A recent article on Offworld claiming that Artificial People are the New Games got me thinking slightly tangentially about the kinds of claims it was making.

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.