I also get the feeling that the viral had big plans, but after all the press about people beliving it was all true and calling Nasa they had to step back from their big plans, create those guides and videos and brand all of the websites with the top “part of the 2012 experience” banners. I imagine that all took some of the fun out of it for the puppetmasters and it seemed to slow things down for a bit.

Overall I enjoyed the viral. It wasn’t perfect, but it had an interesting story and tried some new things. More interaction would have been nice, but this is a new medium and there is bound to be a learning curve. Kudos to Sony for investing so much into it.

Although I too felt that the entire 2012 Experience was overbranded with statements stating that it was tied to the film, that is far down on my list of complaints over all with the game. My biggest issues would be the appearance of the PuppetMasters just phoning the game in and Sony’s treatment of their dedicated player base. While my thoughts on the players being treated unfairly by Sony may be colored by my own experiences, I think the PuppetMasters actions (or lack thereof) speak for themselves. It’s PuppetMastering 101 to have your assets ready when you start broadcasting their availability, so it is utterly inexcusable that it took weeks for them to update their phone system so that you could leave tips for the whereabouts of Soren Ulfert. Not to mention that the amount of mistakes in their puzzles was utterly pathetic. While I don’t expect every aspect of a game to be perfect, the amount of errors that crept in went well beyond anything you could expect from a corporate game.

I also think the way that the Corruption Theory dead drops were handled showed a lack of concern from the PuppetMasters. The initial information drop at the gas stations was a disaster and the lack of any tweets from the main characters acknowledging there was a problem while it was happening is baffling. Then there was more than one occasion where players were not alerted to the address information being broadcast on the gas pumps until after the fact, leading us to wait on the whim of Charlie Frost to give us the addresses (sometimes hours after we publicly asked him for it). I think the number of players at the dead drops speaks volumes about how well this campaign was received by the public.

Overall, while I thought this game had great potential considering it’s huge lead-in time and assets it produced, I thought it fell woefully short. It wasn’t even a game during its entire first year and the pacing at the end seemed erratic. Many of the in-game assets seemed underused (most notably the ARC website with its login) and there was practically zero back-and-forth communications between the characters and the players. The entire game was run on rails and I don’t think that anything would have really changed if the players just decided to sit and home and watch Charlie Frost’s updates instead of going out, picking up the drops and decoding them. And the finale of the game was so extremely weak that many players were left scratching their head wondering ‘Is this really it?’

My final grade: D+