backing it up, motherfuckers!

Dear MuchMusic:

Fail.

You're all hip to the interweb, right? I believe that's what you said. Get hip to this;

Fail.

In otherwords, you suck. Plain and simply, this has been a waste of time.

I am not trolling. I am not trying to be cool by making fun of a corporation. I was very prepared to engage in an interesting and entertaining ARG...

You'll note my participation as user seeveejay on the youtube. I believe I had two of the more interesting and creative videos available. I went so far as to register the blogspot account phake615, thus having the domain phake615.blogspot.com... i was originally planning this as the unofficial 'wiki' of the site... you've seen many of these for other ARGs... or so you'd think... I digress however. Simply keep in mind that this critique comes from a fan of ARGs, and not just a naysayer.

This has been a loss since day one. Granted, yes the inception of it was cool. Fake hacks - they looked good! The start of the blog was good too, you really needed a presence in the 'sphere, and you went to it... the abstract dance worked well - at first.

Sadly, what we did notice quite early in - is that you guys had no clue where this was going. We all showed up and jumped on and were cool. There were quite a few 'tweens' brought in under the faux rebellion theme [a marketing ploy which I find cheap and detestable] and these people were clueless as to how implausible this was.

There was also a core audience though, who while understanding the complete lack of plausibility were willing to suspend their disbelief to engage in your game. What we got however, was little more than one half-witted real life hint [the mad mark mask trade] which turned out to be nothing... then the blog diddled along posting pointlessly and frustratingly for weeks... then we got the point that you guys were putting videos on much. neato.

everyone solved the game days into it, and yet you dragged out your big reveal on the mmvas as though it was a secret, and then one day you simply go and prematurely ejaculate it into the blogosphere out of the blue. what do you expect us to think now?

"oooh! rebellion man is claiming he's going to commit a federal offense!! he's literally BROADCASTING IT! TWICE! THIS MUST BE REALZORS!"

har har...

my point is simply that your in-game dialogue as to how this task is performed simply isn't enough to base a suspension of disbelief on. particularly after muchmusic.com/phreak claims that all much employees have been investigated and are not the phreak. [ps... it's a bait and switch to not include the actual phreak in the selections.] {pps the subsite claims it's not a "virus campaign" which is good, as we all thought it was a viral campaign anyway}

the capacity to believe was present in each of us early on. i have no access to your traffic logs, but i've got a pretty good idea that traffic is down atleast 50% since day one, right? you lost interest by chatting at us... You guys presented this just like television. Most successful ARG campaigns revolve around getting the user up and out from behind our screens. Yours did nothing to promote this, save getting us to record ourselves and send it in to you...which of course perpetuates the spiral as those who sent in videos to see them on tv likely spent hours at a time watching for themselves.

Granted, as a television station it's no surprise that this is the avenue you choice to exploit alongside the internet. However given all the tie-ins that were possible due to the massive Bell media conglomerate, the minimal amount of cross-coverage was pitiful.

Now, at the beginning, I stated this was a loss, and I'm not sure I clearly explained why. Allow me to break it down:

What has this amounted to?

We know this much...

Ultimately, fan videos are going to be displayed during the MMVAs.
This will be performed under the pretext of some rogue 'pop culture activist' [gross misrepresentation; for shame] placing perfectly timed fan videos in to make some point...[which has never been expressed. what is phreak's goal? can't start kids thinking, can we?]

Kids will feel good about themselves for it?

What We Can Assume:

Somewhere during the show, a conflict will arise between MM and Phreak. It's only natural. Much has admitted in RL and GL that they know Phreak exists. Thus we can expect them to be "watching out" for him at the MMVAs.

During this portion, Phreak will appear on TV, and likely get unmasked to be Devon [if it's not, big whoop...one more swerve]. From here, speculation has things going so far as Devon being fake arrested, and Much deciding [after supposed MMVA rating spikes] to drop any charges and offer Devon a "phreak"-esque show on much wherein netvideos are played. [the only idea in this whole mess i support]

so, essentially what we see is a marketing ploy to advertise and gain awareness for phreak - who in turn brings extra awareness and advertising to the mmvas [the net crowd] which will culminate in extra ratings for the mmvas, and possibly a large audience to see the inception of much's next character based show [that hole ed leaves is quite the void].

Now, my problem is that from day one, everyone has understood this is a ploy for ATLEAST the mmvas. That being said, nothing was done to improve the difficulty of the game. No elements were introduced to get real world participation [how hard would it have been to leave phreak masks around TO and call it a scavenger hunt?] Nothing was done to hide the fact that this was just a giant billboard. You engaged us in an intelligent and interactive manner then, just as your MMVA tv commercials do - shouted at us "WATCH! WATCH! WATCH!"

it's pretty hard to build mystique and pique interest with actions like that.

Now - I'm not saying this won't wind up moderately successful for you.

The little tween and early teen crowd who understand the phreak as some symbol of 'rebellion' and 'activism', they'll eat this up. They'll love this just as much as your media savvy 18+ crowd is hating it.

[save the few who think it's a cool way to get some hits for their myspace. which is a dying breed in and of itself]

This is essentially where I think the problem lies;

In going the direction you have with this game, and making it so juvenile and allowing so little input, you've pandered to a lower age group which is already strongly within your grasp. [you've also continued to misinform them outright]

You also, however, completely lost out on the oppurtunity to snag a portion of the media savvy crowd that first started poking their noses around when this hit the web. The 18-25 demographic is grossly ignored on your channel in recent years, and I believe is currently being courted by some of the more downkey alternative/indie programming on MTV [which is still owned by the same company as you, so i admit its a moot point] in this demographic.

This is still an important field, and one that is continually ignored whenever much gets together for their newest "marketing" campaign.

So herein lies the loss:

You created a game that was so unplayable, it only attracted the passive, ignorant fans you already had and frustrated anyone else who became interested in it.

It's really a shame.
Hopefully some time down the road someone will execute an idea like this properly.

There's still time... I suppose you can still do something... This is cross posted somewhere special, too. So don't go thinking you can delete it and steal the good ideas!*

[*/sarcasm...i doubt you'd know a good idea if it smacked you in the face]


-CvJ