Over at io9.com Annalee Newitz has an interesting article on ARGs and pop culture marketing – The Argument Against ARGs. While she acknowledges that ARGs can be fun, she’s bothered by the ways that they blur marketing and entertainment.

“… what I’d like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with.”

Jeff Somers has built small-scale ARGs for his books The Digital Plague and The Electric Church – both of which are extensions of the universe he’s created. For The Electric Church he scripted a story that involved a Monk and a hacker fighting for control of the “official” website of the Electric Church. The ARG was solved by the folks at Unfiction, and it’s still available for anyone willing to try and unlock its secrets. In solving the puzzle the player “wins” a resolution to the story the site is telling through its puzzles.

Jeff’s latest ARG takes place on a message board from the future, in which citizens of Old New York discuss the plague that’s decimating their city. It’s as much an extension of the world he’s created in the novel as a piece of marketing.

The challenge for authors who create ARGs is that they compete with movie studios and games for attention.The Dark Knight, Halo, even this line of perfume from Sarah Jessica Parker, created ARGs aimed at built-in audiences already eager to interact with the story (or at least to score free stuff), and for a new author it’s a challenge to launch an ARG without that level of brand awarness. But an ARG is also a great way to display what’s unique about the author’s world. And if they are compelling enough, the dedicated groups of players who work to unlock the stories can become the book’s best advocates.

Jeff’s ARGs don’t involve the kind of in-world events that are commonly associated with the games – they take place entirely (well, almost entirely) online, so purists might suggest that they aren’t ARGs in the mode of whysoserious.com. But because they are scripted by the author, they contain the kind of story elements you don’t normally expect in marketing: conflict, character, and resolution – and in that sense, they become closer to writing. The Covet ARG ends with bottles of perfume; Jeff’s ARGs end with a bang.

You can check out Jeff’s sites here and here.

And keep an eye out next summer for This is Not a Game, by Walter Jon Williams – a new novel that takes place in the world of ARGs.