The Worst ARG

What makes a bad metagame? One might struggle to think of any metagame they would term as “bad”- it seems unfamiliar to ascribe badness to such a mode of gaming, perhaps because so much of any meta-object is already criticism itself, and that criticism can be read as self-criticism for any form-familiar issue. For instance, if a metagame is built as a riff on roguelikes and a reviewer critiques that the player dies too often, it’s easy to say that that reviewer might be missing the point. Put even more simply, it’s hard to be made fun of when you’re in on the joke.

A particular form of metagame, the Alternative Reality Game, seems even more immune to criticism. Reality-toying games like these are often so rare and so unfamiliar in their form that to see them exist on any large scale at all is in itself impressive. While their history is indeed somewhat more extensive than film’s was at the time, criticizing an ARG might feel akin to criticizing the Lumiere brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train” in 1896- how can we even apprehend the content of something like this when the form itself is so novel and impressive? I can hear my former History of International Cinema professors now referring me to the fact that there were contemporaneous criticisms of the film, notably Maxim Gorky’s, in which he describes how the film represents an empty world of shadows that distracts from the beauty of actual reality. Still, these criticisms center around issues with the novel form of cinema rather than of the film’s content per se.

Is the ARG form in a similar medium-historical moment? I submit that the answer is yes, with one extremely notable counterexample- one of my favorite all-time pieces of cultural ephemera, the 2012 horror film The Devil Inside.

The film is a fairly formulaic found footage horror film, taking cues from The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity as an attempt as a low-budget cultural phenomenon marketed as actual found footage. But while The Blair Witch Project in particular could be described as an early ARG with fake websites and a bought-in cast and crew who did interviews as if it was all real, The Devil Inside makes a weak attempt at ARG with none of the appeal. At the end of The Devil Inside, which to that point has operated as a standard (if drab and hamfisted) horror film, the film fades to black and displays a web address instead of concluding its story arc.

While the site is now down, at the time it featured some additional footage that clarified the film’s final moments. This sort of dead end indicates only the interest in the idea of an ARG more than an actual commitment to one, given that more thorough marketing ARGs like the film Cloverfield’s have sent viewers on multimedia scavenger hunts, and crucially they are generally implemented as lead-up to the film which they’re advertising. By ending The Devil Inside for the first cue to a limited ARG, the audience feels cheated out of the satisfaction and quality experience that they paid for.

Ultimately, The Devil Inside’s ARG stands among the most infamous and poorly-received ARGs ever to occur, due to its attachment to an already-weak film, limited scope, and, crucially, the fact that its ARG subverts the form of the media it is conversation with without introducing an interesting concept in return. The Devil Inside fails not only as an ARG but as a metagame broadly in a way that is hard for metagames to fail- it buys into its conceit with complete sincerity but barely any novelty, commitment, or flavor, in the end becoming the rare meta-object that becomes the joke without being in on it.