"This is not a game: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play"

http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/mcgonigal/notagame/paper.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_%28game%29

Jane McGonigal
Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies,
University of California at Berkeley
E-mail: janemcg@uclink4.berkeley.edu
ABSTRACT: The increasing convergence and
mobility of digital network technologies have given
rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social
interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet.
This paper explores one product of these extreme
networks, the emergent genre of immersive entertainment,
as a potential tool for harnessing collective
action. Through an analysis of the structure and
rhetoric of immersive games, I explore how immersive
aesthetics can generate a new sense of social agency in
game players, and how collaborative play techniques
can instruct real-world problem-solving.

....

Although the pervasive elements of the Beast (phone
calls, PDA downloads, emails, faxes, etc.) were the most
hyped immersive component of the game, the
proliferation of diegetic sites on the Web was actually the
largest and arguably most affecting component of the
immersive experience. The vast majority of game content
was distributed via the Internet, on the Web sites of
fictional characters, corporations, news services, and
political action groups, as well as a fictional psychiatric
clinic, weather bureau, coroner's office, and so on. These
sites featured every functional hallmark of nonfictional
sites, including pop-up warnings advising of software
upgrades, banner ads for fictional companies, incredibly
deep links (many sites featured dozens of internal pages)
and limited password access for sensitive areas of private
or government sites. Nowhere did these pages admit to
being part of a game; even the source code and Whois
information was rigorously monitored to eliminate any
information that might link game content to its producers.
Aesthetically, technologically and phenomenologically
speaking, there was no difference at all between the look,
function or accessibility of the in-game sites and nongame
sites.

....

In this sense, it is reasonable to argue that nothing about
this virtual play was simulated. The computer-driven
alternate reality the Beast created was make-believe, but
every aspect of the player's experience was, phenomenologically
speaking, real. Hacking into the in-game
coroner's office's fictional Web report, for example, was
identical in practice to the process of hacking into a nongame
coroner's office's Web site. This stands in stark
contrast with other kinds of massively multi-user roleplaying
games such as The Sims Online and Everquest, in
which the digital display of virtual worlds is clearly
simulated and, although absorbing, a totally different
mental and physical experience of being and acting than
everyday life.

...

To "TING" a game now
means to explicitly deny and purposefully obscure its
nature as a game, a task that has become increasingly
difficult as immersive players grow more savvy about
TING techniques.

....

The
ubiquitous nature of contemporary networked multimedia
technologies has created in society, arguably for the first
time, an everyday environment whose interface is
consistently and pervasively identical to one of its art
forms. This close identity in design and function enables
an immersive aesthetic in games like the Beast that is
much more powerful and persuasive than the immersive
efforts of the so many other arts that have previously
attempted the interfaceless interface.

.....

How effective were the immersive tactics of the Beast?
When the game ended in July 2002, Cloudmakers
moderator Andrea Phillips, a 26-year-old software
designer from New York, published a recovery guide for
her fellow, deeply immersed players. She wrote:
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. You
slowly wake up to discover that you have missed the
early spring unfolding into late summer.… yet 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 [34].

....