لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Shall We Play a Game?
Upon first glance it might seem that only highly unconventional games like Assassin, Majestic, and Botfighters genuinely blur the boundaries of the magic circle. However, implicit rules, the lusory attitude, and the magic circle operate in such a way that we can consider any game, at least in part, as a cultural environment. By the end of this schema we will return to this important proposition. Before doing so, however, we will explore these concepts through particular examples, by looking at games designed to explicitly blur the boundaries of the magic circle. Our first example focuses on a game reportedly designed and operated by Microsoft as a viral marketing campaign for the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The web-based game, known by its players informally as "The Beast," "The A.I. Game," or just "A.I.," had participants from all over the world collaboratively deciphering cryptic puzzles and clues across a range of media. The game began with an enigmatic credit at the end of the preview trailer for the film. Savvy viewers picked up on a mysterious listing for "Jeanine Salla, Sentient Machine Therapist" and a set of mysterious symbols. When viewers (now players) entered the name "Jeanine Salla" into an Internet search engine, they began a Wonderland-style journey through a series of linked websites. The sites blended real-world information and information from the fictive world of A.I.'s backstory, which concerned a dramatic struggle between humans and robots capable of human emotion. Over the course of several months leading up to the film's premiere, thousands of players took part in the game. Many expressed profound reactions to the distortion of the boundaries between game, film, life, and reality. As one player wrote in an essay on cloudmakers.org, the most active community site developed by players of the game,"Here we are, every one of us excited at blurring the lines between story and reality.The game promises to become not just entertainment, but our lives. But where in the story is there room for the too-mundane matters of our actual lives that must be attended?"[4] While players were intrigued by and often obsessed with the game, there was a clear sense of uneasiness about the truth of what was actually going on. The ambiguity surrounding the game's status (was it a game, a puzzle, a story, an evil marketing ploy?) made the experience of play oddly compelling. Another player noted, On the morning of the premiere, we'll know the plot, subplot, conflict, climax and dialogue down to the last poignant pause. Surely the PMs [Puppet Masters, the game's developers] know this; they also know that most of us will go anyway, to experience it for ourselves. So something undiscovered still remains—the heart of this (and whatever that implies).[5]
Puzzles in the game had players reading Göedel, Escher, Bach, translating from German, Japanese, and an obscure language called Kannada, decrypting Morse and Enigma code, and performing a range of operations on sound and image files downloaded and swapped between players.[6] Sometimes players received actual phone calls from unnamed parties to attend real-world events. At one "anti-robot" rally, for example, attendees solved puzzles and phoned the answers to players at rallies being held simultaneously in other cities. At every moment, A.I. played with the boundaries between the game's magic circle and the cultural spaces outside of it. The play experience of most games can be framed as a closed system, in which the play of the game is in some respects bounded by the magic circle. But because the space of play in A.I. was ambiguous, it operated as an open system, defying implicit assumptions about the scope of the space of possibility. As a result, A.I. mixed freely with its environment at a very deep level. Players were clearly affected by the play such an approach afforded.Although there is much to be said about this game from a marketing perspective, our interest lies elsewhere—in how its play became meaningful, even as it erased and redefined traditional boundaries separating fact from fiction. From a game design perspective, what elements of the game contributed to its status as real-world interloper? Listed next are some of A.I.'s salient design features, incorporating commentary from player Daragh Sankey's online analysis of the game.[7]
Web-based
Although the format of web-based games is not new, A.I. made wonderful use of the web's unique properties. The story was built from an amalgamation of distributed sites. A core mechanic of the game play involved searching and surfing the web, making the Internet fundamental to the game's structure.
Fictional game content disguised as reality
All of the information contained in the numerous sites created for the game was fabricated.There were not, however, any pages that announced,"This is a work of fiction." In fact, many of the websites could easily have been misconstrued as real, such as www.rational-hatter.com. This representational strategy helped reinforce the illusion that the game was part of the real world, rather than part of an artificial game world.
Decentralized content
Unlike most web-based games, A.I. had no single gateway or homepage. Content was spread across many websites, allowing for numerous points of entry. However, the distributed complexity of the game demanded a need for a central information hub. As an emergent effect of player behavior, the website www.cloudmakers.org was quickly adopted as the game's primary player-created portal.
Game events occurred outside the web
Although the bulk of the game was located on the web, the most dramatic events seemed to occur offline. Email, faxes, and phones all played a part in the game. For example, the A.I. trailer included an encoded phone number, which when called, played a mysterious voice message from "mother." Players were able to enter characters' passwords into fictional voicemail accounts and uncover new information. Game associated A.I.s even called players at home. Most dramatic, however, were three real-life "rallies" held by the "Anti-Robot Militia"(www.unite-and-resist.org) in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Players were given a date and address, and attended what turned out to be clever theatre pieces. The rallies included puzzles that required real-time collaboration between players at the events and those at home in front of their computers.
Episodic content
Game content was updated weekly, as elements were added, modified, and taken away. Emails were sent out to players; increasingly, sites attached to the game were "hacked" by rampant A.I.s. With its complex, ongoing narrative, the disadvantage of A.I.'s episodic release was that players who joined the game later had a hard time catching up. The advantage was a heightened sense of urgency, because the game couldn't ever be put on pause. As a narrative structure, the episodic release was a natural fit for a web-based game, because most real sites do change over time. Additionally, because the game led chronologically to the launch of the film, it made sense that it built to a single climax.
Distributed problem-solving
Many of the puzzles in the game were extremely difficult to solve (some of them remain unsolved today). For example, messages were hidden in the html source code of certain web pages. Anyone could uncover this information, but since the game had so many websites, solitary players could not possibly get it all. It is safe to say that an isolated individual could never have played the entire game from start to finish. Thus, fan sites served as a meeting ground for game players, who collaborated by sharing new developments and puzzle answers, organizing and sharing problem-solving tasks. This was a bold design decision, because in designing a game it is generally better to err on the side of simplicity and ease rather than complexity. However, with A.I. the risk paid off—the design encouraged players to interact socially, and the collaborative play heightened the satisfaction each time a puzzle was solved.
Interaction between authors and players
Players presumed from the moment the game began that there was a set story arc to the game, which would end in the release of the film. The weekly updates generally involved puzzles that players had to solve before they could access new story content. Many players speculated that because the size and effectiveness of the groups solving the puzzles was an unpredictable variable, the design of new puzzles by the authors of the game was based on past player performance. For example, if a puzzle turned out to be much too hard for the players, the authors were forced to find an alternative means to provide the story update that the solution to the unsolved puzzle would have granted. If the authors did not seek out alternate forms of dissemination, there was a risk of the story never being completed.
Line blurred between players and game designers
It is worth noting that the game's creators deliberately blurred the lines between themselves and the players. In a few cases, game pages linked to fan pages without breaking the dissimulation. Jeanine Salla's essay on "Multiperson Social Problem-Solving Arrays Considered as a Form of 'Artificial Intelligence'" linked to the cloudmakers page (www.cloudmakers.org); the Center for Robotic Freedom (www.inourimage.org) urged players to help fight for A.I. rights by visiting the spherewatch page (www.spherewatch.net), another fan site. In fact, one player noted that the easiest way for game authors to control the story delivery would have been for them to surreptitiously join the ranks of the fans, posting solutions to puzzles when they saw that the real players were having trouble. Each of these design decisions contributed in distinct ways to blur the boundaries between the space of the game and everyday life. All of the elements we listed share one thing in common: careful attention to the creation of meaningful play. The web-based aspect of the game, for example, took good advantage of the medium. Players were rewarded for careful web searches and source code sleuthing with meaningful outcomes. Similarly, the social play of the game, from the collaborative puzzles to the real-world gatherings, were also forms of meaningful play engendered by specific game design choices. Even the fine line separating fact from fiction—a line made all the more porous by the game's distributed, improvisational format—was only possible through successful design. Each of these game elements—use of the web, collaborative social play, fiction disguised as fact—take advantage of the game as a cultural environment, intentionally blurring the boundaries of the magic circle. The many play dimensions of A.I., from its play with pleasure to its social and narrative play, all intentionally "play" with the border between the game and the surrounding world that it infiltrates, infests, and inhabits. A.I. takes the idea of game as cultural environment to extremes. But in one sense, all game experiences involve playing with the distinction between the game world and the rest of the world. Gregory Bateson's concept of metacommunication, first introduced in Games as the Play of Meaning, reminds us that to play a game is not an act of naïve immersion, but an act of constant communication about the act of play itself. A dog that nips another dog signifies a bite through its action, but also communicates the idea that the bite is not a real bite; the dog is not actually attacking, but is instead just playing. All games engender this quality of double-consciousness, but A.I. took it to new heights. Part of the brilliance of the game's design is that it incorporated metacommunication itself as a form of play.By blurring the boundaries of the magic circle as a key design choice, it made new forms of boundary-crossing possible, intensifying the pleasure of metacommunication. As players moved through the designed structures of the game, at every moment tensions between belief and skepticism, between playing a game and playing real life, moved the game forward and created compelling forms of play. [4]Andrea Phillips,“Deep Water.” 26th July 2001. Cloudmakers.org[5]Maria Bonasia,“MetaMystery.” 30th May 2001. Cloudmakers.org[6]Daniel Sieberg, “Reality Blurs, Hype Builds with Web ‘A.I.’ Game.” May
2001. CNN.com[7]Daragh Sankey,“A.I.Game.” Joystick101.org
