the best online game, EVER.
Jun. 27th, 2004 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swingchickieso, i'm not much of a gamer. i play my share of "dance dance revolution" (*grin*), but i am not one to fire up the computer every night and spend hours conquering worlds or shooting people and that sort of thing. but the spring and summer of 2001, i became absolutely hard-core for a few short months.
summer 2001, the movie "A.I." was going to be released... and a few months before that, the previews started running in theatres. at the end of the trailer, the standard credits screen would appear with who the director was, etc. and one or two observant people noticed something interesting... one of the credits was for jeanine salla, who was listed as the "sentient machine therapist". a Google search turned up her personal web page... except there was one small problem. according to her site, jeanine lives in the year 2142. and one of her friends has been murdered. *cue dramatic music*
and so "the beast" was born. "the beast" became the code name for one of the most unusual online games ever created. it was a collaboration of dreamworks (who did the A.I. movie) and microsoft, who decided to start an underground mystery game to promote the movie. by the time the movie came out, it had grown to thousands and thousands of players (we called ourselves the "cloudmakers", after the name of the boat owned by the murdered man), all working together to solve the mystery through collective intelligence.
so, why was the game so brilliant? what's the big whoop?
first of all, the idea itself was fantastic. no-one advertised the game to the public, there were no commercials saying "play the A.I. game online!!!" (people didn't even realize that it was a game at first, as there were just a bunch of websites from the future to explore.) it was a very quiet beginning... basically they put a few tidbits (like jeanine's name in the credits) out there, and then patiently waited to see who would bite. then word of mouth took over.
second, the game, in most ways, has very little to do with the movie. the main characters in the murder mystery were never in the movie. some of the outlying characters were, to make it interesting and tie everything in. but the game, although a promotion for the movie, was an entity to itself.
third was the sheer DEPTH of the game. every web site looked completely different from the others. to backtrack for a second, jeanine's personal web site contained links to other sites, such as the university where she taught, web pages of her friends, etc. and it didn't look like one person sitting in a cubicle at microsoft came up with all of them. if you go to cloudmakers.org, which has all of the web sites and puzzles archived, you can explore the sites that were created and see for yourself.
the biggest thing i loved, in regard to the depth of the game, was all the different ways they got the players involved. this wasn't just a bunch of web sites for people to click on... it was much, much more. you could hack into character's e-mail, call their voicemail boxes and punch in their personal code to listen to their voicemails, etc. it really felt like they were real people. one of the things you could do was sign an online petition for the ARM, or "anti-robot movement". you gave them your name, phone and fax #s, address, etc. soon after that, a number of players received invitations to ARM rallies at hotels in different cities. some of them did show up out of curiosity, and found a series of puzzles that they had to solve in order to move the game forward. they spent the day collaborating on the puzzles, and reported the results back to the online Yahoo! group that had formed to play the game. also, sometimes we'd get phone calls from characters in the game. every once in a while, my cell phone would ring, and i'd hear a strange noise on the other end... it was one of the characters, giving a hint that their web page had been updated. it freaked the hell out of me.
the funny thing is, about 3 months worth of game stuff was solved by the group within WEEKS. so the poor people at microsoft had to do the rest of the game on the fly. they worked 24 hours a day, creating new characters, web sites, puzzles, etc. to satisfy the hungry masses. they'd read our yahoo group to see how it was going, and adjust the game accordingly. according to one of the creators, they'd be running around the office going, "we need more puzzles! what hobbies do you have? early music? okay, let's create a puzzle around early music notation!!!" then they'd post the puzzle, someone in the Yahoo! group would find it, and the gamer frenzy would kick in again. it was nuts.
the best was towards the end of the game, when one of the characters was kidnapped. someone figured out a phone number hidden somewhere, and a few people called it. a live person answered, and they reported back to the Yahoo! group, "don't call the number, it's not "in-game". it's a security company." well, it turns out the security company WAS in-game, they had a live person playing a character on the phone. so hundreds of game-players start calling the guy, asking him questions, trying to figure out who he is and what he knows. and the microsoft guys are there, listening to the whole thing and reading the Yahoo! board, and just laughing their asses off. it was brilliant.
anyway i know this is a hellish long post. the funny thing is, my few paragraphs don't even do it justice. you have to see for yourself. go to the cloudmakers web site, look around the archives of the game for yourself, and see just how brilliant it was. and the next time you watch the movie A.I., watch the rolling credits at the end. you'll see game clues hidden in there as well.
summer 2001, the movie "A.I." was going to be released... and a few months before that, the previews started running in theatres. at the end of the trailer, the standard credits screen would appear with who the director was, etc. and one or two observant people noticed something interesting... one of the credits was for jeanine salla, who was listed as the "sentient machine therapist". a Google search turned up her personal web page... except there was one small problem. according to her site, jeanine lives in the year 2142. and one of her friends has been murdered. *cue dramatic music*
and so "the beast" was born. "the beast" became the code name for one of the most unusual online games ever created. it was a collaboration of dreamworks (who did the A.I. movie) and microsoft, who decided to start an underground mystery game to promote the movie. by the time the movie came out, it had grown to thousands and thousands of players (we called ourselves the "cloudmakers", after the name of the boat owned by the murdered man), all working together to solve the mystery through collective intelligence.
so, why was the game so brilliant? what's the big whoop?
first of all, the idea itself was fantastic. no-one advertised the game to the public, there were no commercials saying "play the A.I. game online!!!" (people didn't even realize that it was a game at first, as there were just a bunch of websites from the future to explore.) it was a very quiet beginning... basically they put a few tidbits (like jeanine's name in the credits) out there, and then patiently waited to see who would bite. then word of mouth took over.
second, the game, in most ways, has very little to do with the movie. the main characters in the murder mystery were never in the movie. some of the outlying characters were, to make it interesting and tie everything in. but the game, although a promotion for the movie, was an entity to itself.
third was the sheer DEPTH of the game. every web site looked completely different from the others. to backtrack for a second, jeanine's personal web site contained links to other sites, such as the university where she taught, web pages of her friends, etc. and it didn't look like one person sitting in a cubicle at microsoft came up with all of them. if you go to cloudmakers.org, which has all of the web sites and puzzles archived, you can explore the sites that were created and see for yourself.
the biggest thing i loved, in regard to the depth of the game, was all the different ways they got the players involved. this wasn't just a bunch of web sites for people to click on... it was much, much more. you could hack into character's e-mail, call their voicemail boxes and punch in their personal code to listen to their voicemails, etc. it really felt like they were real people. one of the things you could do was sign an online petition for the ARM, or "anti-robot movement". you gave them your name, phone and fax #s, address, etc. soon after that, a number of players received invitations to ARM rallies at hotels in different cities. some of them did show up out of curiosity, and found a series of puzzles that they had to solve in order to move the game forward. they spent the day collaborating on the puzzles, and reported the results back to the online Yahoo! group that had formed to play the game. also, sometimes we'd get phone calls from characters in the game. every once in a while, my cell phone would ring, and i'd hear a strange noise on the other end... it was one of the characters, giving a hint that their web page had been updated. it freaked the hell out of me.
the funny thing is, about 3 months worth of game stuff was solved by the group within WEEKS. so the poor people at microsoft had to do the rest of the game on the fly. they worked 24 hours a day, creating new characters, web sites, puzzles, etc. to satisfy the hungry masses. they'd read our yahoo group to see how it was going, and adjust the game accordingly. according to one of the creators, they'd be running around the office going, "we need more puzzles! what hobbies do you have? early music? okay, let's create a puzzle around early music notation!!!" then they'd post the puzzle, someone in the Yahoo! group would find it, and the gamer frenzy would kick in again. it was nuts.
the best was towards the end of the game, when one of the characters was kidnapped. someone figured out a phone number hidden somewhere, and a few people called it. a live person answered, and they reported back to the Yahoo! group, "don't call the number, it's not "in-game". it's a security company." well, it turns out the security company WAS in-game, they had a live person playing a character on the phone. so hundreds of game-players start calling the guy, asking him questions, trying to figure out who he is and what he knows. and the microsoft guys are there, listening to the whole thing and reading the Yahoo! board, and just laughing their asses off. it was brilliant.
anyway i know this is a hellish long post. the funny thing is, my few paragraphs don't even do it justice. you have to see for yourself. go to the cloudmakers web site, look around the archives of the game for yourself, and see just how brilliant it was. and the next time you watch the movie A.I., watch the rolling credits at the end. you'll see game clues hidden in there as well.
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[yeah, like I don't have enough to do already... LOL]
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Date: 2004-06-27 08:23 am (UTC)