Nokia is to launch a lavish "alternative reality" promotion in partnership with Heroes creator Tim Kring.
The phone giant touts 'Conspiracy For Good' as a "multi platform narrative" that's "an immersive experience" - users will be able to play free online games but these blur with real life events, staged and paid for by Nokia.
It's all the brainchild of Nokia's answer to Steve Jobs, designated visionary VP Tero Ojanperä, and is designed to show off Nokia's devices and services.
Conspiracy for Good pits an eponymous eco-friendly NGO against a fictitious multinational not-so-loosely based on the US military contractor Blackwater (now Xe), here called Blackwell Briggs.
Nokia confirmed that the real-world events will be a sort of Dungeons and Dragons, but with eco-warrior Jemimas and Sheherazades instead of Medieval Knights, and with recycling pamphlets instead of swords.
Well, we're all for people experimenting with participatory, immersive storytelling, but there are a few issues that Nokia may not have anticipated. And some of these may be quite problematic.
The launch hit an immediate snag yesterday, with the site overrun by followers of David Icke and New Agers - the Mandala of Interconnectedness got itself a nice plug. After we pointed these out to Nokia, these have since been removed. But that's not the start of it.
The most obvious problem is when a large multinational gets all anti-capitalist on us. Some might call this patronising. It's certainly a little hypocritical.
And there are parallels with when governments fund specific groups to lobby it - creating a sealed feedback loop, a short-circuit of democracy. (The EU sponsors professional environmental lobby groups to the tune of tens of millions of Euros - Greenpeace, to its credit, is one of very few to refuse the funding.)
I think we all know how I feel about NGOs...
Side note: isn't Xe just the worst rebranding since Prince turned into that symbol? Even I can never remember how to pronounce it and this is my job.
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And what I think about them is that even when they're not actively corrupt or incompetent they tend to do more harm than good.
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If they do slightly more harm than good, they might still be a better bet than a foreign government agency that does substantially more harm than good.
Sentence that we don't hear with anything like as much frequency as we should in politics: how about we just do nothing?
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Nokia, Heroes writer team up for immersive eco D&D fun
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