I found out a few days ago that an online video game that half of my brain is addicted to, Chain Factor, was built as part of an ARG related to the tv show Numb3rs, which I had never heard of until this week.

The video game part itself is fabulous, but it also has all kinds of ARGy clues all over it. I first chalked this up to eccentric anti-capitalist programmers, who it turns out are part of of an ARG that has come and gone. It’s kind of disappointing, actually, for those kinds of programmers not to exist in the real world.

Or do they?

And this is a really interesting point when it comes to these games — however you want to look at this, multi-platform or platformless, the chances of good ARG’s totally contained by the borders of nation-states seems pretty unrealistic, which leads to a lot of tricky and interesting legal questions. And I’ve been over on the unforums at unfiction tonight and one of the coolest things about this game is how multi-lingual it is — there are some great cross-language collaborations going on over there.

I guess I’d first want to know what it would mean for this kind of campaign to be “taking part in the EU” The law in question specifically targets “aggressive marketing” and the examples in the link provided are essentially manual comment spam – that’s very different than an ARG that shares the universe of a commercial product but doesn’t directly point you there — marketing that’s about as direct as fanfic is marketing, except for the who-pays-the-bills part. If the servers used by the bill-payers aren’t EU is that enough? Who knows.

And I’m also struck that the legal language in question comes from a section of the website that focuses on what the players must agree to — it’s not “here we are fulfilling our legal agreements” so much as “here we are specifying your legal obligations.”

But this is all debate fun with words in one sense – your essential point that avoiding lawsuits is the motivation here is very well taken and I appreciate the reminder that the risk of lawsuits might be more real than I was suggesting.