When my group did our presentation about ARGs and were following the contemporary Hatshoe ARG, it had just begun and was questionable to whether or not it was really an ARG.  I have continued to follow it (though I have not had the time with the end of the semester coming up to contribute) and thought I would give an update if anyone is interested in checking it out since the general concensus is that it is indeed an ARG. One place to catch up would be the wiki that was created, hatshoe.org, the twitter page, and of course, the unforum.

One of the really interesting topics that has emerged through this is one of viral marketing.  Apparently there was another forum going on in the Bethesda Forums where many players believed Hatshoe was viral marketing for the release of Elder Scrolls V.  The employees of Bethesda shut down the forum and even went as far as to delete all the comments made through that forum.  Some of the players came to the unfiction forum and expressed their discontent and tried to say Hatshoe was a hoax.  The players in unfiction were not at all pleased with this assessment because no one had even brought up the idea that it could be viral marketing, we have been under the impression that it is something much more than Elder Scrolls through there are many hidden messages and codes and such that relate to that game.  One of the Bethesda players responded to someone who said that just because Hatshoe has nothing to do with TESV, does not make it a hoax, to which he replied

It obviously isn't a "hoax". Hatshoe never made any attempts to deceive us. We (the TES forummers) deceived ourselves into believing what we wanted to believe.

I thought this comment was really explanatory of something that can easily happen within ARGs, people who have been excitedly anticipating the release of the new Elder Scrolls saw what they wanted to in Hatshoe.  With the ambiguity of clues, dead drops, and such that are present in ARGs it could be really easy to misconcieve clues and take something from it that was not there to begin with.  When I started looking into Hatshoe, I did not think that it would have some kind of viral marketing involved because it was so slow to progress and a little disorganized, whereas with a large scale company, you would expect something more.  The reaction from Bethesda was a little alarming and over the top, in my opinion.  One of the Bethesda players put a post up on unfiction in outrage at Bethesda saying,

I've been spending too much time on unmoderated forums. It never occurred to me someone would be fascist enough to delete all mention of something so innocuous because it was using a few precious kilobytes of their bandwidth - let alone Bethesda, funky publishers of the Elder Scrolls. Or claim Hatshoe was obscene, when their most recent game involved blowing people's heads off in slow motion

Seriously, Bethesda. You guys used to be cool.

A little harsh, maybe, but a little extreme and hypocritical of Bethesda to be so adamant about it.  I just thought this instance really highlighted some of our class discussion about viral marketing and some of the positive and negative effects that it can have (if it's really there or not).  For one, Bethesda pissed off some of its most committed players for when the game really does come out and may have eliminated the possibility of creating an ARG for it later.  This instance also stopped some people from playing Hatshoe, because it was not what they thought, and since there are so many references to Elder Scrolls, they could contribute more in depth information.

Overall, Hatshoe started out slow but has really picked up pace and started to get more interesting as more characters have been introduced and there is much speculation that it has something to do with time travel.  I personally cannot wait for the next obscene post Hatshoe makes on Hatshoe.org, since the number is regularly growing, or the next twitter about him stalking his neighbor.  It will be very interesting to see where it all goes and if you have the time or the interest, you should check it out.