Congratulations to everyone involved in putting together this strange beast. We hope you like the outcome– more discussion on versions, transformations, game design and practicality are forthcoming…

But in the meanwhile, we hope you enjoy Unreal City!

Many different people have done lots of work to get Unreal City off the ground, and so thank you to everyone involved in the project in any way.

Now go start talking and linking and shamelessly plugging us!

Levelling Up

I think it was Duncan Gough that talked quite a lot about the continuum between games and films and television shows. There was a real sense through the conference, though, that games were regarded as a separate entity. That film and television were established and mainstream and that games were on the edge of “art”. Certainly this is arguable, but it was particularly fascinating to me because having edged around film-making circles there’s definitely a sense that fims are “proper art” and that television is an edgy pretender, a series of loud, flashing distractions wrapped in ads rather than a legitimate artistic medium. If you hang around theatrical bastions you’ll begin to wonder whether modern cinema is capable of creating anything meaningful. My point here is: every medium goes through an extended stage of unsurety before it becomes legitimated by society, before it is reborn in the mainstream*.

At the moment, it’s games. What I would argue with is the idea that games are always going to be on the edge of art or that this is in any way special or different from the parth that cinema or television had to tread when they were relatively new. Before we can accept the medium itself, its tools have to become second nature to us– in about fifteen years time, when all the Independent arts critics have grown up playing Guitar Hero and Super Mario Galaxy, the tone of the conversation itself will be very different. We don’t regard the television, the cinema screen, the laptop or desktop computer as pieces of “specialised equipment”, and in fact their uses grow less “specialised” the more legitimate and entrenched the medium gets.

Already our gaming rigs are becoming part of the home-cinema landscape, and they’re also starting to be used for an ever wider variety of purposes: now you can not just download but stream in HD to the XBox and the PS3. Films, television shows, games, even live events like sports or premieres could end up being watched through the XBox rather than “conventionally”. So, not just cross-media, but cross-purpose as well.

Authors, Auteurs and Attributing Crowds

Maybe one of the big issues in terms of “artistic legitimacy” is the idea of authorship…which plays heavily into the idea of ownership. Traditionally speaking, something must be owned to have value. Monetary value and creative value have an antagonistic but relative relationship. We are used to art that has a creator, a progenitor, a driving force. Paintings have artists, books have authors, films have directors and auteurs, even television shows have showrunners; as we find it difficult to give credit to a group of people, we pick one to laud, to see as the creative engine behind a project. But games, especially big-ticket console games, tend to be produced by a company and worked on by large groups of people. Games require collaboration between writers and artists and coders and level-designers and marketers and producers. They’re too corporate, too collaborative to quite fit into the singular idea of authorship that helps us to label a creation as “art”. And when we do, it’s often because we’ve created an auteur– a Peter Molyneux, or Cliff Bleszinski or Will Wright. We need to be able to see the imprint of a personality on the product. (That’s not to say it will always be a positive imprint, there are as many Molyneux-haters as there are fanboys-and-girls, but we still see his games as part of an ‘artistic vision’ rather than just a factory output.)

One of the speakers at Playful– artistic lead Kareem Ettouney from Media Molecule, company which produced LittleBigPlanet– touched on ideas of “art” and collaboration in the video game world. What was interesting about his talk was that he didn’t shy away from using art, and artistic terminology to describe his and others’ work on the game. His fine art background did not cause him to dismiss this sort of larger, collaborative, compromise-filled and commercially-driven sort of entertainment creation as anything other than artistically motivated.

Not to put too fine a point on it, television and film are both team-sports in the extreme as well. The production process is not dissimilar. While it’s necessary to have an overarching artistic vision and view of the bigger picture, the real work is done by tens and hundreds of people collaborating and creating within this larger framework. While it’s easier to credit a director or producer it’s rarely entirely accurate. Our auteur-figures are often just convenient props, just so that we can see the creator’s fingerprints in the margins.

Perhaps we were used to experiencing art individually, and so it was important to see an individual on the other end? But now, art is both created and consumed collaboratively. Our labelling system just has to catch up.

*A lovely, thorough academic exploration of this idea is Andre Gaudreault’s ‘A Medium Is Always Born Twice’

Unreal City Update!

The first chapter of Unreal City– our surreal multimedia adventure– will be up for beta testing by the end of the week. If you’ve signed up to the newsletter or read the blog then you’ll definitely be hearing about it. Once it’s up, it would be fantastic to have as many opinions about it as possible. We’re interested in what you think! Comments can be left here, or sent in to themechanic@thisunrealcity.com.

these boundaries between forms of practice and appreciation do not exist, it’s a superflat world

Entwined & Interactive

This made me think back to Douglas Adams’ rather brilliant 1999 essay, which I’m sure most of you have seen How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. It makes an excellent case for the internet and “interactivity” as revolutionary, but in terms of a revolution-as-return. His argument is that it’s the passive media of the 20th century (television, the cinema) that’s the aberration; entertainment by-and-large has always been interactive, and our mistake is treating the “interactive” possibilities of the internet and digital media as newfangled and frightening. We are natural villagers, and the internet is giving us back the ability to organise ourselves into small villages and communities, an ability that was perhaps lost in the noise of the mid-20th century milieu. This is great stuff, and even better because he’s using so many of today’s buzzwords as if they’re old hat in 1999– his offhand point that we’re having to invent silly words for concepts not because they’re new, but rather because they were so pervasive that we never needed a name for them is a telling one.

Personally, too, I think it’s important with placing interactive experiences on a contextual timeline. To draw connecting lines between theatre and roleplaying and the spectacular attractions of the late 1800s/early 1900s. Community experiences: kaleidoscopes, fairs, carnivals. I’ve talked before about the the internet’s strength as a medium of engagement with community, especially in terms of entertainment. But there are a couple of assumptions in the essay that Adams, I think, is exaggerating for effect, that have slipped into the way lots of us think about interactivity, the internet and television. I do not like the idea of glibly drawing a distinction between “active” and “passive” media; interaction means more than affecting the story or interacting physically with the actors/storytellers. Interaction is participation, and that means more than just viewing or sharing a community entertainment experience, it also means talking about it later, thinking about it alone, engaging your brain and body with the entertainment in some way.

Layering It On

Marshall McLuhan hit upon the contradictory ideas of this when he described the media continuum as existing between “hot” and “cold”. A hot medium is one which is high-definition, or rather, highly-layered. A lot of very dense information packed into the stream: a film, the radio. A cool medium is a “less dense” one, one that requires more completion by the audience/viewer/player/participant– the telephone, the television. A hot medium, by engaging one or more of the senses so thoroughly, actually requires less participation than a cool one. So television, far from being passive, encourages engagement. (Of course, everything is converging between the poles of “hot” and “cold”, into the sliding space between: right now we’re watching television in HD on 46 inch screens, and the thickness of our images, the amount of information encoded into them, is increasing. We have comments and tags on youtube videos, augmented reality apps on the iPhone, digital/flash video that can be manipulated and clicked through, revealing ever more densely layered data– but digitally speaking it’s attempting to be inclusive rather than exclusive– each layer is like an irregularity or a tiny opening on the smooth surface of this densely packed medium, they’re all ways into the experience.)

Digital Natives, Digital Colonisers

Unfortunately, one of the comparisons that Douglas Adams draws in this essay plays into what I think is one of the most pernicious and irritating overarching metaphors about digital culture: digital immigrants and digital natives. Those born after the personal computer revolution, who did not grow up “speaking the native tongue” of the digital world will never quite achieve the mastery and ease of operation that their children, “digital natives” who grew up with these tools, will have. At face value it’s nothing particularly revolutionary– children will probably have a more instinctive grasp of technologies that they never had to regard as “new”, and they will inevitably come up with new and exciting ways of integrating them into their everyday lives that their elders didn’t think of. So far so obvious. But by using these particular terms “immigrant” & “native” we call up a whole host of irritating colonial ghosts. The implication is that only natives can ever have a natural, authentic and/or effortless grasp of culture. The immigrant is doomed to fumbling, to mispronounciation and mis-step, to being a second-class citizen. Even without talking about how that’s offensive to, you know, immigrants and naturalised citizens, this does a disservice to the wealth of older people who have learned to use digital technologies for work & for play. It smacks of the most ridiculous ageism and blame-shifting. There are plenty of people in their 20s that are functional digital illiterates, and plenty of people in their 50s who are rewriting the digital landscape. Yes, there are huge inequalities in terms of access to digital technologies and the internet, but age alone is no reason or excuse to be a luddite, or to be left behind. (Not to say it’s not a legitimate choice to be a luddite– simply that nobody is doomed to utter alienation from new technology simply by virtue of their age.)

The alien threat in Children of Earth is– in a classic convention of the scifi genre– entirely unimportant. It is an external pressure that allows the writers to examine their real subject: human nature. When faced with annihilation, with a threat we cannot hope to face, what do we do? Does morality mean anything in the face of death? What constitutes “acceptable loss”? The real monsters in Children of Earth are human beings, more to the point, they are the politicians sitting in Whitehall. Children of Earth asks us to take a long hard look at our governments and leaders; though it was written in October last year, Children of Earth feels jarringly topical, set against the background of anti-terror legislation and debate, MPs expenses scandals and the potential threat of swine flu on the horizon. Politically, this is subversive stuff, taking on issues that rarely make an appearance on TV, especially out of the confines of “topical programming” and especially not during prime-time on BBC1.

The brilliant Peter Capaldi (who you might just remember as foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker from In The Loop or The Thick of It) plays Mr. Frobisher– a small-time civil servant who just happens to be Torchwood’s contact in the government. He is a middleman, brought to prominence in these world-changing events precisely because he is unimportant. To the political establishment, he is expendable. He is most emphatically not a monster, and yet he participates and colludes with actions that are monstrous. This is where Children of Earth is at its hardhitting, politically slimy best. It demonstrates with chilling effectiveness that politicians are concerned with politics, and that is an entity entirely separate from everyday life. The discussions in Whitehall, witnessed by Frobisher, are the best parts of this story. The writers nail the slipperiness of diplomatic language (calling children “units” to depersonalise them), spending far more time discussing how to spin their actions into a media-friendly narrative than even the practical consequences of their decisions. Their closed-door conversations demonstrate the logic, the terrifying ease with which we can slip from appeasement to self-protection to protecting people-like-us. That at the heart of eugenics is the protection of the in-group rather than a blind hatred of the out-group is a subtle, telling distinction, and Children of Earth nails it.

Children of Earth is a wonderful introduction to scifi and its possibilites, and– with its move to BBC1’s primetime slot of 9pm– it achieved audience figures of around 6 million for each episode (and that’s just overnights, not including viewers on BBC HD, +1 and iPlayer). Clearly, it was a mainstream science fiction event. In terms of five solid hours of television, whatever your genre, you could do a lot worse. The creators and writers should be justifiably proud.

Unfortunately, if you were already a fan of the somewhat silly, over-the-top, dark and yet hopeful scifi series that was Torchwood Seasons 1 and 2 you will be justifiably shocked. This is not Torchwood as we know it. It is a reboot in everything but name that has built upon the deaths of two of the main characters in the Season 2 finale by killing off another main character, breaking another one to the point that taking up his role as team-leader of Torchwood seems impossible and leaving the other one behind, heavily pregnant in a world that has been fundamentally altered by the events of the series. Whether a Season 4 is greenlit or not, there can be no return to the format and style of Season 1 and 2, nor can there be any real reconciliation of the message of Children of Earth with the overarching message of Doctor Who, and Torchwood: that the universe is filled with wonder and that human beings are flawed but fantastic creatures.

In the drive to mainstreamise and create a BBC1 event, Torchwood abandoned its own conventions and decided upon a much darker, unpleasant path. It broke its generic contract with established viewers, but gained a huge number of new ones in doing so. (Not to mention, it created something beautiful and daring.)

I think Torchwood can be seen as one of the first, highly visible examples of an issue that’s only going to become more prevalent in television as shows adapt themselves to the new conditions of a medium-free, content-driven market in which the product itself is in flux. Torchwood did not only exist as two long-form episodic serials of 13 episodes each, it also existed in the form of tie-in novels, behind-the-scenes blogs, audiobooks and radio plays.

Mainstream audiences have always found it easy to draw a distinction between “the show” appearing on TV and all of this so-called “supplementary material”. All of this “extra stuff” is thought of as material for the hardcore fans, the crazies, the niche (though of course, let’s remember, the Long Tail and others tell us that it’s this loyal, smaller fanbase that generates a large quantity of a show’s revenue in this merchandising and DVD-sales driven market, they’re the ones that purchase the novels, attend the cons, convert their friends to watching the show, stick with it through its transformations). But Children of Earth has problematised this distinction by messing with the format of “the show” itself. By shifting from a weekly, 13-episode season to a nightly, five-episode “televisual event”, the creators changed the very nature of the stories it would tell. Just as radio plays tell different kinds of stories to television, and novels tell different kinds of stories than audioblogs. So when a show is spread so wantonly over so many media, when its nature is to transform and adapt its content to the form it is currently taking, then how do we pin down the “essence” of the show itself? (Is there such a thing?)

The big question: can we separate form(at) from content? I think we’re going to have to expand our notions of the “canonical”, get used to a product that’s less fixed and certain. But I do also think that creators are going to have to assume a greater responsibility to define and maintain an integrity of content and character across these different media. Battlestar Galactica’s webisodes and TV-events are excellent examples of this: they created short-form, event television that nonetheless maintained the flavour, characterisation and paradigm of the parent-series.

A more practical question: is Torchwood’s move brilliant or flawed? They’ve highlighted an important issue in the televisual marketplace. Who makes more money for a show, particularly a scifi genre show? Is it a small, dedicated group of fans, or a larger, more mainstream audience? Have they made a mistake in breaking their contract with their radio-play-downloading, DVD-buying, con-attending fans? On the other hand, in doing so they have generated huge public interest, debate and viewing figures that have surprised even the most optimistic of commenters. (Tangentially, but importantly: Children of Earth’s is probably going to generate some ire from fans and supporters who were pleased to see a gay couple on their mainstream TV screens. Understandably so, as it was marketed specifically to the gay and mainstream press as groundbreaking in this respect, claiming to treat its queer relationships just like it treats its heterosexual ones but then ending up Burying Its Gays, with a declaration of queer love followed by death.)

In my opinion, their mistake was in setting up this distinction in the first place, as I believe it’s an unecessary one. You can please the fans and create new, mainstream ones– look at JJ Abrams recent Star Trek reboot, which changes the tone and style but preserves and respects the “essential character” of the original. But why wasn’t Torchwood: Children of Earth able to do the same thing?

But here, then, is my big caveat about Children of Earth: the agenda dwarfed the characters, story and sensibility– ultimately, Torchwood were somewhat irrelevant bit-parts in a grand political drama. As slickly produced as it was, by Day Five it was unremitting bleakness and darkness. A nihilism that was shocking to see on prime-time television (and simply for the novelty, it is admirable) and yet, we are left, at the close, grappling with humanity as the show describes it: craven, weak, alternately monstrous and powerless, shameful, insignificant and small. I was disappointed that Children of Earth held up a mirror to the darkest parts of the human soul, but then failed to provide any alternative, any small shred of hope for change or betterment. While it’s fascinating and fantastic to see a mainstream, prime-time series that confronts the idea that sometimes, in life, truly good choices do not exist, and we must pick amongst the greys, I’m unsure of the moral worth of suggesting that we are not worth saving because our nature itself is flawed. We are incapable of our own redemption. What then, is the point of showing us the horror and callousness of which we are capable? What is the point of creating a series that paints so beautifully our easy descent into cruelty and destruction if we are given no alternatives or opportunities to change?

The everyday heroism of human life is what is truly missing from this series, and it is deliberately excluded in favour of a political message: our leaders care only for politics, and in their pursuit of political power lose touch with real life, and we the people are too apathetic and powerless to stop them. We did not see any true revolt from citizens and, more importantly, parents, as their children were taken from them. Yes, we were given many scenes of weeping, screaming, protesting mothers outside school gates but apart from Rhiannon and Johnny on the council estate we do not see the mothers and fathers of Britain refuse point-blank to hand their children over to armed thugs and police. (And yes, I really do think that if armed soldiers attempted to take a seven-year-old from her home, her parents would resist, utterly and rabidly, to the death– the entire series plays on our notion of “the children”, the ultimate heartstrings-tugger, the sacrosanct, the innocent, and yet, fails to acknowledge on screen that a parent confronted with the loss of their child is a fierce and primal force to be reckoned with, even by a government with militias and money at their disposal.) We saw no resistance from other governments of the world, which was suddenly and curiously unified behind the British decision to appease.

Ultimately, the storyteller is responsible for the message that his story sends. And I think that Children of Earth failed, on Day Five, to deliver a message that was useful, morally coherent and worthy. Shocking and frightening us with the potential of our own brutality was step one, but it was not followed by a step two– and step two is what true maturity is about. Without step two, what we are left with is nihilism, nullity. A world in which the good are brutally cut down, where standing up is a brave but pointless act, where we exist only in our worst forms. Tragedy is not, in itself, more worthy. The human experience is complex, and to reduce it to merely our best or indeed our worst natures is reductivist, simplistic, shallow. We are not monsters, and we are not angels– but what Children of Earth seems to sidestep is that we do have free will. The ability to choose our own future, to change and learn and grow. Ignoring this is not brave or intellectually superior or realistic; the quality and political astuteness of Children of Earth therefore demands more than this easy conclusion.

But, the very fact that it generates these questions and prompts this debate is, I think, in of itself a triumph. It’s why Children of Earth will probably be the best five hours of television you have seen recently, if you give it a chance, despite my gripes. It has all the elements of greatness: tight pacing and writing (especially with the political segments), some impressive ensemble performances, shining moments of humour, and an involving, absorbing emotional journey. It aimed high, and achieved an epic scale within five episodes that dealt with topical political, social and moral issues head-on. And though I wanted more from it, I have no doubt that we will remember it as a classic, a gamechanger that opened doors for years to come because it demonstrated with style that people will watch questioning, brazen, ambitious and difficult mainstream prime-time drama. And with any luck, they’ll buy the DVD after, too.

And similarly, here’s one for Dreamwidth users.

It’s the character of Milo that the article focuses on– Milo’s one of the possibilities Microsoft puts forward as a use for its Project Natal motion recognition system– and the article mentions that “we” the players are Milo’s imaginary friends in his world. Other artificial people ask Milo who he is talking to, ‘Oh, no-one’, we cannot be seen by the others. In a little postmodern twist, we’re the ghosts in his (simulated) world. That reminded me of going to see Punchdrunk’s glorious Masque of the Red Death. It was part theatre show, part game. An evening of interactive entertainment. Punchdrunk converted a house in Battersea into a sprawling set, send audience members in groups of about fifty or more, wearing masks and cloaks provided by the show. We moved alongside and amongst the actors as the action led us through the house, through different locations. Some important scenes were repeated. What you saw depended on what you were, and the path you chose to take through the dilapidated, eerie mansion. Follow one actor through his different connected interactions, sit in the bar and watch the live show. Nip round to the dressing rooms to watch the performers play actors that were appearing in the live event. Wait by locked doors and perhaps be grabbed by a guard or a passing character into a private room to witness a secret exchange, a small personal story within the whole.

The clearest parallel is that: as the evening descends into chaos and madness, as the plague makes its way in amongst the partygoers, driving them mad with fever and delusion, they begin to see ‘ghosts’. Figures draped in black, wearing masks, crowding around them. We, the audience, who has been altogether ignored till that point, become implicated. We are their paranoid imaginings. We are the ghosts that they see out of the corner of their eyes, the unreal imaginings in their (fictional) world.

It was remarkably unsettling and exciting, but I left wanting even more than they’d provided. I wanted a completely personalised theatre, an interactive theatre, an agency that wasn’t simply ghostly but real and affecting. In short, I wanted it to be a game. A game of me, a game for me, and others too. To take the best of the RPG experience and meld it with all the depth and fullness of theatre, of television, of a movie. To mesh these media and remove the flaws of each one.

Television even at its most immersive excludes you. The characters can affect you, change your life, become as familar as your friends but you are never quite part of their world. (To naysayers: we exercise exactly the same qualities when we sympathise/empathise with fictional characters as we do with real people. Adam Smith points this out as early as the mid 18th-century, and makes a case for the moral worth of fiction to boot. But of course, that was then: he believed books were of worth because they would teach us, exercise us in moral sensibility so that we could be better citizens in the real world and to real people. Now we can ask: if we feel pain or understanding or happiness in the success of someone else, does it really matter if they’re fictional or real? Is the quality of our feeling different, or is it simply that it’s easier and perhaps more tasteful to draw a distinction between them?) But television has a huge advantage over games, at least as they are now. While there are some partial exceptions, the characters and plots in games are never quite so richly realised, so subtle, so affecting as they can be in a TV show. You can argue that GTAIV is a deep experience and Niko Bellic’s adventures a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America, but The Wire it is not.

The advantage of games is the agency. We are in control. Our actions affect the storyline to a greater or lesser degree. The element of choice is something that has becoming a hot talking point in lots of recent games. The vast canvas of Fable II or Fallout 3, the creative possibility and user-generated gameplay of LittleBigPlanet or Spore. Let’s use Fable II as an example simply because I have played it: one of its big sells is the customisability of the player-character in terms of clothing, hairstyle, appearance, behaviour, relationships and morality. Your ‘moral choices’ (however limited they are, let’s not get into Peter Molyneux’s moral philosophy and just be grateful that at least the choices weren’t orphanage-starting sainthood or becoming an evil little-girl murdering psychopath) actually do shape the world of Albion around you. Your actions feed into the game. When it works. There’s a lot of extraneous choice here, things that don’t matter to the plot or that they try to tie in unsatisfactorily. Ocassionally, you have to seduce someone for mission-purposes, but really, the ’seduce someone’ option is there so that you the Player-Character can go off and seduce a random townsperson if you feel like it today. The game is playable as a mission-focused plot-oriented linear game, or you can just float around, do the occasional job, become a rich landlord and amass a harem of doting and demanding men and women.

This kind of ‘double-design’ is becoming increasingly common. Games that function as traditional games but also as life-simulators, with more in common to The Sims or Second Life. The Sims is thought of as a game (even though, arguably, it’s not in any traditional sense of the word) but Second Life thoroughly exemplifies the difficulty of the term. Is it a game? There’s no fixed purpose, challenge or top-down achievement system. It’s not quite life. It’s something in between, a simulation that draws on many of the same pleasures of gaming, and of course, that big one that is so often left unspoken: the pleasure of pretend. However embarassing it may be to admit (for some of us anyway) our XBox 360s and PS2s and Nintendo DSs are just higher-tech, more structured, more adult versions of playing house as a kid. Of playground games and tag and hide-and-seek. Of playing dress-up when mum and dad were out.

The larger but salient issue is: what is the distinction between a game and art? A game and a story? Tangentially: I’ve particularly been wrestling with this because of Unreal City. What should it really be called? It doesn’t fit into the wavering category of an ARG. It’s not exactly a game, there are no puzzles as such, but it does have choices and branching narrative options. It rewards exploration, not with Achievements or player upgrades but with more content. It’s interactive in the sense that the player-audience picks their way through the narrative and becomes implicated in the game, but apart from the choices there’s no gameplay element. It’s closer to a choose-your-own adventure story. For that matter, is a choose your own adventure story a game or a novel? My very thoughtful and considered opinion on the matter is that the distinctions are largely rubbish. Content is the issue. With the right content, there doesn’t need to be a distinction between game and art, there’s no reason that you can’t make a Mad Men: the Console Game (in terms of quality, character & depth I mean). They’re all fiction, they’re all fundamentally about pretending, about the pleasure of play.

Watching a film or a movie implicates us. The best film and television sticks with us even after the screen is turned off. Simply through the cognitive act of watching we create a mirror-world in our heads, filling out the lacunae, the gaps between the cuts, providing information that might be implied but isn’t definitively shown just to weave together a coherent three-dimensional narrative from the 2-dimensional images. (Aside: we’re getting better and better at this as we grow more familiar with the medium. The length of shots has declined, modern TV shifts in time and space with fewer & fewer aiding clues. This isn’t just because ‘we’re the attention-deficit MTV generation’, it’s also because our brains are so much more attuned to the techniques of the medium. Our media-literacy is phenomenal. We know the meaning of a series of jump cuts, we can make connections and fill-in-the-blanks with less and less information. We don’t need the images to portray everything, merely to imply it.) So we’re creating more and more out of less and less, there’s more of us involved in watching something than there has ever been. To call this a passive process, then, is a grand and outdated joke.

So with games edging into the arena of moral choice, of life and living, and television in the 21st century grasping at ways to extend its tendrils into every aspect of our lives– into our twitter streams, our internet browsers, our emails, our mobile phones, our IPods and radio shows– it seems obvious that the two are going to collide at some point soon. I think that collision point is going to be: you. The audience, the player, the viewer, the character. The immersiveness and involvement of television combined with the player-agency and self-simulation of the game. I think it’s only a matter of time before that distinction between game/television show and life, between audience and player, between player and character is elided. We’re going to be playing ourselves, the ultimate immersive experience.

If you think this sounds farfetched or a bit too geeky, a bit too LARPer for your taste then just look around you.

We can, and do, include in our own senses of identity our online handles and avatars, our Second Life personas and RPG characters. This isn’t exactly strange or revolutionary. William Gibson predicted this, Caprica encompasses it and every day when our online lives and real lives intersect we balance our multiplicity of identities and integrate them into the whole. If you let aside the distinction between online and real, then this is the same process we engage in all the time: like actors, we all play multiple roles in everyday life, without even thinking about it. Human identity, or to be less inflammatory, human self-presentation of identiy, can be thought of as a series of masks; does it matter that some of them are made of flesh and bone, and the others constructed entirely of digital materials? Once we accept that quite a lot of what we consider to be inherent and essential is actually self-constructed, why shouldn’t we embrace the fictional as well as the ‘real’? The distinction is elusive, and already elided.

We rewrite ourselves every day, and that’s the power that games have– not to generate this freedom but to highlight it. To show us that it was always there, we always had this ability. Games can teach us to play reality, remind us of the agency we have have even forgotten we have.

So, here’s my grandiose prediction for the day. The real next frontier of artificial gaming isn’t going to be artificial people. It’s going to be structuring and channeling something we already do, every day.

It’ll be playing a game of you.

The webisodes are presented as marketing/promos for a reality TV series called ‘Edge Of Never’– which is a reality TV series within Virtuality. It follows the lives of the crewmembers of on the Phaeton, on their ten-year mission to save the planet. While– from the information I’ve seen– Virtuality incorporates reality-tv style footage, I’m fairly sure that it also features a more traditionally mediated perspective. It isn’t just the characters seen through a reality TV lens, though that’s one of the narrative tools they use.

I think they’re a brilliant use of the concept. They are marketing cunningly disguised as (fictional) marketing. This allows them to play with genre, introduce the premise of the show and its characters plausibly (and with drama! and over-the-top exposition!– just like reality TV shows do) and delve into this high-concept, high-stakes scifi world with a dose of humour and humanity. Using the fictional reality series conceit also gets them around having to reveal any actual spoilers for the show, but at the same time providing us with some high-quality and interesting canonical material.