My initial thought, when I first encountered 77 Days, was of William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. Unlike Gibson’s previous books, Pattern Recognition is not set in a cyberpunk dystopia but a world still reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The MacGuffin here is the auteur behind “the footage,” a series of artistic film clips that have gained a cult following after being released anonymously online. Through the main character’s search for the filmmaker, Gibson explores our need to make connections between disparate points of data, to assign meaning and structure to random phenomena.

But Pattern Recognition is also about branding and rampant commercialism, and this — not in the search for meaning — is where its connection with 77 Days lies.

The fantasy of Pattern Recognition is that an artistically and culturally compelling mystery can exist independent of a marketing plan. The footage, we find out, was not intended to be branded or monetized in any way — it is a genuine means of artistic communication, one of the few artifacts in the book that is not a product.

It’s rare to find ARGs that are not tied to a corporate marketing department. Most have been used to promote TV shows, movies, video games, and even cars. That’s not to say they can’t be enjoyable: The LOST Experience was good fun for fans of the mythology-heavy show. The very concept of an ARG lends itself to transmedia storytelling, which can be an extraordinarily rewarding mechanism for fans to engage with, and even help construct, a narrative.

But there is ultimately something crass about this kind of ARG narrative. Engaging intelligent, eager critical thinkers as an unaware street team for your promotion belies the idea you respect them as customers, let alone as people. When the center of the mystery is just another thing someone’s trying to sell, what does that mean for and to the people who spent so much time and effort unraveling it? ARGs depend on mobilizing masses of people to cooperatively solve a problem. What does it say about our culture that the root of that “problem” is so often a salable good? Or, worse yet, the promise of a salable good?

Promotional image for Curiosity from 22cans.com.

Consider Curiosity, the mobile game developed by celebrated game developer Peter Molyneux and his studio, 22Cans. This app for iOS and Android devices tasked users with tapping away at a cube to reveal the layers beneath. Eventually, the cube would open and one lucky winner would be rewarded with a “life-changingly amazing” experience.

In late May, the cube opened. This marketing video was inside.

The prize, of course, wasn’t the video. The winner, Bryan Henderson of Edinburgh, would be incorporated into 22Cans’ upcoming video game, Godus, as an all-powerful deity. He would also share in a portion of the game’s profits. This was, by any reckoning, a creative and unique reward.

But for millions of people who chipped away at Curiosity’s cube, the reveal was anticlimactic. 22Cans had spent months hyping their “social experiment” — the app’s subtitle and official hashtag was What’s Inside the Cube? — and now it was revealed to be yet another product. Not even a product, really: the promise of a product that did not yet exist. The winner gained an opportunity to contribute to the making of a product and to benefit from the revenue it could potentially generate. The rest of us received nothing.

Curiosity may not qualify as an ARG in the strictest sense, but it operated like one: It presented a mystery, made vague promises of a reward, and engaged participants in collective problem-solving. (Granted, mindlessly tapping a screen is not very complex problem-solving.) That its reveal was yet another promise of a consumer good — from Peter Molyneux, no less, a man famous for grand promises — reinforced how unlikely something like Gibson’s “footage” is to emerge from a contemporary ARG. At the center of the mystery is something else to buy.