The official title of Focus Film's new alternate reality game is the "9 Movie Talisman Challenge Clue." The image appears to be a ripped bit from something more. We are just one among 9 other sites hosting images from the site. One you find all nine pieces, it should decode a message over at www.9experiment.com. Good luck.

First take a look at these incredible-looking tokens to Flynn's Arcade. But in the sequel, Flynn has mysteriously vanished. At least that's what has been rumored, and is now being implied on the Flynn Lives site. The followers are dedicated to uncovering the mystery of Flynn's disappearance including a time line and an assortment of clippings about Encom's CEO.

1989 — Kevin Flynn alleged to "disappear." Initial facts raise many questions. Many of us were suspicious.

1990 — Sightings of Kevin Flynn by ordinary citizens, including high-credibility "Level 3" sightings of Flynn in NYC's Central Park during a Shakespeare Festival, on the fringes of a San Francisco street fair, and the notorious "Elvira" sighting of Kevin Flynn at Halloween celebrations in West Hollywood, California. Unfortunately, these initial sightings display certain characteristics true to this day — nothing has been confirmed and photographic evidence has been lacking.

1992 — Sightings continue. Several of us make contact thru Usenet and begin correspondence.

1994 — First Flynn Lives! meet-up in Dayton, Ohio. We resolve to continue our efforts to find out the facts behind the mysterious disappearance.

1998 — Letter from Kevin Flynn to a founding member of the group gains media attention, then debunked. Founding member (now ex-member) checks into a mental hospital for observations.

2001 — A $5,000 award is offered to anybody who can prove Kevin Flynn is alive. By December 31st, alas, nobody had satisfied our jury and the money was spent on a great party for all of the "Troniacs" we know and love!

2002 - 2005 An era of low visibility for our group. Sightings drop off, and interest seems to slacken. Thank heavens that is over!

2007 - Interest picks up as the "Albino Cow" Flynn sighting in southern New Jersey energizes a new generation of activists.

Here are a collection of fake clippings documenting the CEO's mysterious disappearance.

So dust off your unitards, it's Tron time, bitches. BRING ON THE ARG's and day-glow lights, we're ready. Also, we're hoping the countdown hidden beneath the dancing spider is for the Comic Con panel — seems like it.

For once I can finally say, I've got a good feeling about this movie's ARG. Looks like Sony is investing lots of time and money creating a layered look at the tensions between humans and illegal aliens, for Neill Blomkamp's new flick.

We've already run a round up on the immense online campaign of MNU's website, plus the anti MNU bloggers (and their mysterious disappearances). Seriously, you could spend hours reading all the material D9 has provided.

D9 will be in theaters August 14, 2009.

I know it is wearying to see ads masquerading as editorial, and it's especially difficult for us at io9 since we've been covering the show True Blood for over a year without any incentive other than the fact that it's part of our beat. Oh, and some of us actually like the damn show, and even think the idea of a fake vampire blog is a cool ARG.

What is uncool is that the ARG is not marked as advertising, and is therefore designed to hoodwink io9 readers in two ways. One, it makes it seem that our parent company has bought a blog written by vampires. Two, it taints our legitimate editorial posts about the show True Blood, calling into question our coverage and reviews because it seems that we've been paid off to write about the show. Already, Media Bistro has commented that io9 is "promoting" True Blood by posting a clip from it. This simply isn't true. If you look at the tag True Blood on io9, you can see that we have been posting clips and recaps of the show starting last year, long before the Blood Copy campaign launched on Gawker. In particular, our resident vampire expert Meredith Woerner has made the show her beat, and recapped every episode for you last season.

This isn't the first time we've written about media created by sponsors of the site. We've had ads from Star Trek running next to coverage of the movie on our blog for the past few weeks (and not all of that coverage was exactly flattering). We've had book ads for books that we reviewed like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. A few weeks ago, we had an ad for a new Alastair Reynolds book next to a somewhat negative review of the novel.

Blood Copy's ads, however, are not clearly marked as advertising and that is the problem. We're not happy with that, and you shouldn't be either. But that isn't going to stop us from covering a show that we think is worth critical attention. Please learn to be a critical reader yourself, and when a post comes up with a red circle around it that says "Blood Copy," realize that is an ad. Anything else is legitimate io9 content.

This goes for other ads you see on the site too. Hopefully, nobody has yet mistaken the Star Trek CheezIt ads on io9 for actual editorial.

The point is, we're not going to change our coverage of a media property just because somebody paid to put an ad on our site. We aren't going to make fun of Sookie any less because of this advertising deal, and we aren't going to stop telling you when the episodes get too cheesy for words. At the same time, if there is a good episode or breaking news about the series we'll tell you about that too - just as we have been for the past year.

If you aren't happy about the Blood Copy advertising campaign, you can make your voice heard in comments on that fake blog. They aren't going to turn comments off or edit them.

And you have my apologies in advance for the Blood Copy sponsorship campaign. If it had only been clearly marked as an advertisement, it might have been a pretty cool ARG. As it is now, I'm afraid it's only advertising.

UPDATE: I am happy to report that Blood Copy posts will now come with a notice that says "sponsored post." Thanks to Gawker top brass, who heard everybody's complaints and acted quickly.

I recently got an email from a company called "Voss & Mauser" promoting their cool new implantable GPS devices, little chips that can triangulate their position using satellite signals. GPS technology is used in most cell phones these days, and allows you to use all those nifty mapping applications that tell you where you are (or where other people with smart phones are) on a map.

But Voss & Mauser say now you can locate somebody using this implantable GPS device, or by steathily feeding the tiny chip to somebody you want to track later. You can learn all about it if you visit to the slickly-designed Voss & Mauser site (sorry - it's in German, but anybody with a high school German class or Google Translate can get through it). You'll immediately see that Voss & Mauser's design - and their technology - is a bit too scifi to be true. It's a fun ARG-like experience, but I wanted to know more. So I wrote to their contact email, praising the site and asking if it were an ARG. I got back a form letter saying they'd had so much mail that I should just redirect all my questions to their "American distributor," whom they claimed is a company called Lightning GPS.

Now here's where things get interesting. Lighting GPS is actually a real company whose business model is only a tad less creepy than Voss & Mauser's fake one. They deal with law enforcement and consumers, selling stealth GPS tracking devices called "Nav Genius" that you can hide in the navigation systems of anybody's car. Lightning GPS recommend it specifically for spying on a spouse you think might be cheating on you, or restricting the movements of your teenager in his or her car (they point out that the device can be set up to send you an alert if the car goes into a "forbidden area").

I love the idea that the pranksters behind Voss & Mauser use their futuristic-creepy ARG to call attention to actually-existing technologies that help people invade each other's privacy in the most egregious way imaginable. You can bet that if Lightning GPS could build a swallowable, trackable GPS device, they would. And they'd sell it for "concerned spouses."

Check out Voss & Mauser, and then take a gander at Lightning GPS - this is social satire at its finest.

This scenario is part of an elaborate and whimsical futurist mapping project called Radiant Copenhagen. If you navigate around the Copenhagen city map created by people working on the project, you'll discover information about everything from bizarre new venereal diseases (spread by Fuck Sects of course) to a crucial research organization called the Center of Improbability and Invisibility.

Artist Kristoffer Ørum explains Radiant Copenhagen:

Anders Bojen, Kristoffer Ørum, Kaspar Bonnén and Rune Graulund have worked with a team of architects, artists, designers, engineers and musicians to create an alternate vision of Copenhagen, an imaginary future as a reaction to present day. All contributors share an interest in alternative realities and how these, through the internet and other media, play an increasing important role in our common understanding of the world . . . Using Google maps and Wiki technologies, the group has created a Copenhagen dressed in dystopian scenery and amusing attire.

You can navigate through the delightfully bizarre world of future Copenhagen using Google maps.

This is one of those delightful time-wasters that will actually make your brain explode with new ideas - and weird ones. You'll learn about everything from "bubble architecture," below, to the history of nano accidents in the city.

Check out Radiant Copenhagen. It's worth the trip.

The starting place for this new workplace timewaster is Lister's Coming Home, which currently shows a postcard written by Dwarf lead character Dave Lister that apparently hints at the plot for the new mini-series ("How did we get separated on 21st Century Earth?") and leads to Scanning Jupiter, a faux scientific site that includes messages from the other cast members and access to Red Dwarf's ship's log... which offers up this particular video:

While we're not the greatest fans of ARGs here, there's no denying that this one captures the (occasionally crappy) feel of the show, and it is kind of nice to see the familiar faces again...

[Lister's Coming Home] (Thanks to Dave for the video)

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!

Ajira Airlines first appeared as a mysterious logo in last year's music video promo for the fifth season of ABC's island drama, with the official website of the airline going online days later. Although the website lacks any exceptionally obvious Lost shout-outs, it's littered with a lot of relatively unsubtle references, not least of which comes in the "About" section:

Get lost in the world with groundbreaking promotions like Destination: Destiny that keeps your flight destination a mystery until you get there. We’re changing the way people think about travel - this isn’t vacation, this is your life... escaped. Let us deliver your destination by revealing your destiny.

You can even try and book a flight on the site... which is where the ARG fun begins. If you enter specific flight information while booking your flight, you can get an advance look at all manner of goodies, including new cast members, a new DHARMA station and... well, some seemingly random other images:


None of this answers what Ajira Airlines actually is, though; a very limited ARG? A taste of things to come? Something else altogether? Possibly both; Ajira - which means "island" in Hindi and "a place to run or fight" in Sanskrit - may be the airline that Jack and the rest of the Oceanic 6 fly to try and return to the Island... which doesn't bode well for the other passengers on that flight.

[Ajira Airlines]

Several months ago, when images of these whirly, spikey drones started appearing in UFO forums around the world, we investigated one possible explanation offered for them. Many people claimed they were the work of a special effects designer, Kris Avery, who used the images in a music video online. But we interviewed Avery, who told us in no uncertain terms that he had just incorporated images he found online into the video.

Now that the ships have appeared on Sarah Connor Chronicles, it seems as if the people claiming that they were a viral marketing campaign were right all along. Over at Screenrant, there's a terrific breakdown of the timeline of the images appearing, along with carefully-labeled comparisons of the leaked images passed around in UFO forums and the ships that appeared in the episode. (The image above is one of the comparison images from Screenrant.)

While it's possible the designers at SCC simply used images they'd found online and incorporated them into the show, it's more likely that they were always intended as a viral campaign but that it got derailed by the writers' strike. That would explain the long delay time between the images showing up online, and then showing up in the series. And who knows whether they'll play a role in the upcoming Terminator film? These could be evil cyborg drones, not UFOs at all.

UPDATE: It turns out that the designers at SCC did not invent these images after all. In fact, as I suggested above, they "simply used images they'd found online." SCC Producer Josh Friedman piped up in comments below to say, in part:

I'm not sure if this will put an end to this but I will assure you that the incorporation of drone-like imagery into TSCC should not in any way suggest there was/is a relationship between the original drone images and our show. The drone images are as much a puzzle to me as to anybody else...Maybe more so, as my obsession with their mysterious origins led me to go on and on about them in the writers' room...So much so that we ultimately used the mystery as a platform for "Earthlings Welcome Here."

This Is My Milwaukee:
A new ARG has been released, about the re-population of Milwaukee now that it's been decontaminated and cleansed from all the terrible things that the company Dark Star unleashed with their "God Seed". It's actually quite cute; here's a commercial they filmed, encouraging people to move back to the fair city, but also reminding them to stay out of certain areas and always carry a rebreather and a flare gun. Also check out their book, Milwaukee: A Reasonable Heaven.

Ricky:
What would you do if your baby grew wings and started to fly about (selling him to the circus not being an option)? A poor woman deals with this conundrum in the foreign film Ricky. I don't really have much else to say other than, why aren't there more movies like this?
Ricky teaser

Afterville:
This short movie shows what happens after the disaster. Afterville takes place 50 years following a collection of UFOs plummeting to the Earth, but remaining dormant; life went on and people lived around the large structures, building around and or on top of the the objects. But eventually people figure out that the discs that cover the globe are all linked on a countdown that end in 2058... but what could it be counting down to? It's actually quite beautiful and the CG objects fit in quite nicely on the world's horizon; thank you to Quiet Earth for pointing out this gem.

So far, nobody on the various ARG game boards I checked seems to know exactly what this ARG is for, but the Aquatic Thought Foundation is one part of the cheekily-named Jejune Institute, a group which supposedly dates back to a group of professors in the early 1960s (shades of Dharma Institute). They do "socio-reengineering," and invite you to come be "inducted" at a local downtown office building in San Francisco. Here's a video from their founder.

What stands out about this ARG is that it's incredibly sly and well-observed. These game designers know exactly what these new agey para-cult organizations sound like, and have mixed in a lot of hilarious 1970s iconography. All the "products" of Jejune are just a little too nutty to be real, but are almost believable and therefore hilarious. I utterly love the long explanation they have for why their "thought recording" equipment has to use VHS tape. Check out the gallery of fliers below to see some of their other great stuff, like a device that uses some kind of thought energy to protect your crotch.

According to people who have been playing the ARG over the past couple of months, the Jejune Institute has rented out an office in downtown San Francisco and paid a staff person to sit in the reception area and take anyone who shows up asking for induction to a room where they watch a really strange video for an hour or so. People have recorded this process and posted it on YouTube. If you want to experiment with the induction yourself, the address is on the flyers and the Jejune website.

Another wrinkle in the Jejune ARG, which apparently is taking place partly via flyers posted in San Francisco and Berkeley, is that now a counter-Jejune group has surfaced. They're posting flyers accusing the Jejune people of breaking into houses and fetishistically massaging people's feet while they sleep. Holy crap I love this freakin ARG.

Plus they have a Yelp entry.

If any of you have this ARG figured out, please tell us!

The Jejune Institute [ARG main page]

For some reason the questionnaire involves origami, and for perhaps the same reason, the "recruiter" I talked to refused to say whether they are looking for people with mind-control powers, spy powers, or just science backgrounds. Apparently, as you'll see in the video below, they are "looking for all kinds of people." Really? Even the guy in the storm trooper Elvis outfit? I saw him today at Comic-Con, by the way. The man is everywhere.

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.

Serializing a print comic that will also include backstory on the series as well as an interview with the show's creator, Six Feet Under's Alan Ball, Top Cow Productions' True Blood: The Great Revelation aims to fill in some of the history of TruBlood, the show's synthetic blood substitute, as California's "vampire king" visits Japan to meet with its creators.

Following it's San Diego Comic-Con debut, True Blood: The Great Revelation launches on HBO's website July 24th.

Exclusive: "True Blood: The Great Revelation" Preview [Comic Book Resources]

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.