Perversive games:

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LECTURE
Perversive games breakinhg the magic circle?
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Networked Games

• Played via
• ? Web sites email
• Telecommunications (Mainly mobile)
• Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wireless
• LANs
• Global positioning systems
• Radio frequency identification
• Genres examples
• MMORPGs and Simulations (Everquest, The
• Sims Online)
• First-person shooters (Americas Army,
• Counterstrike)
• Pervasive gaming (The Go Game)
• Immersive gaming (The A.I. Web Game)

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What Is pervasive Gaming?
the rule book is reality, the board is your city,
and the pieces are you and your team. Once
you accept a mission, goal or objective you're
off and running (or bicycling or scootering)
through the streets.
people are set loose on the streets competing
through Planted clues, creative and interpretive
missions or trivia. all woven together by
wireless technology (flowing through web-enabled
cell phones)
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Uncle Roy All Around You
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• - real play, not role play (personality
• persists)
• - everyday technologies (ubiquitous
• computing persists)
• symbols and places that will be
• reencountered (local and media
• environments persist)
• digital traces of the collective
• infrastructure (network persists)

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Flash mobs
On July 11th I received an invitation to join a
yahoo group.
Sunday the 13th instructions are sent out Go to
one of three bars near Union Square,Wednesday
the 16th at 600 and wait for further
instructions.
600 a girl started handing out half sheets of
paper, stating at 620 we were to head down to
the end of Powell. 627 go to a large
crosswalk wait for the crossing signal. When it
changes green cross, but spin clockwise with
your arms stretched out. If someone asks what
youre doing make something up. At 637 everyone
disburses in different directions without a
trace.
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There were so many people you could not
outstretch your arms to the sides so everyone
put them straight up in the air. For some
reason, as if it was part of the instructions,
as everyone made their first pass across Market
they let out a Whoooooooooooooooooooo sound. I
came naturally and once we reached the other
side everyone giggled.
Is this mass hysteria, or just dumb luck (40
something white guy in a suit) Girl Do you
know what they're doing this? Participant
(cheerfully) No! Girl (in disbelief) Do they
WANT to be doing this?
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RUG BUYING (NY)
New Yorkers used e-mail to coordinate a huge,
instant gathering of people around a particular
rug. Participants were instructed to tell
questioning salesmen that they all lived
together in a warehouse in Queens, and they
were considering purchasing the item for use as
a "Love Rug" back at the house. After precisely
ten minutes the crowd dissipated.
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I Love Bees
During the third presidential debate, an
out-of-place poster with a large cartoon image
of a grinning bee appeared on the wall
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9,000 real-world players 600,000 online players
collaborated to - investigate the mystery Who
hacked www.ilovebees.com, and why? - use GPS
data and technology to locate and answer 40,000
payphone calls in 50 states 8 countries -
compile, reconstruct and interpret a distributed
6 hour radio drama divided into 15-second
fragments
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• - learn a fictional program language,
• flea and use it to reconstruct the
• broken web site
• solve specialty research puzzles
• generate 1.5 million forum posts
• create and maintain blogs and wikis
• - construct ad-hoc networks for real-time
• communications and mobilization

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widely dispersed players coordinate to find and
answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across
the United States and provide correct answers to
recorded questions. When all the answers have
been supplied, the latest episode in an
internet-based War of the Worlds-esque radio
serial is unlocked and made available to its
rabid fans.
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In some cases, we're trying to recreate
Casablanca with six main characters living their
lives in the shadow of the events that are
bearing down on them.
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immersive REALITY Gaming
usually requires web-based sleuthing,
coordination with others in faraway places
and the willingness to do weird things in public.
The first alternate-reality game was a multimedia
creation called Beast in which players entered
the world of Spielberg's film AI (2001).
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erase game boundaries physical, temporal and
social
obscure the meta-communications that might
otherwise announce,This is play.
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Sentient Machine Therapist Jeanine Salla
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Movie trailer
[phone]
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MESSaGE
Welcome my child. Once upon a time there was
a forest, that teemed with life, love, sex and
violence. Things that humans did naturally. And
their robots copied - flawlessly. This forest
is vast and surprising. It is full of grass, and
trees, and databanks, and drowned apartment
buildings, filled with fish. It can be a
frightening forest, and some of its paths are
dark, and difficult. I was lost their once - a
long time ago. Now I try to help others who have
gone astray. If you ever feel lost, my child,
write me at thevisionary.net. And I will leave
you a trail of crumbs..."
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Phone [phone]) E-mail jsalla_at_bangalorewor
ldu-in.co.nz
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To be continued
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On April 11, 2001, Cloudmakers was founded as a
discussion group for the interactive web game.
the game officially solved on July 24, 2001
shocking more than one million players by
calling them at home, faxing them at
work, scribing unauthorized e-mails from their
accounts, sending them packages through the U.S.
Postal Service, embedding clues in national
television commercials, and proliferating more
than 4000 digital files across a series of
fictional Web sites.
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"It evokes a shared community who talk together
and puzzle together and try to figure out what's
going on, and become immersed in the world and
the story.... This experience goes on for three
months. It's pervasively in your life, so the
suspension of disbelief is a bubble that extends
out in the rest of your life and the rest of
the community."
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psychological susceptibility
Im going to catch myself still looking for
patterns and riddles in my daily life months
from now
We normal, intelligent people have been devoting
outrageous percentages of our days, weeks, months
to a game You find yourself at the end of the
game, waking up as if from a long sleep. Your
marriage or relationship may be in tatters. Your
job may be on the brink of the void, or gone
completely. You may have lost a scholarship or
lost or gained too many pounds
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Schizophrenia machines
designed in their sprawling and all Encompassing
format for the sole purpose of turning
previously sane players into paranoid, obsessive
maniacs
Im going to catch myself still looking for
patterns and riddles in my daily life months
from now.
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Herodotus (430 B.C) The Histories Ancient
Greeks invented dice, balls and other gaming
equipment in order to provide a
strategically immersive distraction for their
nations starving masses. In the midst of
famine, the rulers of Lydia implemented a
countrywide policy of eating only on alternate
days. They hoped games would be immersive enough
on the non-eating days to make citizens forget
their hunger. In this way they passed eighteen
years
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi flow, the optimal
psychological experience of becoming one with
an activity.
James Paul Gee Kids often say it doesn't feel
like learning when they're gaming - they're much
too focused on playing. If kids were to say that
about a science lesson, our country's education
problems would be solved.
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the Pinocchio effect
the desire for a game to be transformed into
real life, or conversely, for everyday life to
be transformed into a "real little game.
Now 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.
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Since we wanted this game to be real, we should
have a live event but we forgot something
crucial about the rules of life there is no off
switch. At the end of the night, our actors had
to go home, and one of our players decided to
follow the actor home. He was doing nothing
wrong he was doing everything right! He did
exactly what we had encouraged him to do, and
wed totally failed to plan for that.Ultimately,
the actor had to break character and say Look,
Im sorry, Im an actor, please don't follow
me. (PUPPETMASTERS The BEAST)
the Mike Royal incident
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Apters three-part analogy
will produce boredom in a crowd of spectators
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a tiger without a cage will produce anxiety
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pleasurable excitement. This pleasure, for Apter,
represents the safe arousal we experience during
play.