Early this morning the Alliance News Network started tweeting the beginning of an invasion of Earth by huge squid-like robots. It was an online re-enactment of this.
They used the hashtag #solcomms. And then it went a bit mental. LA was the first city hit. Dallas is in flames. Manhattan is a smoking crater. Most of the eastern seaboard is going silent. London is toast. And some of the images coming in are amazing and terrifying.
Right now #solcomms is a huge collaborative piece of fan fiction, being vaguely directed by a few people at Bioware but largely community driven. You can sit and watch the tweets coming in like the script of some movie or you can join in, like I did (to the annoyance of my followers).
Moreover people are talking to each other around the world, and following the "yes and" rule of story-telling. It really is something to see it happening in real time.
And then a curious thing happened. The Social Media Gurus jumped on #solcomms declaring it a viral victory and "this is how you market a game". Except it wasn't. Sure, it was "viral", but no marketing was involved. Just like the "shit people say" meme this has taken off organically as those wanting to tell their apocalypse survival story, did exactly that.
Interestingly it's hard not to compare these tweets to those that came out of Tokyo and Christchurch after their disasters. Real helpful facts caught up in a swirl false rumours and general panic.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to man the barricade we built from the Wellywood sign, for the Aotearoa Resistance.
