And I'm only half-joking about that. Game designer Jane McGonigal invented this game as part of a futurist scenario where she was trying to imagine how people would entertain themselves in a future where peak oil and plagues forced would-be nightclub goers to stay at home. So she dreamed up the Top Secret Dance Off, a nightclub that you can go to via the web. So many people liked the idea that they started playing the game for real, and so now you can have post-apocalyptic fun before the apocalypse.

Yesterday at the Etech Conference in San Jose, McGonigal confessed that of all the games she's helped design, this is her favorite.

Check out Top Secret Dance Off and start dancing!

Even if you've never participated in an ARG, you've probably seen stuff related to them without realizing it. The first movie tie-in ARG was probably for A.I., which created thousands of websites (most archived here) and phone numbers related to the game, probably the one that caught most people's attention was for the videogame Halo, whose ARG tie-in website ilovebees.com, told the tale of several characters fighting a 26th century alien invasion who desperately needed help from the past. Participants would watch the ilovebees website for GPS coordinates of payphones — at a designated time, the ARG would call the payphone, usually dispensing more information about the storyline via a recording. But a few lucky players also got to talk to an actor, and their conversations were incorporated into the game too. In 2004, ilovebees was the biggest ARG anyone had ever heard of, and it was a smash hit.

More recently, Dark Knight ran a several-month-long ARG, mostly off of whysoserious.com, which had fans doing everything from picking up cakes with cell phones hidden inside them to guessing the names of corrupt cops on the Gotham City Police force. People who figured out the puzzles first were rewarded with Batman swag and, later, tickets to preview screenings. Lost is running an ARG at Comic-Con this week where the fictional Dharma corporation tries to recruit new employees, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles had a tie-in ARG that was quite artful in which employees of the Enitech Corporation discover a camera that takes pictures of the future and predicts the rise of the machines.

ARG-making companies attract top scifi talent like Maureen McHugh, author of China Mountain Zhang, who recently gave a speech about how ARGs are the future of science fiction. But they still remain in a murky area between advertising and original stories, often paid for with advertising budgets and treated mostly as a way to increase brand recognition for a piece of content.

I see nothing wrong with making advertising more fun, and there's no doubt that a lot of people enjoy playing ARGs. What I do have a problem with is the way ARGs seem to have no lives of their own – they feel like they exist solely to advertise another story. At least videogame tie-ins to movies are marketed as their own, standalone items.

With a few notable exceptions, ARGs are basically treated like walk-in commercials a lot of the time. But commercials can't really masquerade as games: It's foolish for entertainment companies to assume that they can get audiences to forget that they're being virally marketed to. And yet I think ARGs are temping as advertising campaigns because their structures inspire so many of the fan behaviors that media companies translate into instant dollar signs. But getting people to run around and do things is not the same as inviting an audience to enjoy a compelling narrative with a bunch of pals. So with an ARG I get a crappy cell phone instead of a cool fan community? No, that doesn't make me want to see Dark Knight as often as I've watched Star Trek episodes with groups of friends.

One reason I liked the Sarah Connor Chronicles ARG so much was that it actually functioned as its own, compelling story. It was almost like the Heroes webisodes – stories set in the same universe as their parent story, but shorter and with a lower budget. The Dark Knight ARG, on the other hand, felt like it really was just advertising with a few perfunctory interactive bits thrown in.

Expect more ARGs everywhere this summer media season, with Dharma recruiting people and Fringe having some kind of treasure hunt at Comic-Con (let me guess: the prize is Fringe swag!). But what I'd like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with. A best-case scenario for ARGs might be that they ditch parent stories altogether, becoming their own entities.

For now, though, I feel like the ARG is just a fancier term for guerrilla marketing. Like I said, I don't mind being advertised to, as long as you call an ad an ad — not an ARG.

Although the acting by "Sam," whose significant other was one of the flight attendants on the vanished flight, is more than a bit hammy, the site creators have built a lot of clues and games into his conspiracy website. You'll be visiting other sites, doing research, zooming in on photos for clues, calling phone numbers and generally driving yourself bonkers until Lost returns to the airwaves on January 31st.

Cheesy as it may be, this is as close to Lost as we've come in a long, long time, and it is successfully making us drool for new episodes. Chances are that the writer's strike might make alternate reality games and viral marketing like this the only teat we'll have to suck from until they start filming new episodes. Here's to hoping I'm not trying to track down Cylon DNA by visiting different websites in three months time if Battlestar Galactica doesn't come back soon.