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The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Introduction
Maintaining Integrity while Presenting Deception
Playing with Reality in the Media Mainstream
Hugh Davies
Monash University
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australian Network for Art and Technology
This paper describes how Australia's national broadcaster: the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation developed and delivered its own Alternate Reality Project: Bluebird AR. This
fictional interactive narrative was presented across a range of online spaces in 2010, and was set
around the actual controversies of climate change and geo-engineering. The projects aim was to
provoke discussion among Australian and international audience participants of how best to
address humanity’s impact on the planet. The projects conception within the ABC provoked
distinctive policy deliberations and editorial concerns, compelling the organisation to develop
new strategies to ensure that the immersive experience did not betray the organisations integrity,
its core values, or its interests. This paper discusses those developments under the headings of:
Immersion, Interaction and Moderation and also considers the Promotion and Adaptation of
Bluebird AR during its final delivery stage. But to begin, further introduction, elaboration and
clarification of the ambiguous field of Alternate Reality Games is required, and is presented here
by way of a journalistic description.
“On your way to work, you encounter what looks to be a demonstration. People dressed in white
dust suits and gas masks give out fliers. A young woman hands you one. It reads: Stop Bluebird.
Is this the same Bluebird that appeared in a slick television advertisement after the national
news last night?
When you arrive at work, you search the words “Stop Bluebird” online and discover a video of
a young scientist claiming that his former employers are about to launch a dangerous and
untested geo thermal solution. But what is this solution – what are the dangers, and who or what
is Bluebird? Welcome to the the Alternate Reality of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's
Bluebird AR.”
From their recent beginnings in 2000 as a small but enthusiastic grass roots sub genre, over the
last decade Alternate Reality Games have become a major international transmedia
phenomenon. Perhaps even more notable today are the spectacular ambitions that ARG's now
aspire to. While once exclusively driven by player immersion and entertainment, ARG designers
now seek to construct games that, as well as providing satisfying immersive experiences, also
tackle real world issues including oil depletion, world peace and climate change. Epic narratives
of saving the world from the problems of humanity’s own making are certainly not exclusive to
Alternate Reality Games. Hollywood cinema and mainstream television attest to this central
place of this theme in the popular ideology of today. Such heroic idealism has bled out of our
screens and into reality with all levels of society taking an interest in how we as humans might
survive ourselves. It is within this context that the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’
Innovation Division commenced production on their own Alternate Reality Narrative: Bluebird
AR.
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