Personally Targeted Videogame ARGs

Alt Title: Social Media Balkanization Game

In a world where Cambridge Analytica can fabricate false narratives using Facebook and Twitter as a vector to locate, isolate, and directly advertise to conspiracy minded people to build a distorted reality; could the same data and tactics be used more benignly to create personalized Alternate Reality Games?

ARGs already follow a "This is not a game" mentality, treating their fictional content as real and asking users to suspend their disbelief to participate in a trans-media experience

Would operate essentially the same way that an Alt-Right extremist message would, only the user would be knowingly consenting to the fabrication instead of being targeted for gullibility and likeliness to spread the message.

Use Facebook Ads/Google Ads/Twitter botnets/Instagram Stories/NextDoor engagement as vehicles for a narrative experience.

Using the same recruiting and community building as a Red-Pilling campaign would to create verisimilitude for a fictional series of events.

The "Platform" the game takes place on is social media ads, promoted content, and player community groups roleplaying by creating fan work and fan propaganda. - Blaseball is an excellent study for this

When a player pays for a subscription and signs up with their Facebook or Google account, they're effectively "opting in" to and contributing to the ARG's social media ad-buy budget and target list. (They can opt out if they wish to stop "playing")
Planted side by side with other normal ads they'll start being targeted by sponsored ARG posts, search results, recommended communities and fabricated or fan news stories around the game's fictional story. (It should be ridiculous so that it obviously stands out against the day to day, though couched in the same marketing and click bait language)

Ex: A highlighted Twitter post Railing against Cthonic cults for being too Politically Correct in their blood rituals, tagged with a game-related hashtag that can be followed or that other players can respond to and interact with.
Ex2: A sponsored Facebook post that's a screen grab repost of a Reddit argument about whether the recent wizard war was the result of a trans-dimensional false flag attack, from a game related reddit group.
Ex3: Google SEO promoting links for your searches that are more likely to take you to community pages and discussions, or and Google News articles from the ARG's blog.

Each "Ad" advances the narrative of the game, or cross posts/highlights/spreads important story moments, community discussions, or fan works across different platforms. The ARG world should feel real and evolving, with players responding to it.

Over time - via osmosis of many ads & posts on many platforms players will be exposed to an ongoing continuity of community action and "news" through reaction posts, article ads, and general advertising even if they never click on anything, join, or post in any community discussions.
Essentially, we're replacing your typical email newsletter/self hosted forums with social media push. Literally sliding into your DMs.

[Tangent]: A weakness of many groups/ARGs/community Newsletters and such is correspondence. With semi-frequent emails or requiring people to follow specific discords/forums/website events... involving people in an evolving narrative can be difficult.

When engagement is funneled through email, it's a one way street and players quickly tune out. Updates get push players to being merely a passive observer instead of a participant, or it hits spam, or they just loose steam on reading text-wall digests on what other people are doing. Even if it's not spam, it's basically spam.
Discord or specific forums can be worse as only the most hyper engaged players are caught-up on what's happening NOW, and the narrative or the "game" gets held hostage by the loudest and fastest posting members. If you're not on the inside of what's happening as it happens its easy to feel left in the cold, confused by narrative jumps while you weren't looking,

Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Ticktok, Instagram, Facebook are all great tools for fostering a community, but they are nightmare platforms for hosting continuity.

I'm betting that targeted advertisement might be a great fix for this -> using the tools of misinformation to bring game context and events directly into the player's world.

Relevant story beats and important community moments are brought directly to you. The ad engagement algorithm becomes the content curation system.

Imagine if instead of just being people going nutty on Discord, Blaseball match results and community event fan fictions pop up directly in your feed the way a ESPN ad would, or a 5 second ad warning about the Hades Tigers being shelled on Youtube, or an Article about the Great Shelled one coming up on Dictionary.com because you searched for the etymology of Nuts.

The game content follows you.

The point would be to create an immersive game that transforms your world in a way more real than video games or virtual reality ever could. By utilizing the systems in place to profile and red-pill people, by using the networks already fundamentally designed to warp perceived reality and slot people into filtered bubbles of unreality, and pushing them into artificial communities of like-minded people intentionally as a game. With the power of social media, you really can live in a world where dragons have taken over the banks, wizards open-carry wands in the streets, and there are great debates about which secret cult will win this cycle's illuminati council seat. With social media being most people's main news source, paying a monthly subscription to "see the secret world" would actually work.

Could also be used to demonstrate how easily someone's world can be skewed by advertisement and what information is being related. White Hat Informational manipulation awareness education.