More on the 'Real' as the 'Virtual'

Okay, so there's video games and real games, right?

Britvic wants to change all that, and, by doing so, underscore the cutting edge of digital as dispensing altogether with such facile distinctions as that between 'virtual' and 'real'.

Britvic's Champion of the Playground is an online game/competition directed at kids, and intended to interweave a product message about their juices with encouraging kids to exercise more ('really', not virtually).

Kids register and receive a 'skill kit' to use. As The Drum puts it, "Skills kits contain a kit bag and a web cam, as well as a digitised skipping rope and a digitised hackysack that contain micro-chips which record a code when the child practises certain skills. Children can enter the recorded code online to receive further skills points and see how they compare against their friends in their friends league'.

The activity takes place virtually and really, rendering the ol' division between 'virtual' and 'real' increasingly irrelevant. 

Blurring the Line Between "Virtual" and "Reality"

How often are campaigns and promotions thought about as linking a separate "virtual" with a separate "reality"?

A number of recent efforts highlight how limiting this is.

Another recent effort that doesn't simply make a "virtual" anything, but instead maps the "real" onto/within the "virtual" is the mixed-media project/proposal "110 Stories," pitched through Kickstarter by Brian August.

By visually reproducing a view of the absent World Trade Center towers to anyone looking at Ground Zero through an iPhone, it not only helps people see/remember what once was at that site, it helps them share that experience with others.

Just as the virtual makes tangible what once was real, the real provides the impetus and substance for the virtual.

These and other efforts are remaking what we mean by "digital."