Well folks... fiction and fact.... as if Spielberg hadn't really spent enough time dealing with slavery in German and American culture (Amistad, Schindler's List)... his new movie is like an update of Crichton's "WestWorld" for teenyboppers. Don't expect anything near as cool as "ClockWork Orange" or "Barry Lyndon," but this article and the cloudmakers.org scene point out a new trend that this summer seems to really have put into sharp crystal clear the perspective that in toyland, and video game land if you're broken, obsolete, or in need of inspection, or heck, if you're distributed networks are a little too reliant on the bio-matter scene - then this stuff is for you.... Norbert Weiner's 'human use of human beings' essay looks a little too prescient for this flick... but the game is funny.
Oh Kubrick! American Movie culture so desperately needs something, anything to make our entertainments better....
July 9, 2001
Some Prefer Online Tie-In to the Movie
By DAVID F. GALLAGHER
Many a moviegoer has had the experience of seeing a preview that turned out to be more entertaining than the film it was meant to promote. Now some players of an ambitious Internet game that is part of the marketing push for the film "A.I." say it is a more absorbing experience than watching the much-anticipated movie.
"The game is great. The movie is garbage," wrote Arie Rubenstein of Staten Island, discussing the latest game developments in an online chat room last week.
"The game did get a lot of people excited for the film," said another chat-room participant from New York. "Sadly, many of those people were disappointed by the reality of the film."
The online game was set up without fanfare on the Internet in March. It has been an effort by the "A.I." distributors, AOL Time Warner's Warner Brothers unit and DreamWorks SKG - assisted by Microsoft - to generate a subtle groundswell of interest in the movie among computer cognoscenti, who might be presumed to be receptive to the film's science fiction exploration of software-driven life forms. But the game's relation to the movie is only tangential. And the game's complexity allowed only a tiny sliver of the Web audience to become caught up in it, meaning its direct box-office impact was probably negligible.
"I don't know how effective it was as a wide-reaching promotional tool," said Harry Knowles, editor of the movie site AintItCoolNews.com. "I thought it was quite a bit of fun. But I know it scared a lot of people off because they felt it was just too involving." The game did receive a lot of attention from the news media, which increased awareness of the film, he said.
But game players have not exactly been evangelists for the film. In an informal online poll set up by one avid game player after the film's release, 65 respondents as of last Friday had said the game was better than the film, while nine said it was a toss- up. The poll is at groups.yahoo.com/group/ cloudmakers. Just two people had picked the film over the game.
That is hardly the word of mouth, or word of mouse, a movie marketer hopes to generate.
With "A.I." generating about $30 million at the box office in its opening weekend two weeks ago, and an estimated $14 this past weekend, the film seems on its way to being one of the summer's top-grossing movies. So the impact of the game promotion may not matter, even if it proves to have been little more than an interesting experiment.
The core of the online game - which has attracted several hundred thousand players, according to Elan Lee, a Microsoft game designer - is an elaborate sprawl of Web sites for fictitious people and companies, peppered with clues to a murder.
The action is set in a futuristic world much like that in the film, but the game has little connection to the film's plot. It incorporates devious puzzles that require familiarity with, among other things, super-Jeopardy categories, sound analysis software and the languages of southern India. To tackle these, players have organized themselves into a community that collaborates in a manner that one player half-jokingly dubbed "distributed biological processing."
The game, which is still progressing, is part novel, part scavenger hunt and part soap opera, with plot twists and character development unfolding as a Microsoft team updates game sites and reveals new ones. It seems to sprawl across cyberspace, with clues buried in HTML code, audio files and nonsensical e- mail messages.
If many game players can take or leave the movie, many also seem to appreciate the promotion's decidedly soft-sell approach.
"Whoever did this, however it was constructed, someone stood firm from the beginning," Maria Bonasia, a self-described addict of the game, wrote last month on a site for players, Cloudmakers.org. "Someone kept the commercials out of it, kept the hype down, kept us curious by not shoving answers at us."
It did take a while for the game to get noticed. In March, its creators set up several Web sites that appeared to have been transmitted from a future filled with intelligent robots and smart houses. (The addresses for these sites include familychan.org, rogueretrieval.com and denkendeneshaus-de.dk.) None of the sites directly referred to the film, although they did outline a struggle between robots and humans, which is a central theme of the movie.
The sites received few visitors until mid-April, when an attentive movie fan noticed a credit for a "sentient machine therapist" at the end of an "A.I." preview. Typing the name into a search engine led to one of the sites and the start of a trail of clues. Word was posted on AintItCoolNews.com, and the game was on.
Within days, thousands of people were following the trail and swapping information. The game's obscurity, like that of a nightclub with no sign outside, seemed only to increase its appeal. Cloudmakers.org, a site created entirely by players and named after the boat of a murdered character in the game, became the focus of the collaborative puzzle- solving effort.
Clues about the game's origins were initially hard to come by. For weeks this spring, Warner and DreamWorks coyly refused even to acknowledge that the string of mysterious game sites was a promotion for the film - although the game was by then generating a wave of attention from the news media. Only recently have the studios confirmed that the game was first proposed by some Microsoft employees, who fleshed it out with the help of a science fiction writer and input from Steven Spielberg, the movie's director and screenplay writer.
Microsoft, which has licensed the right to develop game products based on "A.I.," split the cost of the promotion with Warner Brothers. It would not disclose how much the game cost, but Mr. Lee said it was well below $1 million.
Mr. Lee, lead designer for Microsoft's concept development group and the creator of the game's puzzles, said his team had been concerned that "people would be too into the movie to even notice that the game existed."
But word spread online that this was no ordinary game. Its tentacles have even reached into players' nonvirtual lives. Some have received phone calls and faxes at numbers they entered on game sites, spoken on the phone with a person pretending to be a game character, and even attended rallies in major cities where more clues were distributed.
All along, the game's creators have been monitoring the players and using their feedback to shape the game's content. Players say that this responsiveness and the connections that have developed among players have generated an emotional involvement that the film cannot hope to match.
Mr. Stewart, a well-known science fiction author who was hired by Microsoft to do most of the writing for the game, said he had "tried as hard as possible to forget" that it was part of a marketing campaign for a film.
"Of course we want people to see the movie," he said. "Ostensibly that's what it's about. But everybody also knows that we're on to something big and really fundamental. There is an art form here, and there is a chance that it will be one of the big art forms of the next century."
Mr. Lee of Microsoft, who co-produced the game with Jordan Weisman, said his company was already working on a new game incorporating the spirit of teamwork and the complex interactivity that have been crucial to the "A.I." game's success. The game will be "tied with a Microsoft franchise," he said.
Mr. Lee's team is part of the research group for Microsoft's Xbox game console, which is scheduled for release in November and will have online game-playing capabilities.
But how to turn a game like this into a money-making venture? After all, part of the "A.I." game's appeal is its antimarketing stance and the community spirit generated by the Cloudmakers.org crew - attributes that would be hard to replicate in a more blatantly commercial product. And then there is the fact that the game is free.
Mr. Lee said there were ways other than the obvious subscription model that these games could bring in revenue. He said Microsoft was talking to other companies that might be willing to pay to make their products or sites part of the game and thinking about "what those players' attention is worth to other companies."
Still, even if there is a future market for such games, the "A.I." game's effectiveness at promoting the film is not entirely clear, some players say.
Bronwen Liggitt, the spokeswoman for the Cloudmakers.org group, said the biggest benefit for the studios was probably the amount of news media coverage the game had generated. (That coverage included an article in the Circuits section of The New York Times on May 3.) The number of actively involved players, which she estimated at only 7,000, is much too small to make a difference at the box office, she said.
But Ms. Liggitt said the innovative game had raised the film's hipness factor in advance among computer- game enthusiasts and "Internet movie geeks, like me" - an audience that might otherwise have been more skeptical about the film.
In the end, however, game players may have been too glued to their computers to spread the word, good or bad, about the movie. Ms. Liggitt said she and a group of other players had attended an advance screening of the film in New York at which film posters with hidden clues were distributed. "We went out afterward, and most of the talk was not, 'Oh, the film was cool,' " she said. "It was, `Oh, we've got to call the number we found in the poster. The movie was almost an afterthought."