by Barry Joseph, 25th May 2001

Last week, waking in a dreamy haze, I refused to answer a 4 a.m. series of phone calls. Afterwards, unable to sleep, my thoughts revolved around the absurd possibility which entered both my mind and that of my fiance beside me: "Was that the game?"

The game has become an entity in my life, an entity who sends me emails, who hacks web sites, who phones my loved ones. My best friend received a call at work, on his cell phone, as he was preparing to head home for the day. After addressing him by name, the computer voice warned: "They found out about Jeanine! Get out of the building... fast!"

Perhaps "game" is misleading. Clearly, it must be considered a promotion, as it's designed to advertise the upcoming Spielberg film about artificial intelligence. But for a generation brought up on role playing games and computer adventures, the line between a game and a story has been blurred beyond recognition and, in the case of this one, its telling is beyond anything previously encountered.

The narrative to date describes a speculative future in which intelligent programs inhabit both man and machines while a murder mystery unfolds at the center. But how the story is told, or, more accurately, discovered, reveals a deeper layer of meaning. With this tale, how it is told is as important, if not more important, than the nature of the tale.

When I informed my fiancé about the urgent call received by my friend, telling her, "We're getting calls now!", she asked me, "Who is 'We'?" As it turns out, "we" refers to the thousands of game players who are working together on the net - through bulletin boards, fan sites, chat rooms, and email - to solve the puzzles and unearth the tale. As the game itself became personified into an active agent in our lives, we morphed into a collective mind, armed to do battle like some Japanese Transformer doll.

It all began when the second trailer for the film A.I. revealed an odd credit, for a woman named Jeanine Salla. A web search revealed a personal site for this woman, who lives dozens of years in the future, which led us to dozens of other fake sites, all situated in the same timeframe, each one created from the perspective of the characters or organization that created the site - a dream clinic, a girl's homepage, a university, a government organization - and each changing in real time, a week here equaling a week there.

The storytelling is a natural fit for our emerging culture of pervasive computing, a gadget in every palm. This is postmodern storytelling at its best. The technique of characterization developed through diverse site designs has never been taken to this level - as Oliver Stone uses contrasting camera stock and styles to tell his tales - and the writing behind the various voices is surprisingly effective and, at times, quite moving. But not all of the writing is on the web - there are emails, phone messages, and even hacked code. There is no linear story to read from left to right. These scattered memories of the future, the cultural detritus of a technology age, coalesce into a cohesive whole.

And unlike a traditional epic, with a reliable narrator and a clear line between heroes and villains, the game offers nothing solid beyond the facts of the murder. But even some call that event into question. And absent the authors' signature, the authenticity of anything, and anyone, can be called into question. Many a player has been accused of being a plant, and the minds behind the game certainly encourage the in-fighting, occasionally linking a fan's site within the game or naming a character after a player. We know they are watching us. So while we are observing the game, the game is observing us. And some day, it seems to suggest, it may be more than just a game.

But to piece together the tale, puzzles must be solved. Take one puzzle for example: recently teams meeting in three cities (yes, actual offline meetings, organized by the invisible people behind the game) spent late hours one Sunday night constructing three separate jigsaw puzzles, which, once completed, mapped a location suggested by a series of missing pieces, locations which, when read as binary numbers, could be converted to hexadecimal, which were the perfect key when plugged into a recent web discovery, a web site which was revealed after... well, I think you get the idea. I am amazed by anyone who can unravel these clues, let alone understand how they did it.

What I can understand is what it took to achieve this spectacular mental feats, for I'm less interested in the details of the game than in the gameplay itself; the unfolding of the answers IS the narrative that has me hooked, albeit a meta-narrative. Simultaneous groups of strangers in three cities (L.A., Chicago and NYC) had to work as autonomous yet coordinated teams, first across localities, then across the net, to solve the puzzle. Cell phones, digital cameras, wireless internet connections and, most importantly, the ability to pull the resources of thousands, across numerous time-zones, were all required to solve the puzzle and allow "us" to move on to the next piece of the story.

With this game, the medium is indeed the message. Telecommunication is pervasive and, one day, will be incorporated into sentient beings and, perhaps, might become sentient itself. As such, these communication tools not only enhances who we are, acting as extensions to our senses (as the keyboard I use to type these words uses technology to extend my voice), but they may also define who we are as well, shaping us into something new.

So what precisely is being defined, as revealed through the gameplay? On one hand, we have the image of humans living in fear of technology's ubiquitous eye, as I experienced through my fear of that phone call and represented, within the story itself, by militant anti-robot bigots (a cross between Luddites and the Michigan Militia). On the other hand, we are offered the potential of telecom technology freeing us from the oppressive confines of modernity while encouraging a cooperative behavior that takes advantage of the powers of a group mind.

What position the final tale will take is anyone's guess. One participant has speculated that the story will conclude in a direction shaped by the players themselves. Perhaps that is how it will be for us all in the end. As it turns out, the call to my friend was a prank - brilliantly set-up by his jealous girlfriend - and I'll never know about that 4am call. But one thing is for sure: sometimes a phone call is just a phone call... and sometimes it is a warning from the future.

Barry Joseph is the Human Rights and Internet Specialist at Global Kids, a NYC-based educational organization. He can be reached at bjoseph@globalkids.org.