Part 1 of 3
Let me start right away by addressing those of you coming here who happen to already know me… This article probably won’t make much sense at first, but you might find it interesting. Here is the Wikipedia article on ARG’s for more information on what those are (if you don’t already know).
To those of you coming here from Unfiction, or who were sent here from the Saver site, we haven’t met yet, or at least not in this manner so, hello!, my name is Mike (aka Weem) and I have been running the SAVER Corporation ARG that just concluded.
I played the role of every character in the game. Eric, Marty, Jared, and the rest. I created the story, and did my best to keep you interested during these last 30+ days. I responded in character to hundreds of emails over the course of the game, as well as managed the related twitter, gmail accounts and more. The voice message for SAVER Corporation? Yea, that’s me too!
I also had a friend (@ForrestHat) help me with some online tools (the Terminal, and the tools I used to manage members and mass emails) and another friend (@smittyhalibut) who helped me with some cipher stuff, thanks guys I really appreciate it!
If you have any questions or wanna talk about the game, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up on twitter, or email here!
This article is meant to share with you the process of how I created and ran the game. It’s a peek inside I guess, and as much as this is a piece for my records and anyone else wanting to run an ARG, I hope that you find it interesting as well and perhaps it will answer some of the questions you might have had (if any).
Everything written here has been written as the game approached it’s end. In fact, it is currently Jan 31st, and Minz and company are very close to finding the evidence they need to bring down the company via the “Terminal” (terminal.saver.co).
As such, I have had to go off of memory and various records (emails, etc) to recall events as they happened in order to write this. I have tried to be as accurate as memory allows, but a good memory is not something I am known for at all (ask my wife).
Anyway, this is the story of how I ran a game for 100 people, every day for 1 month.
I Like Domain Names
For a long time now, I have had a habit of thinking up ideas for websites, snatching domain names for them, and then sitting on them for years. As a web designer/developer, this is not an uncommon thing, but compared to those I know who do the same work, this habit is much more prominent with me. In fact, this extends beyond domain names. To date I have almost 50 twitter accounts, over 10 gmail accounts, 6 IM accounts, a few Facebook accounts and am down now to 18 domain names (after 2+ years of trimming the fat)!.
In July-ish of 2010, .co domains became available. There was a ‘landrush’ for them and I was right there with everyone else at the front of the line. I had my credit card ready… this was going to be fun. However, at $25 each it can get out of hand very quickly.
In the end, I spent about $500, so I had done well – better than expected even. It would be a few days before everything would be ironed out as it was determined who really had snatched up each domain. I knew I would not get everything I was after, so the wait was aggravating but exciting as well.
Days later, the results were in and as expected I had lost many of the domains I really hoped to have grabbed. I won’t list them all, but I WAS able to get the name of the city I work in, as well as the name of a very popular table top game. One of the last domain names I had snagged was saver.co.
The Company
Whenever I have a domain name, I like to put something up for it related to the name, even if it will not be used in the same form. Of course, with saver.co I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t have a clear plan for the domain other than the hope it could be used in the pharmaceutical field .They have a lot of money and related domain names auction well.
The .co had me thinking “Corporation” of course, and for some reason my mind went immediately to a corporation that ‘saved’ lives. That line of thinking took me to the game Army of Two for some reason – perhaps the whole aspect of the privatization of the military. Naturally, my mind went to Blackwater from there.
Of course, as a gamer I started flirting with the idea of the supernatural and how it could be incorporated. Now I was thinking of the game Crackdown – one of the only games I have every fully completed (my attention span regarding them is very short, so I don’t finish most games).
I eventually decided I would put up a WordPress site for it and pass it off as Blackwater, re-skinned as a company who protected the nation against supernatural threats. Just for fun.
Somewhere between the time I was making the site and the time it was up and running, I realized that I had subconsciously recreated something I had seen before – that is, a website dedicated to something that didn’t really exist in the real world, but nonetheless acted as though it did. The first time I really noticed something done like this (obviously of higher quality of course) was the Multi-National United site created for the movie District 9.
The MNU site was my new inspiration, and I decided to even allow people to apply for a job. I would simply ask for people willing to help by being available to answer questions, etc. If anyone applied, I would just email them from the saver account and let them know they were accepted. I would put their name on an employee page of the site and that would be that. Using a Google Voice widget, I would even allow people to call in to Saver where they would hear a recording of some kind (it’s my voice you hear by the way) stating that no agents are currently available.
At this point I really wasn’t expecting more than one or two people to contact the site. Who would want to participate in something like this anyway, right?
More Twitter Accounts
I love twitter. In fact, I wrote an article about it a while back and how powerful a tool it could be for your D&D game. Naturally, I created a new twitter account for this (@savercorp) and began tweeting out the headlines of the articles I was writing. I added more as I went including one for the CEO (@enewold) and one for the CIO (@SAVER_Jared).
D&D is one of the primary connections I have to twitter and as such, I decided to tie Saver to D&D so I could leverage my familiarity with the crowd. I knew that many people used the #dnd tag as I did, and really it was fellow gamers that I figured would be the most interested in seeing something like Saver anyway. Even at this point, I was not imagining anyone really getting involved – I was more expecting a tweet or two along the lines of “wtf is Saver?” at BEST.
That’s where the story came in. I decided that Saver, as a company who faced the supernatural, would be at the pioneering edge of recruiting. They were going to actively seek D&D/RPG players as new employees because those were the people who knew the most about the supernatural and magical elements.
It didn’t catch though, and to be honest, I didn’t put in much of an effort. I sent a few tweets from time to time linking to an article about how SAVER was looking for RPG players, but only 1 person ever applied. I decided for the most part to let it go. It didn’t need to be active, and in fact I didn’t even need to have the site up. I continued putting up a few articles here and there as inspiration hit me based on current events, but for the months of November and December I was pretty much done with the idea…
…But at the end of December, something happened. Emails began coming in… lots of them.
I just wanted to say, I found Saver Corp to be pretty inspiring considering how you just jumped right into it. It’s too bad you decided against doing another one, because I think it would be cool.
Thanks for stopping in, and it’s good to hear!
Yea, I just don’t have time (that was a TON of work) hehe. I’ve been open to helping others with advice, and have indeed answered some questions here and there, but that’s about it.