This has just gone around our facebook wall at Millions of Us. Powerful prose indeed. Worth sharing with the world.

The Road to WrestleMania XXIV has been paved, the gauntlet thrown down! Who will rise to the challenge for a chance to party with a real Superstar in Habbo Hotel?

Following on the heels of two successful campaigns promoting Royal Rumble and No Way Out, World Wrestling Entertainment and Millions of Us brings you this third and final campaign promoting WWE’s marquee event WrestleMania XXIV. We are thrilled to tie together all three campaigns as we continue the narrative of the Road to WrestleMania XXIV with our “WWE Habbo Road to WrestleMania XXIV“ contest running March 19th - March 28th, 2008.

In this campaign, WWE will challenge Habbos to battle on behalf of their favorite Superstar in five WrestleMania matches - Triple Threat Match, World Heavyweight Champion Edge vs. Undertaker, Big Show vs. Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather – The Biggest Battles the Best, The Money in the Bank Ladder Match, and ‘Playboy’ BunnyMania Lumberjack Match. In the “Habboized” version of Road to WrestleMania XXIV, each of these matches is represented as a complex maze race taking place daily for one hour in the virtual world of Habbo Hotel. Each of the Superstars in these matches will call upon Habbos to “battle” for their victory by racing through the “Habbo Road to WrestleMania XXIV” - a virtual labyrinth built out of Habbo “furni” spanning 7 WrestleMania themed Habbo Hotel rooms.

To fully convey the WrestleMania story, the race begins within the No Way Out Elimination Chamber themed room, since the Road to WrestleMania goes through No Way Out! The Elimination Chamber room is just one of the 7 WrestleMania themed rooms. Habbos will also race through 5 other rooms, one for each of the five matches we are representing, and the final room which is the WrestleMania XXIV room. This maze will be complex, changing daily, and requiring the right selection of paths, doorways, and tunnels to find the finish line. Each time a Habbo successfully traverses the maze during the 1 hour window the race is in play, the Habbo is able to earn points for his or her favorite Superstar and bring the Superstar that much closer to winning that day’s respective match. At the end of the 5 days, points will be tallied for each Superstar and the Superstar with the most points (and support) from the Habbo community for each match will be the winner of the respective WWE WrestleMania XXIV match. The winning Superstars for each match will be announced at the end of the 5 days and all Habbos who enter and finish at least one race and have supported the winning Superstar(s) will have the chance to party in Habbo Hotel with a real WWE Superstar! This exclusive and private event reserved only for winning Habbos will be the first of its kind in Habbo history!

Special thanks to our long-standing client WWE and Tom Boland for all his support and rapid client approvals, as well as, Kristin Kanan at Sulake Corp. for her dedication and infectious enthusiasm throughout all 3 campaigns. It’s been a blast!

Habbo Road To WrestleMania XXIV Group Page:

Another sweet banner ad!

Questions -

Eliana Sur

eliana(at)millionsofus(dot)com

Millions of Us recently launched an ARG experience for a major network television show. I want to take a moment to discuss the experience of producing an ARG because I found it fascinating. First, designing an ARG is a lot like playing an ARG. It requires imagination, razor-sharp attention to detail, creative and collaborative problem-solving, a knack for detecting subtleties, and complete suspension of disbelief. I also find myself comparing the experience to being in a co-dependent relationship – a really intense, committed, delusional, romanticized, verging on obsessive relationship where both parties track each other’s every move, check in religiously, and are determined in making the partnership work… like marriage maybe? ; ) The happy couple in this case was the puppetmasters (Millions of Us and the fictitious entity known as Enitech Research Lab) and the players (the web community). A healthy relationship would require consistent effort, communication, compromise, collaboration, commitment, and most importantly, some imaginative role-playing to keep things interesting and evolving. Could we both deliver what the other was looking for?

Unlike most of the projects we work on where we design and deliver a tightly controlled experience, producing this ARG required us to design an experience around a lot of variables and in collaboration with a massive and distributed online community. Since the success of the ARG hinged on player participation, and especially since our narrative relied on this aspect, creating a well-defined plan of action was tricky. How do you create a detailed roadmap for producing a viral thriller where audience participation is uncertain but critical in establishing the storyline? We were in a risky position of assuming the audience would respond. Other unique challenges posed included figuring out how to make the gameplay explicit, yet discrete, as well as figuring out how to launch the ARG and seed it in the right online communities to gain visibility, interaction, and virality without compromising the perceived legitimacy and “reality” of the underlying story. Resolving these issues was a bit of an experiment - forming a hypothesis on what we expected, then testing, measuring the results, and recalibrating whenever necessary.

The other challenging aspect of producing this ARG was producing the weekly video series. Since we needed to tell a story where we took into account player feedback and content and had to inject these elements into our storyline, we had to keep the creative flexible, adaptive, and somewhat improvisational. In order to guide the ARG experience, we created a tight feedback loop between us and the players, responding and communicating diligently and often directly to a growing online community of invested players all over the country. Through emails, blog posts, video posts, and more subtle forms of communication such as subliminal messaging in our videos or through affiliated fictitious sites and entities, we endeavored to drive the experience, but also invited the randomness and chaos of a massively multiplayer design in the storyline. It was entertaining for us as the puppetmasters to be entangled in a complex process of trying to anticipate the players’ moves, respond to it in kind, and stay in-step in this weekly frenetic dance. Lastly, and possibly the most difficult challenge was generating the gameplay. Designing these highly complex puzzles within the framework of our story and delivering it with clever subtlety to a super discerning community of Terminator geeks was an ARG in and of itself (thank you Evan!). These puzzles included everything from cracking code, to assembling cryptic diagrams, to digging up geocached “cameras-of-the-future,” to adventuring into real world venues and interacting with the right people to retrieve a hidden item.

Capturing the essence of an ARG experience is a lot like trying to capture the essence of a healthy relationship. You can map out some of the key elements in advance, but ultimately, you have to feel your way through it. You have to intuitively understand your players and feel this vague thing called “chemistry.” Working with Blair Erickson, Creative Director at MoU, and Evan Jones of Stitch Media, aka ubergeeks, we had an intuitive understanding of what our audience wanted and were able to effectively anticipate what would keep them engaged. What was pleasantly surprising, however, was how increasingly engaged and excited we were by the players and the content they were producing as the ARG progressed. It was a great relationship. Without a doubt, we had chemistry!

Though the campaign has ended officially, fans continue to create, distribute, and promote content inspired by the ARG, a testament to successful campaign virality. This experience has taught me some valuable lessons as a marketer. You have to know your audience (target market). You have to anticipate their needs (market research). You have to deeply and genuinely care about the relationship (engagement versus reach). And if you do all this, it’s truly rewarding (high ROI).

Special, special thanks to Blair Erickson for all his effort, vision, and diligence throughout this campaign. You’re inspirational.

Recap of ARG via BoingBoingTV:

Questions

Contact - Eliana Sur

eliana(at)millionsofus(dot)com

This heartbreaking little video really hit close to home for some of us at Millions of Us. We hope you enjoy it too.

Come make a splash at a sweet
POOL PARTY
as we unveil the SPLENDA^® Pool Experience

Where: SPLENDA^® Brand Island in Second Life^®
When: March 18, 2008, 2:00 – 3:00 pm PST (SLT)

The pool is open!

It’s time to unveil the SPLENDA^® Pool Experience, the winning entry in our Imagine Life Sweeter™ contest in Second Life^®.

Come dive into a sweet swimming pool filled with fluffy SPLENDA^® No Calorie Sweetener. Groove to a DJ playing all original music. And pick up some awesome aquatic animations, including the crawl, back stroke, breast stroke, belly flop, swan dive, and much more.

Plus, you can grab some recipes featuring calorie comparisons for tasty treats made with SPLENDA^® No Calorie Sweetener versus sugar.

See you poolside!

ARG - An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.

For several months here at MoU, we’ve been working on a top secret project we’ve been dying to tell you about. We’ve begun developing on a new virtual world platform: real life.

2 weeks before the launch of the new Fox show “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” a website for an unusual company appeared. In their first video they claimed to have developed a tachyon camera that sensed faster-than-light particles and could therefore generate images of the future. Their first blog post generated significant online controversy, with 53 posts suggesting ways of testing the camera’s capabilities. In their second video, the researchers followed the audience’s suggestions, taking photos of mirrors, newspapers, and cityscapes. The images they revealed suggested a dark and apocalyptic future. Soon the audience became directly involved in the story, digging up similar camera devices around the United States. Finally, the researchers found themselves being hunted by a deadly entity seeking to stop their work permanently. The drama built to an explosive conclusion in the Sausalito parking lot of Enitech’s offices.

Now that it’s concluded we’d like to show you a bit of it. If you want to know more, check out Enitechlabs.com.

Links to more press coverage of the Enitech saga here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Special thanks to Evan Jones over at Stitch Media for all his incredible help and expertise on this project.

If you haven’t already, check out AC3D’s plugin for Second Life. Their actual software has a highly managable price, but the best part is the 14 day free trial to find out if this is the right program for you. I’m going to snag myself a copy and will get back at the end of the trial. I’ll come back in a couple of weeks and post my findings, and if you’d like to do the same we can discuss it.

Being able to build projects outside of SL and then import them is reason enough to check it out!

First, a quick note. I just realized that I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon. So, in the spirit of Spring, I’m going to hop back on. Stay tuned. . . . .

I’m currently in Spain, speaking at the Radiate Group’s European Summit. Radiate is part of Omnicom and a world leader when it comes to experiential marketing. For those of you too lazy to click the link, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry — “Experiential marketing attempts to connect consumers with brands in personally relevant and memorable ways”. OK, it’s a broad definition, but from what I can tell, this refers to marketing techniques that have been around for a while but recently were grouped together and given a sensible category name.

Most of my talk focused on virtual worlds — explaining what they are and how brands and entertainment companies are using them. I tried to focus on the fact that despite the fact that Second Life gets 99% of the media attention, it really only accounts for about 1.5% of the 80 million total users in the category of virtual worlds.

There was a great moment about 5 minutes into the talk, when Radiate’s CEO Jay Lenstrom interrupted me and said, “So, are you guys going to put us out of business or are there good ways for us to work together?” When I got over the surprise at this question, I understood what he meant and answered. You see Radiate’s specialty is live event marketing: The Olympics, FIFA World Cup, Rolling Stones concerts etc. And what I said was that it really depends.

The promise of virtual worlds for the experiential marketing industry and brands is that we will be able to combine the aspects of live events and experience design that produce fantastic engagement with the aspects of the internet that lead to cost efficiencies and reach. And so I responded to Jay that the answer to his question really is in Radiate’s hands. If they embrace this new category, it can be a great value added service for their clients and a driver of revenue. Or, they could take a page out of the record company’s playbook. They could see a disruptive technology and instead of embracing it, argue about it until some outside force (iTunes) steps in and virtually replaces them. These guys are smart and my money says they’ll do the former.

Gary Gygax, co-founder of Dungeons and Dragons passed today.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/04/1750206

I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours as a tween/teen rolling dice and moving lead miniatures around an acetate hex sheet. The sounds of birds and a lightening sky would tell my friends and I that we played all night long. But it wasn’t dice, or just a sheet of plastic. It was a story, a world in which I lived and shared with friends. Amazing how far virtual worlds have come. RIP EGG.