This is the first year that CHI, a major annual conference for human-computer interaction academics, didn’t interfere with South By Southwest, a major annual gathering of startup techies (and musicians). Money and family commitments kept me away from Austin, but until I read about the talk by Andrea Phillips, I had avoided regret.
Phillips—whose work includes the Institute for Human Continuity (IHC), an extension of the 2012 movie about global cataclysm—talked about things to consider when creating alternate reality games and transmedia campaigns. In her solo talk, “Hoax or Transmedia? The Ethics of Pervasive Fiction,” she gave examples from The Onion, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, lonelygirl15, Martin Aggett, Zona Incerta, Toyota Matrix, Dell, Shelby Logan, and The Haunted Apiary to illustrate the risks and consequences that come with ultrarealism.
Narrowing her definition of transmedia, Phillips focused on pervasive fiction—stories that use the real world as a platform and make fiction almost indistinguishable from what is really happening in the world. This is the wheelhouse of Improv Everywhere and Andy Kaufman, but organized around marketing campaigns or participatory immersion games.
Andy Kaufman would have played well on the Internet
Phillips’ IHC campaign rubbed NASA the wrong way. After thousand of people called to verify that the world was going to end—including teenagers who preferred to commit suicide than endure the End of Days—the Astrobiology Institute denounced Sony as unethical. “It is easy to be condemned by the Vatican,” she notes, “but it takes a certain special something to be condemned by NASA.”
She also recalls the die-hard gamers from The Beast, an ARG for the movie AI that ended in August 2001. The “Cloudmakers,” which numbered in the thousands, reacted to the 9/11 bombings by considering reuniting to take on actual terrorists, something Phillips doesn’t condone. “This is the thing that has made me uneasy about pervasive fiction ever since,” she says.
Being able to separate fiction from reality is a cognitive milestone most people will hit by the time they are five, says Phillips, but transmedia experiences today can make things difficult. The Landover Baptist Church is fake but plausible. Gene Ray’s Time Cube is crazy but real. “The Internet is not optimized to help us distinguish what is true from what is fictional.”
On ARGnet, Brandie Minchew’s analysis of the talk is well worth a read. She highlights a few key themes from Phillips’ talk, which I’ll paraphrase as:
- The reality-fictional threshold flips on a dime. You can go too far with the deception.
- Anonymity isn’t really an incentive to participate. “Rabbit holes,” mysterious entrances into the game world, can risk players not caring, or lumping you with people with whom you don’t want to be associated.
- Context is important. Hoaxes can become frauds or attacks if the right people don’t know it’s a game, or can’t see all of the game. (“Puppet-based transmedia is ethically safe. Ish.”)
- Imagine the worst thing that can happen when you put the game in the world. Plan for that.
- Games will be commandeered, and boundaries broken. Designers should consider building a kill-switch.
- Create worlds that are so amazing that people don’t care if they are real or not.
With SociaLens entering this arena over the next two months, these are some things to keep in mind as we play our own games with reality.
BTW, Phillips has a nice blog about this domain, Deus Ex Machinatio. She writes about games, storytelling, digital culture, and gender issues.