To Get Viewers For Reruns, A ‘Sopranos’ Game

After five and a half seasons of The Sopranos on HBO, Tony Soprano, his crime crew and his family are as familiar to many Americans as the presidents pictured on money. So the Arts & Entertainment cable channel faces a challenge: get millions of viewers to watch reruns of the series with renewed interest.

In “The Sopranos” game, players can collect virtual tokens by taking photos of ads.

One strategy is a video game, but not a typical video game.

Do not expect interactive computer-generated animations of the Sopranos characters. In fact, there is no action in this game that was not scripted into the first season of the television drama, which A&E will run in its entirety beginning Jan. 10.

Imagine instead a fantasy football league in which actual football games supply the raw data for parallel competitions for points and rankings. Similarly, the Sopranos A&E Connection Game depends on action in the series to win points and rankings in the online game, said Kevin Slavin, managing director and co-founder of Area/code, a video game developer involved in the project.

In a preliminary round that starts Friday, players must first hunt down virtual tokens that represent characters, objects and places that are central to the series. The pieces, up to 36, are essential to the game. They can be collected by clicking online advertisements for the series, or by taking digital photos of ads on billboards or in magazines, and then sending them to a special Web site.

Using optical recognition technology, the pictures will yield tokens that will automatically be sent to a players online game board, Mr. Slavin said. Before episodes are shown (two are scheduled back-to-back every Wednesday), players must arrange their pieces. When the character or object that the pieces represent appears in an episode, players earn points — 10 for every two seconds on the television screen.

Players are rewarded bonus points if the pieces are arranged in contiguous clusters that reflect the same groupings during an episode. After the episodes end their run in February, the player with the most points will win a suitcase stuffed with $100,000, said Lori Peterzell, the vice president for advertising and consumer marketing at the A&E Network in New York. It is to create a groundswell of buzz, to invite people in, Ms. Peterzell said.

The Connections game was created in a collaboration of the Civic Entertainment Group, a promotions marketing firm, and Area/code, which specializes in big games, ones that bridge the virtual and the real.

Many Americans first became aware of big games in 2004, when Microsoft employed an alternate-reality game called I Love Bees to help promote the release of its Xbox video game Halo 2. The game prompted players to scurry about the country to designated pay phones to answer recorded questions. Correct answers unlocked short audio clips of an Internet-based back story for Halo 2, a futuristic combat game that became a blockbuster for Microsoft.

While big games have proved to be effective promotional tools, Christopher Swain, a professor at the University of Southern California and an expert on game design and online game culture, said these games represented much more.

He said they were an outgrowth of the participation age — he credited Jonathan I. Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, with coining the term — in which millions of people want to join in activities within communities of shared interests. Those active in social networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook are prime examples, said Mr. Swain, who is co-director of the universitys Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab.

They want to express themselves in a community, he said. In this case the community is of people excited about The Sopranos. I think it is a natural flowing from this sort of participation age.

For the Sopranos game, players register at www.suitcaseofcash.com, where hints on locating game pieces will be provided. To help prevent cheating, Mr. Slavin said, the boards will lock 15 minutes before the episodes begin and unlock after the evenings last episode ends on the West Coast. Players can arrange their pieces only while the board is unlocked.

Mr. Slavin added that even a thorough study of The Sopranos episodes on DVDs before the shows appear would not help players much because of the multiplicity of scoring possibilities. These are types of problems that computers can generate but computers cant solve, he said.

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