Explorer Game Digs Up Viewers for National Geographic TV ‘Expedition Week’
The National Geographic cable channel is encouraging viewers to tune into its first annual “Expedition Week” programming in mid-November by rolling out an interactive Web game that lets players build their own globe-trotting avatars, dig up priceless treasures in far-off locales, an earn virtual cash to fund even bigger digs.
The ”Expedition Week Game”, open now online, lets players customize their archeologist alter egos with tools and attire. Players are then assigned a series of missions to uncover relics, tracking their expedition successes in an online passport. Missions and artifacts are randomly generated, so the quests are varied enough to encourage return visits. Each complete mission reveals more of the background story generated for the player’s avatar.
In addition, the game promotion will cross channels to include “snipe ads” during the TV programming for “Expedition Week.” Those ads, which run at the bottom of the TV screen, will offer special promotional codes that can be entered at the game site to unlock new tools and explorer gear to help players complete missions faster.
While players cannot challenge their friends online and will not see a leaderboard showing those with the most completed missions, they will be able to e-mail their passport with mission completion stamps to their address books, showing how well they’ve played and encouraging them to sign up for the game.
The game makes up part of a broad online promotion for the cable channel’s “Expedition Week” and incorporates other interactive features, including a “March of Explorers” timeline using historic audio clips and photos of famous explorers, an online exploration of Egypt’s Giza Plateau with 360-degree views of the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, and video previews and photos from the “Explorer Week” shows.
“The ‘Expedition Week’ game is particularly engaging in that it takes players beyond the programming featured in the week and allows them to interact with and complete their own adventures and expeditions,” said Brad Dancer, vice president of research and digital media for the National Geographic Channel in a statement. “’Expedition Week’ offers answers to questions that have challenged us for generations, and we are excited that the game takes it one step further in a fun and engaging way.”
New York-based Arkadium developed the game for NGC. Co-founder and chairperson Jessica Rovello said the company, which has made something of a specialty of building white-label games that can be branded and deployed quickly on sites such as the gaming portal run by the AARP, built the game from scratch for the cable channel’s Web site.
Arkadium has created other online games around National Geographic programming—notably for programs on Stonehenge and dinosaurs—but this is the first time a branded NGC game will cross over to the broadcast channel and include access codes in TV ads, Rovello says.
While the Expedition Week programming will end on Nov. 25, Rovello says she expects the game will continue in some form on the National Geographic TV Web site.
