakes and were called with special requests from The Joker himself. To prove your support, photos and videos of the players campaigning for Dent had to be shared with the Gotham City community and the response was enormous.

Players were sent coordinates to lockers located in bowling alleys which contained clues to an exclusive screening of the Batman trailer but Joker found it first and vandalised the film. All web pages were vandalised by the Joker and with that, The Dark Knight became the highest grossing film of and biggest opening day of all time. Websites, cake, mobile phones, print, media, collectables, mail, email, sms messages, phone calls, flash games, location based games, GPS coordinates, live events, videos, audio and sky writing.

Multiple levels of engagement for the casual, curious and committed audience. Hundreds of websites created to build Gotham city through the internet. Integrated casual flash based games found on the websites to unlock pieces of the story. Physical news papers, special collectables and direct mail sent to players. 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. A former Disney imagineer, Bonds had experience in getting crowds of thousands to do her bidding. The company takes its core tenets seriously -- it's like a heightened mix of spycraft and theater. Still, pulling off an event as elaborate as the Comic-Con scavenger hunt required an intense amount of logistical legwork beyond coming up with a wacky idea.

A currency attorney was consulted to make sure the dollar bills were legally defaced. They used stickers. Meetings with top Comic-Con brass were arranged to figure out how to distribute bills through their internal banking system. Originally 42 Entertainment wanted to toss the dollars from the third floor of the convention center, a la the Joker in Burton's Batman , but it was deemed a safety hazard.

Security guards had to be hired. They wore suits and acted as mobsters. The coordination required boggles the mind. Then there's the online experience to worry about. In addition to racing around confirming actors were at the proper checkpoints at Comic-Con, Bonds and the team, who were running the operation at a command center at a nearby hotel, had to periodically add servers to keep the website from crashing.

They knew that if the website took too long to load or the makeup ran out, players would abandon the game. They're fickle. The promise of free stuff only keeps a crowd hanging around for so long.

That desire to get everyone involved, to make a piece of big-tent pop entertainment, was central to the studio and Christopher Nolan's vision of The Dark Knight. According to Bonds and Lieu, the filmmakers were intimately involved in the ARG, and there wasn't a piece of content in the campaign that they didn't see. Even as the release date of the movie drew nearer and the Joker's missions grew more baroque -- in December , players picked up cakes from local bakeries, called a number, and discovered a Nokia "Joker phone" ringing in the center of the desert -- every detail needed to be on point.

Nothing was insignificant. Each element had to be as tailored as the suits Nolan wore on set. They know how to drive things forward. It's almost slandering them to say they're extremely intelligent and sharp. It's obvious. That degree of control was tested on January 22, , when Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

He was 28 years old. It was a shock to the public, to the filmmakers, and to the people at 42 Entertainment, who already had a sense of how bracing Ledger's performance as the Joker would be.

He had completed his work on the film, but, following reports of his death, speculation about the movie intensified. Quickly, the ARG was put on hold for 30 days following the terrible news. A small black ribbon was added to WhySoSerious.

Being a regular on the online forums where the game was most frequently discussed, I witnessed several types of players. I combined characteristics of those players into individual personas.

To engage the most dedicated players, I designed the archive as if it was an internal investigation by the Gotham Police Department Major Crimes Unit. This concept was extended by having the archive acquired by the Joker and vandalized with in-game notes to send to his followers, i. Being faced with what I later calculated to be pieces of information, organizing all of it was one of my priorities.

Once the inventory was done, I categorized all pages and internal links into an Excel spreadsheet. This came out to be almost rows. The first screen is shown here. I also used the spreadsheet to track what pages I needed to write content for. Acknowledging the differing content types across the site, I designed several high-level page templates.

Since I aimed for the experience to be as in-game as possible, I chose to keep the same visual style as 42 Entertainment had used, especially for the Gotham Police Department storyline.

Main investigation page, with the 4 storylines I categorized. Sample investigation page, with collapsible local navigation for wayfinding.