Author: "A.Garbe"
Online: 2008-05-16
URL: http://www.3sat.de/3sat.php?http://www.3sat.de/neues/sendungen/magazin/121996/index.html
Accompanies and comprises a featurette in a TV show aired 2008-05-18. See the excerpt on YouTube.

Whitespace

This article in the online content of a publicly funded German-speaking TV channel (jointly run by German TV stations ARD, ZDF; Swiss TV station SRG and Austrian TV station ORF) revealed a new, previously unpublished link to a directory not "whitespaced" on aladygma.com: http://www.aladygma.com/evl/
That same link is also featured in an extreme close up in the video excerpt (see above).

Text

A translation of the last two paragraphs reads:

"Players continually exchange with each other about their research on their own sites. The producers continually bring new links and hints online. 3sat [the TV channel] has found them. As an exception, they talk with us about the game in progress, but choose to stay anonymous. It usually takes only minutes until players have solved a clue, they say. Access to Aladygma is impressive. About 3 million hits and 160,000 seperate users have been logged since the game's start on February 12th. What exactly is behind Aladygma, the two marketing professionals do not want to tell. Many players suspect Aladygma to be a new project of Cloverfield producer Jeffrey Jacob Abrams. And in fact: a lot of allusions to that film are being found in Thomas Dahlem's fictional journal. But when we asked the two, if they already had contact with the [film] producer, they only laugh. They did not want to comment on that. They had not yet determined, what else might be behind Aladygma when the game is finished in December. They are open for everything and receive new offers regularly, they tell. They reject most, because they do not fit the game.

"Viral marketing conceals the true interests behind a blog, a movie or a game. The internet is getting a new subtext, a double bottom. But that's the medium's nature. Authors of content stay nearly always anonymous - no matter, whether viral or not. With a healthy dose of suspiciousness this double bottom can get more noticeable, though. Even this article could contain a subtext and for example be part of the Aladygma game_" [last character is link to above mentioned URL]