Daniel talked about a video to help pronounce "Diego Garcian" and it reminded me of this youtube channelYouTube channel launched on April 14th, 2010 with a video instructing viewers how to pronounce ASUS. It continued for years with normal engilsh words, but also did names and brands like Baal, Tutankhamun, Ke$$ha.Some videos gained more notariety, because of the subtle comedy or oddity. in 2012 * The video "How to pronounce GIF" followed the typical format, but substituted the phrase "GIF stands for graphics interchange format"some surreal, like the correct pronounciation for the phrase "please help me escape from this place"July 9th, 2013, Pronunciation Book departed from its regular programming with a video titled “How To Pronounce 77”. Instead of illustrating the correct pronunciation, the voiceover narrates that “something is going to happen in 77 days,” followed by 15 seconds of silence with soft clicks that could be interpreted as Morse code.Next day the video was 76The following days had a different pattern than previous videos:Start with a cryptic sentenceState how many days until when something will happenA cryptic narrative began to form through the intro sentencecaused internet buzz, the whole world wide web was spreading this series of videos in what I'd call an "explosive node" way.Bear Stearns BravoOn September 24th, 2013 Pronunciation Book released a new video titled "How to Pronounce Horse_ebooks," which contains a phonetic reading of the infamous Twitter spambot account @Horse_ebooks and a mysterious message narrated by a woman standing in front of a silver screen.The same day as the Horse_ebooks reveal, the New Yorker revealed Thomas Bender, VP of product development at HowCast as the identity behind Pronunciation Guide and he was running the @Horse_ebooks Twitter account with BuzzFeed's creative director Jacob Bakkila. The two were staging an event to launch of their new alternate reality game project called "Bear Stearns Bravo."Pronunciation ManualOn April 13th, 2011, the YouTube channel Pronunciation Manual launched, offering similar instructional videos. However, these videos intentionally mispronounce the words for comedic purposes. As of July 2013, the channel has inspired other copycat channels including PronunciationPartner and PronunciationPooper while amassing more than 213,000 subscribers and 68.4 million views, averaging 81,600 views per day.horse_ebooksStarted basically as a spam bot, but a Russian web developer, But without the nefarious tactics.Gained popularity as poeticTwitter account that posted nonsense phrases from ebooks about horses, interspersed with spam links."I will make certain you never buy knives again,""We all agree, no one looks cool,""Is the dance floor calling? No,""Everything happens so much""unfortunately, as you probably already know, people."Purchased in 2011 by Bakkila. This change was noticed by the account's followers when, on September 14, 2011, the account began tweeting "via web" instead of "via Horse ebooks", and the frequency of tweets promoting ClickBank significantly dropped while the number of "funny" tweets increased.Alternate Reality Game (ARG)interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.Among the terms essential to understanding discussions about ARGs are:Puppet-master – A puppet-master or "PM" is an individual involved in designing and/or running an ARG. Puppet-masters are simultaneously allies and adversaries to the player base, creating obstacles and providing resources for overcoming them in the course of telling the game's story. Puppet-masters generally remain behind the curtain while a game is running. The real identity of puppet masters may or may not be known ahead of time.The Curtain – The curtain, drawing from the phrase, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," is generally a metaphor for the separation between the puppetmasters and the players. This can take the traditional form of absolute secrecy regarding the puppetmasters' identities and involvement with the production, or refer merely to the convention that puppet-masters do not communicate directly with players through the game, interacting instead through the characters and the game's design.Rabbit-hole/Trailhead – A rabbit-hole, or trailhead, marks the first media artifact, be it a website, contact, or puzzle, that draws in players. Most ARGs employ a number of trailheads in several media to maximize the probability of people discovering the game. Typically, the rabbit-hole is a website, the most easily updated, cost-effective option.[4]This Is Not A Game (TINAG) – Setting the ARG form apart from other games is the This Is Not A Game sentiment popularized by the players themselves. It is the belief that "one of the main goals of the ARG is to deny and disguise the fact that it is even a game at all."design ...
