Humans vs Zombies is a very large game at SCAD's campus. It consists of a week-long game of tag with an in-depth plotline that focuses on the occurence of a zombie apocalypse. About 500 people participate each year, and so the game has a very large advertising campaign. I was voted onto the committee that creates all the advertising as well as the game's plot, and I took it as an oppurtunity to create an Alternate Reality Game.
The plotline of this year's game focuses on a video game that transmits the zombie infection to the students at the college, and to go along with that, we created two factions. Kostick Co- the man that created the game- and MAG-V (Mother's Against Gaming Violence)- a company that seeks to better the world by turning violent games into tame educational tales. I'll explain each piece individually but essentially I created a web presence for both Cliff Kostick and MAG-V. Through these presences the plot would be revealed over time in an interactive fashion. There was also to be a print campaign, which I will explain as we get to those pieces.
Everything in this set was designed solely by myself other than the three colorful posters that have the HvZ logo on them. I only created the MAG-V Warning on those. And so, I present to you, my first Alternate Reality Game.
Everything in this set was designed solely by myself other than the three colorful posters that have the HvZ logo on them. I only created the MAG-V Warning on those. And so, I present to you, my first Alternate Reality Game.
Let me introduce you to Cliff Kostick. He is the genius behind Brother's Blood, the game that causes the outbreak. He is a hardworking student who is inspired by history and his experiences to create a new genre of game- historical first person shooters. His era of choice is the Civil War. I wrote this blog entry for him and posted it on Word Press, where it is still hosted. I wrote it in his voice and did my best to convey his personality in the text. Cliff is our protagonist.
Now here you can meet MAG-V, headed up by Gabrielle Yamauchi. Obviously Ms. Yamauchi is not a real person, but she does have a Gmail account that I run as well as a twitter feed that I ran. The actual twitter is still up at twitter.com/magvcorporation. I researched articles for her to post as well as developed a posting order for the entirety of a ten week span. I did a lot of in-depth research to figure out who she would follow as well as to find and read any and all articles she would post. MAG-V is the antagonist.
This is the poster for "Brother's Blood" which is Cliff's Game. I created this poster myself as well as the MAG-V Warning. The idea behind this was that we would post the original flyer without the MAG-V warning around campus. Over the next couple of nights, we would go by and actually place MAG-V stickers on these convince the students on campus that MAG-V was in fact real and was around spreading her propaganda.
Similar to the poster above, this is another poster that MAG-V would take over. This one was for the actual game HvZ here on campus but we felt she would be against that as I created different badges for each poster. Against this would be the guerilla sticker campaign.
Another piece from the guerilla sticker portion of the ARG.
A third example fo the MAG-V guerilla sticker campaign on the HvZ posters.
