The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

I took part in the game because there's not much I'll not take part in at least once, twice if I like it. I also saw this as an excellent opportunity to explore social play behaviors. One aspect of social play behaviors is that once you're in the game, you'll find out how the game plays itself through time. Jokelists are an example of this. You send a joke out and a while later it comes back to you, perhaps a bread upon the waters kind of thing.

Watching how players mutate the game (as Robbin did) is an example of opting out via active memetic migration (NextStage has an ex-assay immunologist on staff. I'm told the proper bio terms are "genetic drift" and "mutation"). The viral component does not organically alter itself to fit a new host. The existing host forces the viral element to mutate in order to thrive and be propagated further before the original memetic structure can die (the game continues, the rules have changed in order for the virus to infect new hosts and reinfect old ones, kind of like catching and re-catching a cold that's going around).

I don't know how much further Robbin's virus has spread (given that the actual community willing and able to catch and spread the virus is small, as in Brad Beren's 1%), but what we're witnessing is something mentioned in Why Some Viral Marketing Doesn't Work. Companies looking to use viral campaigns would do well to see how far Robbin's redesigned virus travels. It could offer a microcosm view of how well their co-opting a competitor's viral campaign would fare.