Heroes 360

I've been dabbling my toes into the Heroes 360 experience. It's a great idea, but the execution leaves some things to be desired. First: I'm a big fan of the show. I'm also a big fan of complementary content, even if it isn't the full-tilt no-holds-barred textbook ARG. The graphic novels from the beginning of the season were terrific for this - lots of flavour, some good characterisation and backstory.

Now, with this whole Primatech Paper development, I'm really excited about what they're trying to do. Will it be an ARG? I don't know, and I don't think it matters. The thing that's bugging me is that the execution is a little, well, sloppy.

Case in point: I received a text message containing a username and password, but when I got to the relevant site, mere minutes later, that section of the site no longer prompted for a username and password. However, there were four new places to enter a different username and password, leaving me soundly baffled as I tried to input my obsolete password into all of these wrong spots. (Hey, it's been a long while since I've been an actual player.)

Of those four new protected areas, two ceased to require a username/password combination within a few minutes, robbing me of the satisfaction of having figured them out on my own - and I was pretty sure I had them figured out, although the site didn't accept my authentication, though I hear that it did so for other people.

Sloppy, sloppy, NBC. You should have been prepared a little better. Here's hoping you get your act together by next week.

Comments

[David J. Bodycombe]

Sad to say, when TV companies get involved in any high-concept game, they use a mixture of running horses, open barn doors and asses divided by two. Promotions are thought about at far too late a stage for such activities to be worthwhile.

One game I designed for a BBC documentary relied on points of bright light which you had to note down then play dot-to-dot. However, when all the rushes came back, everything was in the wrong place. Our little game was way far too down the director's list of things to worry about, and we ended up doing an acrostic (oh, the shame) instead.

We also tried to do something ARG-like for Spy, the popular BBC Three documentary. The problem was that they only started considering the online aspects of it when episode 2 was already in production. The opportunity to seed clues into the main show was already nonexistent.

I'm sure there must be a good way of integrating something ARGish with a TV show, but it needs to be planned so far in advance it's untrue because of the way that the TV show itself will have anything up to 24 month of up-front thinking time.

It would be interesting to see if anything along these lines will emerge in the near future. The current Emmerdale "whodunnit?" could be seen as a very tentative step in that direction. Whatever the format, it cannot be too commercial in its approach for fear of running into all sorts of OFCOM product placement issues.

One of the key areas of any TV/media crossover game will be the "Can My Mum Do It?" test. She can hardly turn a computer, so the basic 'pick-up-and-play' notion of, say, the Wii will need to apply to this format also.

Cheers,

David