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This Might Be a Game:

Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by

Jane Evelyn McGonigal

B.A. (Fordham University) 1999

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Performance Studies

and the Designated Emphasis in

Film Studies

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor William B. Worthen, Co-chair

Professor Gregory Niemeyer, Co-chair

Professor Ken Goldberg

Professor Peter Glazer

Fall 2006

This Might Be a Game:

Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

© 2006

by

Jane Evelyn McGonigal

1

Abstract

This Might Be a Game:

Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by

Jane Evelyn McGonigal

Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor William B. Worthen, Co-Chair

Professor Gregory Niemeyer, Co-Chair

This Might Be a Game

examines the historical intersection of ubiquitous computing and experimental game design, circa 2001 AD. Ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, is the emerging field of computer science that seeks to augment everyday objects and physical environments with invisible and networked computing functionality. Experimental game design is the field of interactive arts that seeks to discover new platforms and contexts for digital play. The convergence of these two fields has produced a significant body of games that challenge and expand our notions of where, when, and with whom we can play. This dissertation explores how and to what ends these playful projects reconfigure the technical, formal and social limits of games in relation to everyday life. To mark the heterogeneity of this experimental design space at the turn of the twenty- first century, I propose three distinct categories of ubiquitous play and performance. They are: ubicomp games, research prototypes that advance the scientific agenda of ubiquitous computing through game design; pervasive games, performance-based interventions that use game imagery to disrupt the normative conventions of public spaces and private 2 technologies; and ubiquitous games, commercial entertainment projects that replicate the interactive affordances of video and computer games in the real world. I examine seminal games from each of these three categories, including Can You See Me Now? (Blast Theory/Mixed Reality Lab, 2001); the Big Urban Game (The Design Institute, 2003); and The Beast (Microsoft, 2001) respectively. My discussion draws on original gameplay media, design statements, and first-person player accounts. My critical framework is based on close readings of the play and performance values expressed in the founding ubicomp manifestos of Rich Gold and Mark Weiser. I conclude by outlining a course for the future study of these categories that is based in the pre-digital games theory of Johann Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Brian Sutton-Smith. I argue that as the perceived opportunities for digitally networked play become increasingly ubiquitous, game designers and researchers must attend more carefully to the insights of philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists who historically have explored play as an embodied, social and highly consequential ritual, always already grounded in the practices of everyday life. i I dedicate this dissertation to the ubiquitous gamers. Through their collective and playful performances, they have embodied and embraced a more intimate relationship between gameplay and everyday life. ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ......................................................................................... i

List of Figures .................................................................................... v

Acknowledgments ............................................................................... ix

1 Introduction: A Ubiquitous Computing Approach to Play and Performance ... 1

1.1 "This is Not" a(s) Design Philosophy .............................................. 1

1.2 The Technological Performance and Dark Play of Ubiquitous Computing ... 8

1.3 Relationships and Rhizomes in the Ubicomp Network ................................. 16

1.4 The Social Structures of Ubiquitous Computing ................................... 19

1.5 A Theory of Transitional Play and Ubicomp Objects ........................... 29

1.6 Ubicomp Research Culture: The Player and Performer in Residence ......... 35

1.7 The Defining Characteristics of Ubiquitous Gaming ............................. 42

2 Three Kinds of Everywhere: The Multiple Genres of Ubiquitous Play and

Performance .................................................................................. 46

2.1 Contentious Terms and Consequential Language .................................. 46

2.2 Colonization through Gameplay ..................................................... 55

2.3 Disruption through Gameplay ....................................................... 60

2.4 Activation through Gameplay ....................................................... 67

2.5 A Map to Three Kinds of Everywhere ............................................. 85

3 Colonizing Play: Citations Everywhere, or, The Ubicomp Games ................. 87

3.1 Is Ubiquitous Computing There Yet? .............................................. 87

3.2 Ubicomp Games as Research and Rhetoric - Academic Projects .............. 93

Smart Playing Cards .............................................................. 93 CatchBob! .......................................................................... 97 Seamful Games .................................................................... 101

3.3 Ubicomp Games as Research and Rhetoric - Industry Projects ................ 103

Pirates! ..............................................................................104 The Drop ........................................................................... 106

3.4 The Conspicuous Absence of Gameplay .......................................... 112

3.5 Ubicomp Hypotheses and the Experimental Game .............................. 114

3.6 Making Invisible Computing Visible .............................................. 120

3.7 The Play Values of Ubicomp Games .............................................. 127

The Invisible Train ............................................................... 129

Can You See Me Now? .............................................................................. 139

3.8 The Critical Function of Ubicomp Games ........................................ 147

The SpyGame ..................................................................... 147 You're In (Urine) Control ....................................................... 157 iii

4 Disruptive Play: Spectacle Everywhere, or, The Pervasive Games ............... 165

4.1 Urban Computing and Situationist Play ........................................... 165

4.2 'A Surreal Spectacle': The Big Urban Game ..................................... 174

4.3 'What the ****?': The Mp3 Experiment 2.0 ...................................... 208

4.4 'Can I Play Too?': PacManhattan ................................................. 224

4.5 'This is Not a Sinister Game': The Super Mario Blocks ........................ 238

5 Activating Play: Affordances Everywhere, or, The Ubiquitous

Games - Part I ............................................................................. 247

5.1 The Structure of a Computer Science Revolution ................................ 247

5.2 A Virtual Paradigm Shift ............................................................ 254

5.3 The Originary Pattern of Ubiquitous Play in The Beast ........................ 264

5.4 Real Ruins and the Ludic Impulse .................................................. 270

5.5 Affordance Hunting as Core Mechanic ........................................... 283

5.6 The New Realism: Phenomenological Identity .................................. 295

5.7 Desired Affordances and the Affordance of Desire: I Love Bees .............. 299

6 Dangerous Mimesis: Simulation and Dissimulation in Alternate Reality

Games ....................................................................................... 313

6.1 The Persistence of Gameplay Vision .............................................. 313

6.2 A Brief History of the Credulous Spectator ....................................... 322

6.3 "You Never Really Know When You're Playing" ............................... 323

6.4 The Problem of Accidental Players ................................................ 326

6.5 Suturing the Illusion .................................................................. 331

6.6 Player Speculation about "This is Not a Game" (TINAG) ...................... 341

6.7 The Design Philosophy and Historical Origins of TINAG ...................... 351

6.8 Make-Believe Play and Realistic Performance .................................... 358

6.9 Open Source Play: Turning Real Life into a Real Little Game ................. 363

7 Power and Superpowers: The Ubiquitous Games - Part II ......................... 372

7.1 A Comparative Introduction to Reality-Based Superhero Games ............. 372

7.2 The Secret Ludic Life of Everyday Environments: The Go Game ............ 377

7.3 Promiscuous Activation as Design Principle and Core Mechanic ............. 382

7.4 Reality Testing and Reverse Transitional Play .................................... 399

7.5 Hard-Coded Interaction: SFZero ................................................... 404

7.6 Forbidden Play in Reality-Based Superhero Games ............................. 414

7.7 The Puppet Master Problem ......................................................... 419

8 The Collective Play Values of Ubiquitous Games ...................................... 434

8.1 The Community Dialectic ............................................................ 434

8.2 The Rhetoric and Design of Massively Collaborative Play ..................... 443

8.3 The Socio-Technological Metaphors of Ubiquitous Games ..................... 453

8.4 The Virtual Problematic of Ubiquitous Games ........................................... 468

9 Conclusions: Specifying Play ............................................................... 475

9.1 The Construction of a Ubiquitous Game Studies ................................. 475

iv

9.2 On the Limits of Play and Seriousness: Homo Ludens ........................... 485

9.3 On the Limits of Safe and Dangerous Play: Man, Play and Games ............ 494

9.4 On the Limits of Play and Real-Life Behaviors: The Structural Elements

of Games ............................................................................ 501

9.5 The Future Limits of Ubiquitous Play and Performance ........................ 507

Bibliography ...................................................................................... 516

v

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Reproduction of The Treachery of Images. Rich Gold, 1993. 2 Figure 1.2 "Introduction: Rhizome." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 17 1987.
Figure 1.3 "Phenomenological Post-Modernism Explained and Related to 18 Computer Science, in Cartoons." Mark Weiser, 1996. Figure 2.1 Screenshot from Tass Times in Tonetown. Activision, 1986. 77 Figure 2.2 Screenshot from Grim Fandango. Lucas Arts, 1998. 78 Figure 3.1 Smart Playing Cards. Distributed Systems Group, 2005. 94 Figure 3.2 Screenshot from CatchBob! CRAFT - Swiss Federal Institute of 99

Technology, 2006.

Figure 3.3 Screenshot from Treasure. Seamful Games, 2005. 102 Figure 3.4 Live Treasure Playtest. Seamful Games, 2005. 102 Figure 3.5 Screenshot from Pirates! Nokia Research 2001. 104 Figure 3.6 Mock-up of Mobile Interface for The Drop. Intel Research, 2005. 107 Figure 3.7 Logo for the Infrastructures for Smart Cooperative Objects 126 Research Initiative. Distributed Systems Group, 2005. Figure 3.8 Gameplay Demonstration of The Invisible Train. 130

The Handheld Augmented Reality Project, 2004.

Figure 3.9 The Invisible Train Playtest. The Handheld Augmented Reality 131

Project, 2004.

Figure 3.10 Close-up of The Invisible Train Playtest. The Handheld 135

Augmented Reality Project, 2004.

Figure 3.11 Can You See Me Now? Playtest. Blast Theory, 2003. 141 Figure 3.12 Screenshot from Can You See Me Now? Blast Theory, 2003. 141 Figure 3.13 Player "Sighting" Photo from a Sheffield playtest of Can You 144

See Me Now? Blast Theory, 2001.

vi Figure 3.14 You're In Control (Urine Control) Game Installation. MIT Media 158

Lab, 2003.

Figure 3.15 Screenshot from You're In Control (Urine Control). MIT Media 158

Lab 2003.

Figure 4.1 A Race in the Big Urban Game. The Design Institute, 2003. 176 Figure 4.2 Dice Rolling in Big Urban Game. The Design Institute, 2003. 176 Figure 4.4 Playing The Mp3 Experiment 2.0. Improv Everywhere, 2005. 210 Figure 4.5 Saluting The Mp3 Experiment 2.0. Improv Everywhere, 2005. 211 Figure 4.6 The PacManhattan Map. Interactive Telecommunications 225

Program, 2004.

Figure 4.7 Video Game Iconography in Urban Environments. Interactive 225

Telecommunications Program, 2004.

Figure 4.8 PacManhattan Street Players, Pac-Man. Interactive 226

Telecommunications Program, 2004.

Figure 4.9 PacManhattan Street Players, the Ghost. Interactive 226

Telecommunications Program, 2004.

Figure 4.10 Screenshot of the PacManhattan Custom Game Application. 227

Interactive Telecommunications Program, 2004.

Figure 4.11 Screenshot from PacManhattan's Online Store. Café Press, 232 2004.
Figure 4.12 A Super Mario Blocks Installation in Hoogeloon, the Netherlands. 239

Qwantz.com, 2006.

Figure 4.13 A Super Mario Blocks Installation in Ravenna, Ohio. Quantz.com, 240 2006.
Figure 5.1 "Virtual Reality vs. Ubiquitous Computing." Mark Weiser, 1996. 252 Figure 5.2 Screenshot from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. DreamWorks, 2001. 270 Figure 5.3 The Secret Affordance of "Summer 2001." Warner Brothers, 2001. 284 vii Figure 5.4 The Beast: Credit for Jeanine Salla, Sentient Machine Therapist. 289

Warner Brothers, 2001.

Figure 5.5 The Beast: Jeanine Salla's Home Page. Microsoft, 2001. 291 Figure 5.5 I Love Bees GPS Coordinates. 42 Entertainment, 2004. 301 Figure 5.5 I Love Bees Payphone Gathering. Unfiction, 2004. 302 Figure 5.7 I Love Bees Role Playing Mission. 42 Entertainment, 2004. 302 Figure 5.8 I Love Bees Payphone Challenge. 42 Entertainment, 2004. 302 Figure 6.1 Screenshots of the A.I. Artificial Intelligence TV Trailer. 316

Warner Brothers, 2001.

Figure 6.2 The Beast: The Brutus Collage. Microsoft, 2001. 348 Figure 6.3 I Love Bees: Flea++ Translation. Unfiction, 2004. 367 Figure 7.1 The Go Game Superhero Supplies. Wink Back, Inc., 2004. 381 Figure 7.2 The Go Game: "Fill the Frame." Wink Back, Inc., 2003. 383 Figure 7.3 The Go Game: "Face First." Wink Back, Inc., 2003. 385 Figure 7.4 The Go Game: "Go Underground." Wink Back, Inc., 2003. 387 Figure 7.5 The Go Game: "Trust is Everything." Wink Back, Inc., 2002. 389 Figure 7.6 The Go Game: "Before and After." Wink Back, Inc., 2002. 390 Figure 7.7 The Go Game: "Aah the Transformation." Wink Back, Inc., 2002. 390 Figure 7.8 The Go Game: "Dare Ya." Wink Back, Inc., 2004. 391 Figure 7.9 "You Just Played The Go Game." Wink Back, Inc., 2006. 396 Figure 7.10 The Go Game: "Special Project." Wink Back, Inc., 2006. 396 Figure 7.11 The Go Game: "Seek Spiritual Guidance" Wink Back, Inc, 2003. 398 Figure 7.12 SFZero: "Information Insertion" Before. PLAYTIME, 2006. 409 Figure 7.13 SFZero: "Information Insertion" After. PLAYTIME, 2006. 409 viii Figure 7.14 SFZero: Map Insertion. PLAYTIME, 2006. 410 Figure 7.15 SFZero: Low-Tech Data Flows. PLAYTIME, 2006. 410 Figure 7.16 SFZero: "Physical Representation of a Virtual Occurrence." 412

PLAYTIME, 2006.

Figure 7.17 SFZero: "The City as Supermarket." PLAYTIME, 2006. 413 ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the exceptionally valuable guidance and support I have received from my co-chairs, Professor William B. Worthen and Professor Gregory Niemeyer. They have broadened and deepened my understanding of performance and play immeasurably, while helping me develop the critical perspective necessary to balance my games research with my game design practice. This dissertation also has benefited enormously from the critical review of committee members Professor Ken Goldberg and Professor Peter Glazer, who have informed greatly my understanding of where art practice meets research, while helping me to clarify the technological, social and political stakes of this project. I want to thank the innovative game designers and developers who invited me to be a part of the playful experiments that inspired this dissertation. In the fall of 2001, Ian Fraser and Finnegan Kelly at The Go Game (Wink Back, Inc.) gave me my first opportunity to participate in experimental game design. Since the summer of 2004, my colleagues at 42 Entertainment have given me a home to continue exploring and inventing new platforms and contexts for gameplay. I especially am grateful to Elan Lee and Sean Stewart, who supported this research project even before there was a 42

Entertainment.

Some ongoing design and research dialogues over the past few years have also been quite important to this dissertation's development. I especially want to acknowledge Ken Anderson, Eric Paulos, and Joseph McCarthy, all of whom I first had the pleasure of meeting through Intel Research workshops and colloquia. My conversations with each x have expanded, tremendously, my understanding of the relationship between technological innovation and play. Looking back over the course of this dissertation's development, two particular moments stand out as having led, quite unexpectedly but fortuitously, to its final shape and subject matter. In the spring of 2002, Professor Mark Sandberg organized the most enriching seminar I have had the pleasure of participating in, and guided me in developing my first digital games paper: a study of The Beast (Microsoft, 2001) as interactive back story. Through Professor Sandberg's support and interest in that seminar paper, I came to realize that I had something important to say about games. Without his early attention to this project, this dissertation would not exist. And in the fall of 2003, Professor Gregory Niemeyer invited me to collaborate on a playful installation at the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Without this opportunity and my subsequent exposure to the field of ubicomp research, I never could have conceived of this project in its current form. I am most grateful to Professor Niemeyer for trusting me as an artistic collaborator, and for being the first person to introduce me to a field of research that has changed the way I think about how and why we interact with computer systems. I thank everyone who read, supported, and commented on my "Best Sentence of the Day" dissertation blog. Having a live audience for the writing process was a great motivation for me. I especially thank fellow games researcher and game designer Ian Bogost, whose daily support and critical feedback online gave me the momentum to keep writing. xi Finally, a few important personal acknowledgements: I want to thank my twin sister, Kelly McGonigal, who was born six minutes before me, but who finished her Ph.D. two years before I did. Her success was an inspiration to this dissertation, and her insights were essential to its completion. I thank my parents, Judith and Kevin McGonigal, for their love and support, and for sharing their intellectual curiosity with me. I thank my husband Kiyash Monsef, because of whom I think more clearly, play more often and live more fully. 1

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: A Ubiquitous Computing Approach to Play and Performance We live in a complex world, filled with myriad objects, tools, toys, and people. Our lives are spent in diverse interaction with this environment. Yet, for the most part, our computing takes place sitting in front of, and staring at, a single glowing screen attached to an array of buttons and a mouse. From the isolation of our workstations we try to interact with our surrounding environment, but the two worlds have little in common. How can we escape from the computer screen and bring these two worlds together? - Pierre Wellner, Wendy MacKay, Rich Gold, "Computer Augmented Environments: Back to the Real World" (24)

1.1 "This is Not" a(s) Design Philosophy

In 1993, digital artist and technologist Rich Gold published a short essay on what was then the brand-new field of ubiquitous computing, the invisible integration of networked computer functionality into everyday objects and physical environments. Gold, a founding member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) team that first coined the term, argued that ubiquitous computing was more than a new technological practice. 1 It was, he wrote, a novel worldview, one that would invert the operational metaphor of the digital age. To capture the reigning worldview he predicted ubiquitous computing would overturn, Gold titled his thought-piece "This is Not a Pipe." This title is meant to invoke French surrealist René Magritte's famous painting of a pipe (The Treachery of Images, 1929), which is captioned with the same disavowal. A small black-and-white reproduction of 1 Xerox was the official corporate sponsor of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) when the ubiquitous

computing project was first conceived in 1991. On January 4, 2002, PARC incorporated as an independent

company, dropping Xerox from its name. However, as a historical matter, it was the Xerox PARC team that

launched ubiquitous computing, which is why I have opted to use the now anachronistic name when writing about the early era of the ubicomp project. 2

3.1 Reproduction of The Treachery of Images. This black-and-white reproduction of René Magritte's

painting appears at the top of Gold's essay "This Is Not a Pipe". (Gold, 1993) Magritte's painting appears at the top of Gold's essay (see figure 1.1). This electronically reproduced image is a performative reference, which Gold makes to draw our attention to the ubiquity of visual reproduction in contemporary computing culture. Gold observes: "The twin inventions of photography and electricity shattered objects into new and novel pieces. The camera could skin an object and then reproduce the pelt over and over, collaging it into nearly any context" (72). As a demonstration of the profusion of electronically mimetic images, Gold digitally skins Magritte's oil painting and reproduces it in a rather unexpected context: the computing research magazine The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (72). For Gold, this kind of promiscuous visibility - semblances allow themselves to be reproduced by anyone, anywhere, anytime - is the defining wonder of what he calls the "postmodern" computing age (72). It is "the skin," as he puts it, that current technology desires. And as a result of this desire, resemblances - digitally-enabled images of real referents - blanket the world. For Gold, it is ubiquitous imaging, we might say, that precedes the coming age of ubiquitous computing. 3 What is ultimately being made pervasive via this process of endlessly replicated and recontexualized skins? Gold reminds us that it is not just the images themselves, but also the notion of their referents. He observes how effectively, on a cognitive level, skins stand in for the animal itself: "Our [brain's] pattern-matching mechanisms seem to make only a lazy distinction between the symbol and the symbolized" (72). In other words, mimetic semblances are excellent conductors of cognitive concepts. We know what the skins mean, or at least what they mean to call to mind. And if we are not inclined to make a more emphatic distinction, Gold suggests, our brains may well process the idea suggested by the image exactly as it would process an unmediated experience of its referent. The age of ubiquitous imaging, then, is a period of prolific and powerful semantic replication. 2 The ability to trigger successful recognition, however, does not mean that the skinned object is rendered in all of its phenomenological fullness. Gold writes: "As Magritte so surreally points out, the image of an object is not the same as its Real McCoy, 3D Cousin. While the painting of a pipe might produce a pattern on our retina similar to a real pipe,quotesdbs_dbs28.pdfusesText_34

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