Daniel talked about a video to help pronounce "Diego Garcian" and it reminded me of this youtube channel

YouTube channel launched on April 14th, 2010 with a video instructing viewers how to pronounce ASUS. It continued for years with normal engilsh words, but also did names and brands like Baal, Tutankhamun, Ke$$ha.
Some videos gained more notariety, because of the subtle comedy or oddity. in 2012 * The video "How to pronounce GIF" followed the typical format, but substituted the phrase "GIF stands for graphics interchange format"
some surreal, like the correct pronounciation for the phrase "please help me escape from this place"

July 9th, 2013, Pronunciation Book departed from its regular programming with a video titled “How To Pronounce 77”. Instead of illustrating the correct pronunciation, the voiceover narrates that “something is going to happen in 77 days,” followed by 15 seconds of silence with soft clicks that could be interpreted as Morse code.
Next day the video was 76

The following days had a different pattern than previous videos:

1. Start with a cryptic sentence
2. State how many days until when something will happen

A cryptic narrative began to form through the intro sentence

caused internet buzz, the whole world wide web was spreading this series of videos in what I'd call an "explosive node" way.

Bear Stearns Bravo
On September 24th, 2013 Pronunciation Book released a new video titled "How to Pronounce Horse_ebooks," which contains a phonetic reading of the infamous Twitter spambot account @Horse_ebooks and a mysterious message narrated by a woman standing in front of a silver screen.

The same day as the Horse_ebooks reveal, the New Yorker revealed Thomas Bender, VP of product development at HowCast as the identity behind Pronunciation Guide and he was running the @Horse_ebooks Twitter account with BuzzFeed's creative director Jacob Bakkila. The two were staging an event to launch of their new alternate reality game project called "Bear Stearns Bravo."

Pronunciation Manual
On April 13th, 2011, the YouTube channel Pronunciation Manual launched, offering similar instructional videos. However, these videos intentionally mispronounce the words for comedic purposes. As of July 2013, the channel has inspired other copycat channels including PronunciationPartner and PronunciationPooper while amassing more than 213,000 subscribers and 68.4 million views, averaging 81,600 views per day.

horse_ebooks
Started basically as a spam bot, but a Russian web developer, But without the nefarious tactics.
Gained popularity as poetic
Twitter account that posted nonsense phrases from ebooks about horses, interspersed with spam links.

"I will make certain you never buy knives again,"
"We all agree, no one looks cool,"
"Is the dance floor calling? No,"
"Everything happens so much"
"unfortunately, as you probably already know, people."

Purchased in 2011 by Bakkila. This change was noticed by the account's followers when, on September 14, 2011, the account began tweeting "via web" instead of "via Horse ebooks", and the frequency of tweets promoting ClickBank significantly dropped while the number of "funny" tweets increased.

Alternate Reality Game (ARG)
interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.

Among the terms essential to understanding discussions about ARGs are:

• Puppet-master – A puppet-master or "PM" is an individual involved in designing and/or running an ARG. Puppet-masters are simultaneously allies and adversaries to the player base, creating obstacles and providing resources for overcoming them in the course of telling the game's story. Puppet-masters generally remain behind the curtain while a game is running. The real identity of puppet masters may or may not be known ahead of time.
• The Curtain – The curtain, drawing from the phrase, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," is generally a metaphor for the separation between the puppetmasters and the players. This can take the traditional form of absolute secrecy regarding the puppetmasters' identities and involvement with the production, or refer merely to the convention that puppet-masters do not communicate directly with players through the game, interacting instead through the characters and the game's design.
• Rabbit-hole/Trailhead – A rabbit-hole, or trailhead, marks the first media artifact, be it a website, contact, or puzzle, that draws in players. Most ARGs employ a number of trailheads in several media to maximize the probability of people discovering the game. Typically, the rabbit-hole is a website, the most easily updated, cost-effective option.[4]
• This Is Not A Game (TINAG) – Setting the ARG form apart from other games is the This Is Not A Game sentiment popularized by the players themselves. It is the belief that "one of the main goals of the ARG is to deny and disguise the fact that it is even a game at all."

design principles

• Storytelling as archaeology. Instead of presenting a chronologically unified, coherent narrative, designers scatter pieces of the story across the Internet and other media, allowing players to reassemble it, supply connective tissue and determine what it means.
• Platformless narrative. Stories are not bound to a single medium, but exist independently and use whatever media is available to make itself heard.
  Designing for a hive mind. While it might be possible to follow games individually, designs are directed at a collective of players that share information and solutions almost instantly and incorporate individuals possessing almost every conceivable area of expertise. While games might initially attract a small group of participants, as the participants come across new challenges they try to find others with the knowledge needed to overcome an obstacle.
• A whisper is sometimes louder than a shout. Rather than openly promoting games and trying to attract participation by "pushing" it toward potential players, designers attempt to "pull" players to the story by engaging in over-the-top secrecy, have elements of the game "warn" players away from them, and eschew traditional marketing channels. Designers do not communicate about the game with players or press while it is in play.
• The "this is not a game" (TINAG) aesthetic. ARGs themselves do not acknowledge that they are games. They do not have an acknowledged ruleset for players; as in real life, they determine the "rules" either through trial and error or by setting their own boundaries. Narratives present a fully realized world: any phone number or the email address mentioned works, and any website acknowledged exists. Games take place in real time and are not replayable. Characters function like real people, not game pieces, respond authentically, and are controlled by real people, not by computer AI. Some events involve meetings or live phone calls between players and actors.
  Real life as a medium. Games use players' lives as a platform. Players are not required to build a character or role-play being someone other than themselves. They might unexpectedly overcome a challenge for the community simply because of the real-life knowledge and background they possessed. Participants are constantly on the lookout for clues embedded in everyday life.
  Collaborative storytelling. While the puppetmasters control most of the story, they incorporate player content and respond to players' actions, analysis and speculation by adapting the narrative and intentionally leave "white space" for the players to fill in.
  Not a hoax. While the TINAG aesthetic might seem on the surface to be an attempt to make something indistinguishable from real life, there are both subtle and overt metacommunications in place to reveal a game's framework and most of its boundaries.

Inspiration

• 1905 short story "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" by G. K. Chesterton
  • (part of a collection entitled The Club of Queer Trades)
  • seems to predict the ARG concept
  • While investigating a case of assault brought by Major Brown, Rupert Grant, the private detective, and his brother Basil stumble upon the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited, an agency that creates adventures for its clients.
• John Fowles' 1965 novel The Magus.
  • young Oxford graduate
  • moves to greece to teach
  • gets dissolution, meets wealth recluse
  • gets drawn into Godgames
• science fiction novel Triton (Delaney) pub 1976 by
  • The combination board and card game, Vlet, that many of the main characters in play throughout his novel appears to be a type of ARG.
• Ludic texts (Ludology is game studies)
  • Choose Your Own Adventure children's novels
• Reader-influenced online fiction such as AOL's QuantumLink Serial provides a model that incorporates audience influence into the storytelling in a manner similar to that of ARGs, as do promotional online games like Wizards of the Coast's Webrunner games.
• Other break-the-fourth-wall actions in theater and performing art

The concept has had cultural touchstones throughout post-WWII pop culture.

• the Beatles' "Paul is dead" phenomenon.
• the 1997 movie The Game with Michael Douglas

Earliest examples of ARG include

• Webrunner: The Hidden Agenda to promote "Netrunner"
• Dreadnot
  • from SF Chronicle published at sfgate.com in 1996
  • The game included working voice mail phone numbers for characters, clues in the source code, character email addresses, off-site websites, real locations in San Francisco, real people (including then-Mayor Willie Brown), and of course a fictional mystery
• Marketing for the Blair Witch Project
  • expanding the world of the movie online, adding backstory, and treating the fiction as reality through real-world media such as fliers and a fake documentary on the Sci-Fi Channel.
  • However, due to the subject material & absence of overt metacommunications that this was fiction, so mor elike a internet hoax

Notable examples

• The Beast
  • marketing for Spielberg's AI Artificial Intelligence
  • an elaborate murder mystery played out across hundreds of websites, email messages, faxes, fake ads, and voicemail messages
  • dubbed "the Citizen Kane of online entertainment" by Internet Life,[19] was a runaway success
  • three million active participants[21] from all over the world during its run
  • An early asset list for the project contained 666 files, prompting the game's puppetmasters to dub it "the Beast"
• Portal 1
  • March 1 , 2010 game update
  • game update now includes 26 radios in the test chambers playing the same default tune that the original radios played
  • play Morse code which led to phone number
  • phone number was to a BBS
  • show the user ASCII art images and paragraphs quoting Cave Johnson
  • idle for 4 minutes, "Hey! Please login now. You have one minute left." and if left idle for one more minute the next text will say "Your login time (5 minutes) ran out. Goodbye" disconnecting the user.
  • Portal was updated at another time on two days later "Added valuable asset retrieval". The Portal 1 game ending was expanded to include Chell being dragged back into the facility by the Party Escort Bot saying "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position" creating the plot for the upcoming game Portal 2.
• I Love Bees
  • first advertised by a hidden message in a Halo 2 trailer
  • on the website discovered that the pages appeared to be hacked by a mysterious intelligence. As players solved puzzles, audio logs were posted to the ilovebees.com site which gradually revealed more of the fictional back-story
  • involving a marooned artificial intelligence stranded on Earth and its attempts to put itself back together.
• CBS made an ARG for Jericho to promote the series in 2007.
• 2016 TV show Mr. Robot, started with a phone number shown on a box in a video clip. Prizes were awarded to the first 509 solvers

Serious ARGs

if ARGs can spark players to solve very hard fictional problems, could the games be used to solve real-world problems?

• World Without Oil
  • using collective intelligence, puppetmasters acted as players to guide the "collective imagination" to create a multi-authored chronicle of the alternative future
• October 2008 The British Red Cross created a serious ARG called Traces of Hope to promote their campaign about civilians caught up in conflict
• European Union funded an ARG to support motivation for multilingualism within European secondary school students called ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation

Meow Wolf

House of Eternal Return

House of Eternal Return has a storyline based on the fictional Selig family, who disappeared after experimenting with interdimensional travel by tapping into a mysterious force known as "The Anomaly" in an effort to bring back deceased family members. This caused the house to fracture open paths to alternate dimensions. A secret government organization called the Charter was able to contain the Anomaly's effects and passes off the containment warehouse as an art installation.

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