the blue monster game

[Click on image to enlarge]
The Blue Mons­ter has been tur­ned into a game. Ryan Ander­son from Fuel Indus­tries in Canada sent me the follo­wing e-mail:

Hi Hugh,
We’re just ente­ring the early sta­ges of the deve­lop­ment of the game that will inc­lude the Blue Mons­ter, and I just wan­ted to show you how he was being inte­gra­ted. The idea of the whole promo is to take IT peo­ple through a game that shows them the bene­fits of Tech­net, which is one of their key IT sup­port ser­vi­ces. Right now, the Blue Mons­ter shows up in one of the mini-games, where the hero IT guy has to des­troy bad pac­ket requests on the net­work, iden­ti­fied by port without des­tro­ying the real requests (I’m told it’s fun if you’re a geek).
He flashes on the screen and eats all the bad pac­ket requests and lea­ves the good ones. There’s not much of an expla­na­tion of who the Mons­ter is, other than that he’s on your side. I would like to inte­grate it into the dia­lo­gue of the quest game (think Lei­sure Suit Larry meets The IT Crowd) just as an ack­now­led­ge­ment of it. Mostly, it’s just meant to be a little nod to those who know it, and perhaps we can link to an expla­na­tion of what the Blue Mons­ter is… that much is not deci­ded.
I’d love to hear what you think about it, from “cool.” to “I think this is stu­pid.” Also, if you wouldn’t mind sen­ding me an email that just sta­tes clearly that you’re okay with Mic­ro­soft using the image in a game in this con­text, I’d really appre­ciate it. As I’m sure you’re aware, MS has a lot of law­yers who need things like that, and appa­rently our exchange on Face­book isn’t enough for them.
I’ve attached a screen cap­ture of the Blue Mons­ter in action… though he moves quickly so I couldn’t get a shot with his mouth open. This is not a final screen design, but it gives you the idea.
Let me know if you have any ques­tions / com­ments, etc., and I’ll let you know about any chan­ges or addi­tions we make with BM.
Cheers,
Ryan

I cer­tainly don’t think it’s stu­pid. I think it’s won­der­ful. Totally. The only thing i would say is I’d love to see a few Stormhoek bott­les in there somehow. But I would say that. Heh.
[Note to MSFT law­yers:] Yeah, I’m totally cool with the Blue Mons­ter being used in a Mic­ro­soft game. Just in case you had any doubts etc.
Thanks, Ryan. Rock on!
[PS: Yes, this is indeed a Social Object etc.]