SALON

Gaming

Tuesday, Aug 20, 2002 7:30 PM UTC

Coming up next: Ambushed on “Donahue”!

More dangerous than Grand Theft Auto 3 -- a defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here's what he really wanted to say.

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Coming up next: Ambushed on

On the long drive back from Secaucus, I kept thinking about all the things I should have said. I had just gotten my ass whupped on “Donahue.” Looking for comfort, I called my mother on the cell. She thought my suit looked good and my hair was combed straight. Somehow, it didn’t help.

I am the director of MIT’s new comparative media studies program. I’ve been writing about video games for more than a decade, have testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and the Federal Communications Commission, have conducted workshops with game designers, spoken to PTA meetings and the American Library Association, and been interviewed by more reporters than I can count. I agreed to appear on “Donahue” to talk about games because I knew I should have owned the issue. But I blew it.

The first thing I told my wife after I got off the phone from my first conversation with the “Donahue” producers was that I was flying to New York to get beaten up on national television. She asked if she should have my head examined.

But the producers were so, so reassuring. They wanted to have an intelligent discussion, to avoid sensationalism, to give me a chance to make my arguments. They would have some representatives of the games industry and someone from one of the media reform groups. One producer almost convinced me that “Donahue” was a serious news discussion program.

I really wanted to believe. I remember Phil Donahue publicizing the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace long before Anita Hill; I remember his program as one of the first to allow gays, lesbians and bisexuals to talk openly about discrimination. I recalled how he quit the talk-show business in disgust and how they lured him back with the promise that he could be a progressive alternative to O’Reilly. There were signs all over the Boston subway telling us “Donahue’s Back. Be Thinkful.”

That ungrammatical slogan should have been the first clue that something was wrong with the new “Donahue.” But I had also watched the opening episode: Phil was trying so hard to escape the “wimp” label that he was practically frothing at the mouth. “Donahue” was mimicking the style of right-wing talk television as if that style didn’t carry its own insidious political messages. Marlo Thomas’ hubby had been lured to the dark side of the Force.

So, yeah, I should have known better. I did know better, sorta. I did it anyway. And after the fact, the only person I could kick was myself. I was ambushed, and forgot how to fight back.

I knew what the activists opposed to gaming violence would say — that computer games are too violent and are bad for young people. I was ready to tear them apart on the evidence. Despite all of the publicity about school shootings, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is currently at a 30-year low. When researchers interview people serving time for violent crimes, they find that they typically consume less media than the general population, not more. A 2001 surgeon general’s report concluded that the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered around the quality of the child’s home life and their mental stability, not their media exposure.

The field of “media effects” research includes around 300 studies of media violence. But most of those studies are inconclusive. Many have been criticized on methodological grounds, particularly because they attempt to strip complex cultural phenomena down to simple variables that can be tested in the laboratory. Most found a correlation, not a causal relationship, which means they could simply be demonstrating that aggressive people like aggressive entertainment.

Only about 30 of those studies deal with video games specifically. And if you actually read the reports, most responsible researchers are careful to qualify their findings and are reluctant to make sweeping policy recommendations. None of them buy a simple monkey-see, monkey-do hypothesis. But the activists strip aside any qualifications, simplifying their conclusions and mulching together all of those contradictory findings. What they want is the aura of scientific validation, since that provides cover to all of their liberal allies who wouldn’t support the Moral Majority but love to sound off about cultural pollution.

Activists exploit any data point and any tragic event as grist for their cause. They will cite studies which show that 8-year-olds have difficulty separating out fact from fiction and use them to justify restricting 17-year-olds’ access to violent entertainment. 90 percent of American boys play video games, so it’s a pretty good bet that if the killer is an adolescent boy, they can find the proof that he was a gamer.

Parents are demanding that the government do something even if it’s wrong, and once we reach that point, we tend to do all the wrong things. This is doubly dangerous. First, constitutional protections make it unlikely that the government is going to take decisive action against the media industries. So all of the fears get redirected onto the kids who play these games. We may not have an epidemic of youth violence in this country but lots of adults are ready to lock up teenage boys and throw away the key. Second, every moment our government focuses on the wrong problems, they take away time and resources that could be used to combat the actual causes of youth violence. Banning games doesn’t put a stop to domestic violence, doesn’t ensure that mentally unstable kids get the help they need, doesn’t stop bullying in the hallways, and doesn’t deal with the economic inequalities and racial tensions that are the real source of violence in American culture.

But, during my 15 minutes on “Donahue,” I never got to say any of this. I was intellectually ready for this discussion, but nothing prepared me emotionally. I was the captain of my high school debate team, but debating on “Donahue” is a whole different ball game. The first thing you’ve got to do is throw away the notecards.

I walked tall into the studio, having been reassured once again by the producer that they weren’t planning any cheap shots. They lied.

No sooner do I sit down then I glance at the teleprompter and get a preview of what Donahue had in store for me: “I want to show you a picture. This is 13-year-old Noah. While reenacting the video game Mortal Kombat, he was stabbed to death by his friend.” I hear the producer coach Donahue on how to speak with Noah’s mother so that it looks like she called spontaneously when they really had prearranged the call. I hear him reassure Daphne White, spokeswoman for the Lion and the Lamb Project and my sparring partner for the show, that he has some especially gristly footage from Grand Theft Auto 3 at the ready and she clucks with glee. And then, whoosh, we are going live in, five, four, three, two, one, seconds — and you’re ON THE AIR. I stare blankly into the camera as a freight train comes barreling toward me.

I hear Donahue explaining about how some school kids got shot in the back of their heads because their slayers had learned about “kill zones” from a video game. I find myself wondering why anyone would imagine a kid needed to play Quake to learn that you can kill someone by shooting them in the back of the head when just moments before, MSNBC was interviewing a former Mafia hit man.

Then, the first question goes to White, who uses it to remind viewers that she is a concerned mother. Never mind that I am a father and have raised a son successfully through his teenage years. On Donahue, activists are moms and intellectuals are presumed to be childless.

White explains how parents across the country had purchased Grand Theft Auto 3 for their children without any idea of its distasteful contents. Hello! The game is called Grand Theft Auto 3. It’s rated M for Mature Audiences — not appropriate for children under 17 — “violence, blood, strong language.” The hit men and prostitutes are right there on the package. If you are a thoughtful — er, I mean, “thinkful” — parent, how much more information do you need before alarm bells start going off in your head?

White notes that the Federal Trade Commission had cited overwhelming evidence that video games were aggressively marketed to youth. The same FTC study found that 83 percent of all video game purchases were either made by parents or by parents and children together. Moms and dads still control the purse strings on what remain high-ticket items in most family budgets. As parents, my wife and I took responsibility for knowing something about the media we bought our son. We didn’t expect the storekeeper to protect us from ourselves.

And suddenly, it’s my turn. I had composed a little speech debunking the evidence but it seemed beside the point because her last speech was backed by nothing more than her personal distaste for Grand Theft Auto 3. Uncomfortable with the black-and-white framing of the discussion, I search for middle ground, praising the Lion and the Lamb Project for helping parents to make informed choices. And I really meant it. Education, not regulation, is going to ensure that parents get to decide what kind of media their children consume. Maybe we could all work together to improve the quality of resources available to parents.

But seeking middle ground was a classic liberal mistake. On these “Crossfire”-style programs, any compromise is read as weakness. Make no mistake about it, everything here works to exaggerate the differences between you and the person sitting on the other side of the table. It isn’t a conversation, a discussion or even a debate by any classical standards. You are opponents, whether you want to be or not. The producers actually keep you in separate rooms before they bring you on the air. They encourage you to interrupt each other and to show as much passion as possible, because what they want is controversy and entertainment. The producers rattle your cages until your blood is pumping and you want them to go down. They flash up captions underneath your image and you have no say over how they shorthand your position. When you cede a point, you can almost hear the folks on your own side booing.

Then, Donahue spooks moms with a clip from GTA3. You can tell he enjoys it: “We’re going to kill a cop, or more than one cop, and a prostitute … This is gratuitous violence here. We’re beating, beating. We’ll get a little blood here in a minute. The blood, you’ll see. Look at this.” He shows it over and over like we were watching the Zapruder film. Of course, any violence we see was staged by the show’s producers, this being a game and not a movie. If Donahue really believed watching these scenes was harmful to minors, why was he showing them without parental warnings during what used to be considered the family hour? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Then, he asks me to justify what we just saw. Where does one start? The idea that we are going to get rid of violent entertainment is preposterous. Every storytelling medium in the history of mankind has included violent themes and stories, because we depend on stories to help us sort through our conflicting values and our mixed feelings about aggression. We turn to violent entertainment for the same reason moral reformers turn towards apocalyptic rhetoric — because it gives us a sense of order in a world which otherwise can seem totally chaotic. We fantasize about a lot of things we’d never want to do in real life, and through fantasy we bring those impulses momentarily under control. What is bad about a lot of games isn’t that they are violent but that they trivialize violence. They tell us little about our inner demons because they fall back too quickly on tried-and-true formulas. Without fail, the works that moral reformers cite are not the ones that are formulaic but those that are thematically rich or formally innovative. It is as if the reformers responded to the work’s own provocation to think about the meaning of violence but were determined to shut down that process before it ever gets started.

If you want to actually change the quality of popular culture, the best way to do it is not to throw rocks from the sidelines but to get involved in thinking through the creative challenges confronting the games industry. And that’s what I’ve been doing, speaking at trade shows, doing workshops with individual companies, trying to figure out how to develop a richer and more complex vocabulary for representing violence in games.

And that’s where Grand Theft Auto 3 enters the picture. I feel about GTA3 the same way I feel about the film “Birth of a Nation” — it’s a work that includes lots of distasteful aspects but I respect, even admire it, as a huge step forward in the evolution of computer games as a medium. There are elements in the game which are hard to defend — your health can be replenished by “powerups” gained from visiting prostitutes; you are encouraged to club passers-by with baseball bats just to watch their blood splatter. No one, not even the people who made this game, think it’s the best plaything for small children. This game was made for adults. People over the age of 18, by the way, constitute 61 percent of the total market for computer games.

GTA3 is a story about a mobster, not unlike such critically praised works as “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos.” Maybe not as good, but asking some of the same questions. You have escaped from prison. What kind of life are you going to build for yourself?

Contrary to what Donahue said, you don’t score points by killing people. This isn’t a virtual shooting gallery. Unlike earlier video games that give you no way forward except to slaughter everything that moves, this game offers an enormously expansive and responsive landscape. Certain plot devices cue you about possible missions, but nothing stops you from stealing an ambulance and racing injured people to the hospital or grabbing a fire truck and putting out blazes or simply walking around town. This open-ended structure puts the burden on you to make choices and explore their consequences. If you choose to use force, you are going to attract the police. The more force, the more cops. Pretty soon, you’re going down. GTA3 is only as violent as we choose to make it and, used wisely, the game can tell us a lot about our own antisocial impulses. White dismissed all of this as “purely technical.”

Assuming the role of host, White asks me whether I can identify video games that fully meet my ideals and I yammer like an idiot. I should have said that the medium has not achieved its full potential but any number of games in recent years have tried to offer more morally complex and emotionally demanding representations of aggression, loss, and suffering, everything from Black & White where your moral choices get mapped onto the physical landscape of the game to The Sims where game characters mourn those who have died or Morrowind where how other characters treat you reflects your history of violent actions. Over the past year or so, the games industry has assembled the building blocks that can lead toward a much more complex portrayal of violence, but no one has put them altogether yet. None of this is apt to look much like progress to someone who believes that teens should only inhabit an imaginary world where the lamb shalt lay down with the lion and Barney shalt hug the Teletubbies.

After the commercial break comes the prearranged phone call from Noah’s poor mother, then a call from a 14-year-old girl who is told that she doesn’t represent the core of the video game market, and then a hostile question from Donahue, who attempts to reduce my efforts to reform the video game industry from within to the issue of whether I have ever taken money from the games industry.

The moral reformers always want to peg me as an apologist for the video game industry. I won’t lie — the games industry likes what I have to say and they shove the media my way whenever they get a chance. Lately, I’ve even engaged in some sponsored research to help explore how games could be used to improve the quality of American education. Sponsorship covers the expenses of the research. Trust me, if I wanted to sell my mind to the highest bidder, I could command a whole lot higher price. What motivates me is, more or less, the same thing that drives Daphne White — a concern for American youth. This debate always gets presented as though there were only two sides — mothers battling to protect their kids and the cigar-chomping entertainment industry bosses who prey on American youth. This formulation allows no space to defend popular culture from any position other than self-interest. When Congress calls witnesses, it calls the usual reform groups and then allows the industry to name a few spokespeople. When Donahue sets up a discussion, his producers do the same. I enter the room already tainted with having been recommended by the industry. Meanwhile, the media-effects researchers find themselves beholden to social conservatives. There are only two seats at the table.

Even though I am sometimes disappointed with their content, I refuse to give up on games. White kept harping on the fact that GTA3 was the top-selling game in the country, as if it were representative of the industry as a whole. If we went only a few more notches down the charts, we would have found games like Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Sims, Civilization 3, Spiderman, and Rollercoaster Tycoon. M-rated games make only about 9 percent of the gross revenue from the American games industry. The game industry is more diverse than it was a decade ago, the technology and storytelling more sophisticated, the market more far-reaching, but the reformers keep beating the same dead horses. White and her allies describe games as commodities no more valuable and every bit as dangerous as cigarettes. I call games an art, and challenge game designers to live up to their responsibilities as artists and storytellers.

Only after the fact does it occur to me that most of the research dollars our program has accepted to look at games and education come from Microsoft, the same company that partially owns MSNBC and cuts Phil Donahue’s paycheck. You got to love living in an age of media concentration!

By this point, however, I am caught looking like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, trying to explain to someone who really couldn’t care less how contemporary universities get funded.

Sometimes it was three against one. At others two against one. Sometimes, Phil even tossed me a lifeline. But at all points, it was me struggling with my own emotional responses. I should have picked a point, preferably a simple one, and hammered it over and over like White did. Instead, I was self-censoring, getting bogged down in the complexities, uncertain what distortion to correct. Most people watching the show probably read me the way the producers wanted — as a pointy-bearded civil libertarian and a paid corporate apologist trying to talk down to a concerned mom.

And then, it’s over. As I exit the studio, I hear Donahue grumble to his producer that those GTA3 clips seemed a whole lot more bloody when he was watching them before the show.

I wanted to tell them that media does have influence but media is most powerful when it reinforces our existing beliefs and behaviors, least powerful when it seeks to change them. Advertising, for example, is pretty effective at getting us to try a new product but ultimately, if the product turns our teeth a funny color, we are unlikely to buy it again no matter how much marketing gets thrown at it. We typically test media representations against our direct experience and dismiss them when they don’t ring true. I wanted to tell them that if you look closely at the personal background of those kids who have been involved in school shootings, you will find a history of real-world aggression and violence. They don’t need games to teach them to hate and hurt; they learned that at home or at school.

I wanted to tell them about spending an afternoon brainstorming about games with the Royal Shakespeare Company and discovering that they were all GTA3 fans. I wanted to tell them what I learned when I went around the country talking with teens about school violence — that the adults were focused in the wrong places if what they wanted to do was to stop kids from hurting each other. I wanted to talk about the importance of media literacy education not simply for teens but for their parents.

I wanted to tell them lots of things but it was over.

I was driving back to Cambridge, my tail between the legs, and all I could think about as we got bogged down in the repair work on I-95 were all of the things I should have said.

When I got home in the wee hours of the morning, I found that I had already started to receive hateful e-mails from the “Donahue” dittoheads.

“You are obviously not a mother trying to raise teenagers you stupid freaking moron idiot.”

“I’d like to take that stupid X Box and crack that moron from MIT over the head with it.”

“By the way, Moron, get a shave.”

Guess Mom was wrong about the hair.

Donahue’s Back. Be Thinkful.

Henry Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More Henry Jenkins.

Friday, Apr 27, 2012 5:45 PM UTC

Draw Something, decoded

The newest mobile app sensation isn't just a game -- it's an intimate new form of nonverbal communication

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Draw Something, decoded

Upon first brush, there’s not too much to grasp on to with Draw Something. The title of the game is essentially its elevator pitch: You are presented with three words, then you pick one, and then have a blank canvas on your smartphone/tablet/whatever to, well, draw something. You use your finger to draw some stuff on the screen, which ten times out of nine comes out as some sub-MS Paint-worthy scribble. The person you’re playing with then guesses what you just drew. Then, they draw something. You watch this happen, all in real time. And on a certain level, that’s it. Pictionary for the digital age. But why do we play Draw Something so obsessively, like an alcoholic returning to the bar for just one more round, and then another? Perhaps there is something downright pedestrian about Draw Something. Then again, that might be the point.

What’s astonishing about the game from a pure numbers standpoint is how many people are playing the damn thing. In its first five weeks, 20 million people downloaded it. Fifteen days later, that number increased to 50 million. Miley Cyrus plays it. So does Rosie O’Donnell. There are 6.9 billion people in the world. That means statistically, about 7 percent of the world plays Draw Something. It is currently the second-ranked paid app in the iPhone and iPad’s app stores (its free version is ranked second on iPads).

Though it reads “social game” much in the same way as Words With Friends and Scramble (also With Friends) do, Draw Something is an entirely different chimera, more of an exercise in interpersonal communication than a game per se.

It’s owned by Zynga, the social gaming behemoth whose IPO launched for a billion dollars. Zynga more or less made its name from FarmVille, which was a game that you probably remember downloading for Facebook and then becoming obsessed with. It was about farming. In all likelihood, you played it for a few weeks and then deleted it because it became annoying. Such is the Zynga way — release something addictingly addictive, have its user base grow tired of it, and then release something else that is equally addictive. Their strategy is, as the notoriously business-minded rapper Jay-Z might say, an exercise in “on to the next one.”

Zynga’s games are overwhelmingly free, and the company is publicly traded (stock is resting comfortably at $9 a share, for all you Gordon Gekkos out there). Essentially, all Zynga games are what some people refer to as “freemium” games. That means they’re free, with a caveat: You get the game, but you don’t get the full experience. If you want the Full Zynga Experience, you have to shell out. In FarmVille, this meant you could convert your money into “Farm Cash,” which could also be earned — albeit at a snail’s pace.

There’s a thing about addiction, though. Eventually, you get over it. You might enter into a 12-step program, or you might just delete Words With Friends from your phone. Whatever you have to do. Zynga understands this. This is why it offers social games of every flavor, from Words/Chess/Scramble/Hanging With Friends to Farm/Fish/Forest/Castle/PetVille to both Mafia and Vampire Wars. Clearly, Zynga is just plugging in different variables to the same equation. But people like the equation.

The same business model applies to Draw Something. In the game, your color palette is extremely limited. You get black, plus the primary colors. There is no mixing. Want pink? Oh, that’ll be 249 gold coins. Don’t worry. You get four other colors with it, too. And if you give Zynga $25 dollars, they will give you 10,000 gold coins, which translates into being able to buy basically every single color in existence, even the ones scientists haven’t come up with yet. This is the same strategy that your friendly neighborhood drug dealer employs: Give something to somebody for free, get them hooked, and then stand out of their way while they trip over themselves to give you money. It’s like the brains behind Zynga got their financial savvy equally from Business School and by listening to Biggie.

Still, there’s something compelling about Draw Something that just isn’t there with other Zynga games. It lies within the fact that unlike Words With Friends or Mafia Wars or any of the approximately 1 zillion other Zynga properties, Draw Something is an intensely communicative nonverbal experience. There’s no chat function (though the recent game update allows you to offer comments on your drawing), so anything you’ve got to say has to go down on that little white canvas. Sometimes, people will just write what they’re trying to draw out. It’s an interesting strategy, and not an unfair one. It’s still hard to draw a word on a touchscreen, and if you’ve got terrible enough handwriting (as I do), it might just look like a herd of portentously shaped snakes.

But by watching someone struggle to draw a clown fish on a blank canvas, you’ve inadvertently opened a window into their personality. There is a certain voyeuristic pleasure to be derived from watching your drawing be sculpted for someone in real time, and then watching them guess at it, and then watching them go through their own creative process, struggling to re-create a pirate ship, or Skrillex, or such abstractions as “champ” or “thug.” Succeeding at Draw Something is less a test of artistic skill — imagine Matisse, color-obsessive that he was, trying to make do with his scant four colors as he tried to draw a facsimile of a snail on his iPhone — and more a testament to the relationship one has with their Draw Something partner.

I might not be able to draw my way out of a paper bag — thankfully, a concept that has not cropped up for me in the game yet — but if someone really gets me, they’ll know that little yellow squiggle with a couple jagged edges is a walrus, not a hornet’s nest or a stack of gold doubloons or an orangutan. (Note to self: Buy the “Mardi Gras Color Package,” whatever that means. It has orange in it.)

That’s another thing about the game — there’s no way to win. Once you hit your 99th turn with someone, the game resets and you’re back to round one, without even so much as a virtual fist bump. It’s Theseus, finally slaying the minotaur, only to find himself back at the start of the labyrinth and having to do it all again. It’s quixotic in the fullest sense of the term, only instead of a suit of armor and Sancho, you’ve got a digital, smartphone-shaped scimitar and your fingers. And your friend.

In this way, Draw Something isn’t really a game at all. It’s a conversation, full of pointed chit-chat, pictures, and sometimes several-hour lapses. After challenging me to a game, my dad didn’t realize that you were supposed to play at your own leisure, and sent me an antsy series of texts because I didn’t draw him back immediately. My father’s immediate instinct to treat the game as if we were sitting across from each other speaks to a very real generational gap. When my father was my age, you were lucky if you could jam a computer into a ranch-style home. Now, he’s got a computer in his hand, and he’s drawing on it. That’s pretty drawesome (as the app puts it), in and of itself.

I have very few running conversations in my life. I like it that way. It’s hard to talk with someone on, say, Gchat, for hours or days on end, and there are few people I would actually try to do such a thing with. However, I am currently playing 14 games of Draw Something. Social games allow for a certain level of mediation, creating the necessary distance to feel like you’re interacting with someone without actually talking to them. In many ways Draw Something is the perfect surrogate for real communication — drawing is an inherently more impressionistic mode of exchange than speaking, but you’re still getting your message across. It’s not like Words With Friends, where you’re taking turns filling in tiles on a faux Scrabble board with somebody you went to school, while holding a real conversation with them in the app’s chat function. There’s still a message to be gleaned. Draw Something just tells you what you’re trying to say.

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Drew Millard is an Associate Editor at Kill Screen Magazine and a freelance music writer. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, VICE, and Time Out New York. His blog Rap Industry Fan Fiction was named one of Huffington Post's "Seven Sites You Should Be Wasting Time On Right Now." He lives in Brooklyn, because of course he does. He tweets from @drewmillard. More Drew Millard.

Tuesday, Aug 16, 2011 6:01 PM UTC

“Sleep No More”: Shakespeare meets Internet games

"Macbeth" and alternate reality gaming collide in a show that could suggest the future of cutting-edge theater

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"I've gotten to the secret level in Macbeth!"

“Sleep No More” is one of the hottest shows in New York right now, which is surprising, considering that I spent most of my two hours during the McKittrick Hotel production wandering around the six-story building, wondering what the hell was going on.

The British company Punchdrunk’s production is ostensibly the story of “Macbeth,” though mixed with Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rebecca” and told in the form of an interactive maze that owes more to video games — New York magazine compared the experience with “puzzle-horror first-person video games like BioShock” — than Shakespeare.

Audiences form groups and are given “Eyes Wide Shut”-style masks as they enter the lounge area, which serves as the show’s waiting room. They are told they aren’t allowed to speak until they return to the lounge and also not to bother the actors — but nothing else is off-limits. Then you are let loose in the hotel, where every room is decorated like a spread from “Nightmare Homes Monthly,” and run into the “characters” (easy to spot because they aren’t wearing masks). They perform their wordless scenes as they race from room to room. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fight (also a form of dancing, with some super-intense choreography). In one room, you might find a weeping woman looking at a photograph while packing a suitcase. In the basement, there’s a dinner party where guests are either having a blood orgy or doing a sweeping waltz, depending when you arrive.

There’s even a strobe-light rave room where a naked man wearing a boar’s head simulates sex with a woman. In another, a lithe man lip-syncs to Peggy Lee’s “Is that All There Is?” while crying. David Lynch would be proud.

“Sleep No More” was beautiful, terrifying and novel. What it wasn’t, however, was coherent. But maybe that’s because I hadn’t known that in order to get the full experience of the play I would have had to spend hours unlocking hidden Internet websites and swapping clues on Facebook with other devotees. Basically, it requires turning your life into one big alternate reality game before the show even begins.

As Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review:

“The idea is once you’re let loose on one of the floors of the hotel, you pick out a single character and pursue him or her (though you can switch any time you want), as the performer runs, dances and vaults all over the place.”

That’s easier said than done. These actors will run you ragged through corridors and secret passageways, sometimes locking the door behind them. Audience members themselves act as another deterrent to sticking with Macbeth or one of the witches; mobs form around the actors and block you from seeing all the action. Half the time, the group divides as it tries to (silently) figure out if Macduff ran up the stairs or slipped into a backroom somewhere. Next thing you know, here’s a new character with a plot all his own. You end up watching a bartender fight some other guy for awhile before realizing that you’ve completely missed the point … if there ever was one.

Unlike fragmented films such as “Memento” or “Inception,” there’s no DVD version of “Sleep No More.” If you leave feeling like you didn’t get it, well, you didn’t get it. If only you had bothered to check out the discussion boards on the play’s Facebook page, where hyper-vigilant audience members post clues on whom to follow, where the action is going to take place, and what the hell is actually going on. It’s like a go-to guide for the uninitiated, and after the show it’s the best place to go and post your questions about the production. Say, for instance, that you wanted to figure out how to follow the character of Macbeth without losing him in the crowd. Well, here are some tips (which contain major show spoilers), courtesy of another “Sleep No More” forum:

“I followed Macbeth around pretty much all night. After the dance, Lady Macbeth takes Duncan away to another room. I followed them.

She seduces him, then after some kissing, she goes away.

Duncan undresses and then goes to the area right next to his bedroom that has pillows on the floor, and a basin with blood, and he lies down on the pillows.

Macbeth walks in and smothers Duncan with a pillow. Then he goes to the basin and covers himself in blood.

He runs to the bedroom with the bathtub, Lady Macbeth undresses him and bathes him, etc.

Then Macbeth runs to the Witch Disco Orgy, where he gets covered in blood all over again.

After that, he goes to a room with a pool table and kills Banquo.

He goes and meets Lady Macbeth again (but not in the bedroom) and they go to the banquet scene.

Then Macbeth leaves (unless you’re catching the very last go-around), and goes to the Hotel Lobby.

He beats up and tries to rape Lady Macduff, and then Macduff beats the crap out of Macbeth.

Then Macbeth runs to a balcony (we’re not allowed to follow him, we have to watch from the sides), and he jumps down to the forest.”

Don’t live in New York or have $80 to spend on a ticket? Well, there’s a reason to care about these secret clues and weird haunted-house rooms. Remember that 1997 David Fincher film, “The Game,” the one where Sean Penn buys his uptight corporate brother (Michael Douglas) the ultimate birthday present — a voucher for a live “game” from a company called Consumer Recreation Services. From there on in, every person Douglas’ character comes in contact with is part of the game, from business associates to that pretty waitress who just messed up his food order. Before you can say “Big Brother,” Douglas is running for his life, convinced he is about to be killed by this shadowy CRS conglomerate, which is everywhere and owns everybody.

Now jump ahead a couple of years and meet a man named Elan Lee, one of the founding fathers of alternate reality games (ARGs), who cites “The Game” as one of his major influences.

ARGs usually start out on the Internet (check out ARGN.com, which links to the big games being played right now). A cryptic website leads participants to a couple of clues, which quickly move into real-life scenarios. Players are expected to meet a certain person at a certain place in order to get another piece of the puzzle. The difference between “The Game” and ARGs is that you are working with a team: everyone else who is playing the game at that time. It’s a group activity, where one person’s find is quickly put up on a forum, to be compared with what someone else discovered in a different location. It’s like Fincher’s movie plus Dungeons and Dragons, with enough viral buzz to attract a cultlike following.

Even if you’ve never heard of ARGs, you’ve probably followed one anyway. “The Dark Knight” used one to give away the first peek of Heath Ledger as the Joker. To a lesser extent, it’s how J.K. Rowling revealed Pottermore as her new website, because the clues were only handed out online.

ARGs have been mainstreamed by marketing strategists for everything from the movie “A.I.” (where the game was called “Beast” and revolved around a fictitious murder) to Lee’s first corporate creation, “I Love Bees,” which was actually a viral promotion for “Halo 2.” Here’s a walk-through of how the latter worked:

The great part about using alternate reality games instead of regular advertisements is that a small group of super-fans can be counted on to play the game as quickly as possible, then post the results online. Then it’s picked up by the rest of the Internet and mainstream media, which don’t have the time or inclination to do hours of real-life legwork just to see a sneak peek of an upcoming movie. But for ARG fanatics, the results aren’t the point; it’s the game that matters. Well, the game, and the community built around it.

Which brings us back to “Sleep No More.” Yes, this play is an ARG, although it doesn’t have to be; it can start and end with your experience during a performance. But the show does have bonus material that will lead you to real-life encounters with the characters outside of McKittrick Hotel, provided you can figure out how to unlock Punchdrunk’s coded website. There have been location-based clues at Grand Central and IRL meet-ups for those who are as obsessed with solving the seemingly endless mysteries of “Sleep No More.”

Suddenly, those insanely detailed rooms filled with ephemera in “Sleep No More” don’t seem to simply mean some whimsical set designer had an unlimited budget. As it turns out, everything is a possible clue, relating to a story much larger than the ones told inside the confines of the “Macbeth” story line.

So “Sleep No More” is an interactive play that’s also a community-sourced Internet game that requires a working knowledge of Greek gods and JavaScript in order to solve it. God help all the Luddites of the world if this is the future of theater.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Tuesday, Jul 19, 2011 12:30 AM UTC

My summer of Dungeons & Dragons

I was a scared kid with a sick mom. But I finally found the courage I needed -- and it came with polyhedral dice

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My summer of Dungeons & DragonsA photo of the author as a teen, with one of his D&D dungeon maps superimposed behind him.

Some say that all narratives ultimately tell only two stories. One: Someone goes on a journey. Two: A stranger comes to town. The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was 12, I experienced the intersection of both. In other words, I learned how to escape.

This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were just coming to understand her. Our “new” Mom.

The new version of my mother was a changeling. At 38 years old, she had suffered, and barely survived, a ruptured brain aneurysm. The head injury caused her to be mostly paralyzed on her left side. Her brain became scrambled. She limped around the house, couldn’t tell time and didn’t know the day of the week. Often, she’d make inappropriate remarks, swearing at the slightest provocation or making some lewd joke in front of friends. At times, she scared me.

“Ethan!” she’d yell from her lair. “Help me get up!” She might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the floor, or in the bathtub.

Years before my mother’s “accident,” as we called it, my dad had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We eventually discovered this would never come to pass.

It didn’t take long to figure out I couldn’t tame my mother, not this beast. I knew I couldn’t save her, either. I fought with her for a while, usually battling over her inability — what I mistakenly read as her refusal — to regain her old life, be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision. After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck with a mother I was afraid to love.

We began calling her the Momster.

 ——-

Coincidentally enough, the film “Super 8″ also takes place in the summer of 1979. Like the boys in that film, I armed myself with a movie camera and was determined to be the next Spielbergian blockbuster kid. I studied Disney animation books. I built sets in my sister’s bedroom where stop-motion Plasticine creatures ran amok through an HO-scale train town. I ripped apart Revell model airplane kits to make my own “Star Wars”-like space ships that I’d film, frame by frame, as they dangled from fishing line in front of a hand-painted star-scape.

As I built and destroyed these worlds, my journey through the realm of adolescence to the kingdom of adulthood began to reveal itself as a tricky maze filled with traps, monsters and dead ends, not to mention broken mothers. I longed for some safe way through that labyrinth of conflicting, constricting emotions. The Super 8 movies I shot provided one avenue of escape.

Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came home from the hospital, a stranger came to town — a new kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared to me.

JP and his family bought the house across the street from me. Not a ramshackle, creaky, 19th century New England colonial like mine, but a more modern one, with linoleum in the kitchen, wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere else, and a fully present, fully functioning father and mother.

I hung out a lot at JP’s house that summer. After a few weeks of watching “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Discovery,” and programming primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.

“Elves?” I said one particularly hot afternoon as he cracked open the Basic D&D boxed set’s lid. “Like the Keebler kind?”

“No. Not little ones, doofus.” JP seemed a little miffed. “Have you read ‘Lord of the Rings’?”

“I saw the movie,” I countered. Ralph Bakshi’s half-baked, but still haunting, adaptation of Tolkien’s fantasy novel had come out the year before. I saw the cartoon on a trip to Boston to visit my mother in the hospital and it blew my mind.

“Well, D&D is kinda like ‘Lord of the Rings.’ Only you’re in the book. You’re in the movie. You choose what happens. You can be an elf, or a dwarf, or a human. You can be a wizard, or a fighter, or a thief. Even a cleric.”

I wanted to ask what a cleric was, but I kept my mouth shut. “A fighter. You mean like Conan? Or Strider?”


“Strider is more of a ranger. But yeah, you kill stuff. You’re the tank.”

I didn’t know what a ranger was either. All I could picture was the Lone Ranger, and the Texas Rangers. Mentally, I thumbed through my baseball card collection that my pet cat had recently peed on, ruining it. Neither of the Wild West or Major League Baseball universes seemed to be of use here.

“OK, I’ll be a fighter.”

JP handed me a pile of polyhedral dice — not just 6-sided dice, but 4-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided. I rolled as he instructed and before I knew it I had written six numbers on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, next to six categories that JP called attributes.

“Is 14 Strength good?” I asked. “Wait. He’s only got 5 for Intelligence.”

“He’s pretty strong,” JP said. “But he’s pretty dumb. You’ll have fun.”

Strong and dumb. This sounded like exactly the opposite of me, Ethan: about 5-foot-6, 130 pounds, a predictably good, B-plus/A-minus student, and never once tested in a real fight. Fun. “So now what happens?”

“Go to the store and get your equipment.” JP said my character had a few gold pieces to outfit himself.

This whole role-playing thing was new to me, but not to JP. Using words only — and in my mind, but also in the combined words and minds of JP and me — my fighter went shopping. Once in the “store,” in the “town,” my fighter (me) asked JP (who was the gamer referee, or the Dungeon Master) if he could buy himself a sword, a suit of chain mail, some torches, 50 feet of rope, a grappling hook, food (what JP called “rations”), a throwing dagger, a shield and a helmet. JP said he could. By the time he got out of there, my fighter had about six copper pieces left. JP told me to write down all these items on my character sheet. I dutifully complied.

“So now, you need to find the other adventurers,” JP said. “I’d suggest you go to the tavern.”

Go to the tavern. This was strange. D&D felt too much like little kid’s play, too much like make-believe. But I liked where this story was headed. “OK. I go to the tavern.”

“Good idea.” He smiled. “You push open the door. Inside, it’s gloomy. A fire crackles in the corner. You hear that a ship just docked in town, and a big battle against some nasty goblins just ended, so the place is full of tough-looking guys. There’s a dude in the corner with a funny hat. You might, you know, go over and talk to him.”

“I go over to the corner and talk to him.”

“Hello there, traveler,” JP intoned, with a kind of mysterious, Mr. Roarke from “Fantasy Island” voice. “I have heard of your exploits. You are a brave warrior.”

“I am? I mean, I am.” Maybe I could be a brave warrior. Even if I felt far from brave in the real world. “Yes, good sir, very brave.”

“Well, I have been assembling a group of worthy adventurers for a task.” JP looked up from his books and dice spread out around him on his bedroom’s pale green carpet. “Oh, how rude of me. I forgot to introduce myself,” Mr. Roarke continued. “My name is Malicus. Malicus the Wise, they call me. And your name?” JP raised one eyebrow, wizard-like.

I was sitting on the floor across from him, propped up against his bed. My fingers sunk into the soft fibers of the carpet. “My name is … My name is E … Ethor.” Ethan + Thor = Ethor. It was the best I could do.

“Well, Ethor,” Malicus said, “I know an Elvish archer named Quikpuck, a Halfling thief by the name of Slyfoot, and a cleric named Fabian the Just. The four of us have been hired by Lord Rathbane to investigate some mysterious happenings in the Krog Mountains above this port town. We have been told of treasure in a dungeon there. But also many men have died trying to get it. And these parts are overrun with goblins. We need a fighting man.”

“Uh huh. Well, Sir Mal … what is his name?” I whispered.

“Malicus.”

“Sir Malicus, I am not afraid of goblins. I have slayed many a … uh … Fell beast.” I had no idea where the phrase “fell beast” came from, but I was pretty proud of myself. I raised my arm in the air. “I will join you!” I was getting the hang of it.

“Very good. A stout warrior like yourself will come in handy. We leave at daybreak. You’d best get some rest, Ethor.”

It was way past dark. I could see, across the street, a square of light from my kitchen. The TV flickered like a blue flame. Mom would be wondering where I was. “I should probably go. Can we play again tomorrow?”

JP nodded.

“Can I take this?” I held up Ethor’s character sheet.

“Sure,” JP said, his nose in a rule book, already onto the next thing. “I gotta plan the adventure anyway. Come over after dinner.”

I gathered my stuff and booked it across the street, hoping to get though the front door and sneak past my mom without her seeing me. Maybe like Slyfoot.

——-

That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid — a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the basketball team — take action, be the hero, go on quests, and kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted, non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one Band-Aid. But shooting my “Star Wars” remakes and clay monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless, instantaneous and endless. Epic.

I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it found me, coincided with my mother’s return from the hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the Momster — more courage than I could muster at the time. I couldn’t face down the creature that plagued my own house. But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family’s four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.

But in the summer of ’79, I was but a newbie. I needed to gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t know that game was about to save my life.

Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and again. I would play many new roles. I would go on incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat many monsters.

When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session, after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for Webster’s. “Cleric |ˈklerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a priest or religious leader in any religion.” The next day, back at JP’s for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D game world, clerics weren’t just priests. They were characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as “cure light wounds” and “protection from evil.” They could dispel the undead.

Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer, or in some realm far away in the future.

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Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms," his travel memoir/pop culture investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures. He also writes on pop culture, movies and books for The Boston Globe, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and contributes the blog "Geek Pride" for psychologytoday.com and blogs for wired.com's Geek Dad. Follow Ethan's adventures at Fantasyfreaksbook.com. More Ethan Gilsdorf.

Thursday, Jul 7, 2011 9:30 PM UTC

Your guide to day one at Comic-Con

The schedule is set for the opening date of the country's largest collective geek-out. Here's what you need to know

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Your guide to day one at Comic-ConGet ready to rock out.

San Diego’s annual Comic-Con can be a very scary place for the uninitiated. With thousands of panels, screenings and artist booths, the four-day entertainment convention is perhaps the only place in the world where you can have a panic attack while staring at six versions of “Sexy Leia.”

In two weeks, nerds will descend en mass to California, and in preparation, the producers of Comic-Con have posted the schedule of events for the kickoff day on July 21. (Technically there is a preview night, but who is counting?)

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, we’ve prepared a brief guide of the day’s must-sees, as well as what programs to avoid.

Definitely catch: “Game of Thrones” panel

Author George R.R. Martin moderates a panel featuring series executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as well as cast members Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Kit Harington and Jason Momoa.

I know this is going to be the hot ticket event of the first day, but I’m not sure if it’s because the show is so popular, or if fans are just going with a bag of rocks to pelt at George R.R. Martin’s head. Either way, it’s not to be missed. Bring your Flip cam.

Definitely avoid: “Battlestar”: So Say We All

Richard Hatch hosts a panel and fan discussion of the “Battlestar Galactica” universe, politics and philosophy with Hatch (Tom Zarek, Capt. Apollo), Michael Taylor (“Battlestar Galactica,” “Caprica,” “Blood and Chrome”), Dr. Kevin Grazier (BG science consultant), and surprise guests for this exciting roundtable and Q&A session.

Guys: “Battlestar” is over. Time to move on. Now, someone show me the way to that Damon Lindelof/”Lost” theory panel.

Definitely catch: “Oh, You Sexy Geek!”

Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? When geek girls show off, are they liberating themselves or pandering to men? Do some “fake fangirls” blend sex appeal with nerdiness just to appeal to the growing geek/nerd market, or is that question itself unfair? And what’s up with all the slave Leias? Action flick chick Katrina Hill (ActionFlickChick.com) asks Bonnie Burton (Grrl.com), Adrianne Curry (“America’s Next Top Model”), Clare Grant (Team Unicorn, “G33k & G4m3r Girls”), Kiala Kazebee (Nerdist.com), Clare Kramer (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), Nerdy Bird Jill Pantozzi (“Has Boobs, Reads Comics”), Jennifer K. Stuller (Ink-Stained Amazons, GeekGirlCon) and Chris Gore (G4TV’s Attack of the Show!) to discuss whether fans can be sexy and geeky at the same time — and if they should!

I’d say that you could just watch the mashup of hot chicks on late-night shows and save yourself the effort, but since these are actual nerd girls discussing gender issues and not just Mila Kunis talking about World of Warcraft, it’s worth making time for.

Avoid:  TV Guide Magazine: Fan Favorites

TV Guide is back with an all-star panel for the fans! Moderated by editor in chief Debra Birnbaum, Fan Favorites features your favorite talent from your favorite shows — in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Panelists include Nestor Carbonell (“Ringer”), Johnny Galecki (“The Big Bang Theory”), Jorge Garcia (“Alcatraz”), Leslie Hope (“The River”), Zachary Levi (“Chuck”), Joe Manganiello (“True Blood”), Julie Plec (“Vampire Diaries”), Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”), Kevin Williamson (“Vampire Diaries”), Deborah Ann Woll (“True Blood”), and others.

What a clusterfuck … do the same people who want to see Jorge Garcia or Matt Smith really care about what “Chuck” or the guy from “The Big Bang Theory” have to say? I imagine this panel will be the real-life approximation of channel-surfing when you’re bored.

Definitely catch: Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries: A discussion with Jon Favreau and Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Pop Culture

EW moderates an in-depth conversation with Jon Favreau (“Cowboys & Aliens”) and Guillermo del Toro (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), two filmmakers at the forefront of bringing geek culture to the masses and making blockbuster art out of pulp fiction. They will discuss their inspirations, their current work, and how they strive to put a personal stamp on blockbuster entertainment. Plus: How is new technology changing the way stories are produced and viewed? And what do they think the pop culture universe will look like a decade from now? Moderated by Jeff “Doc” Jensen.

Comic-Con is one of the first places that “cool” directors will leak spoilers and info about their upcoming features, so get a front seat and turn on your tape recorder in case Guillermo del Toro lets something slip about “Pacific Rim.”

Bonus “Don’t Miss” screenings: Mike Judge hosting the new “Beavis & Butt-Head” episodes, “Archer” viewing and cast discussion, and the exclusive premiere of “Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe.” Just kidding.

This list is far from definitive. What events are you most looking forward to for Comic-Con?

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Friday, Jun 3, 2011 7:04 PM UTC

Even more evidence “Candy Land” movie will be like “LOTR”

Film's writer confirms previous comments; admits to loving challenges, J.R.R. Tolkien, candy

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Even more evidence "Here the gumdrop hammer-stroke will fall hardest."

Last week, the sweet world of nostalgic board games got a little bit more bloody. Glenn Berger, one of the writers for the upcoming “Candy Land”  film, told Entertainment Weekly to “envision it as Lord of the Rings, but set in a world of candy.”

While my first reaction was to send that idea to Yikers Island for a life sentence, Berger’s bold vision grew on me. Think of how many jokes there are to be made here! Lord Licorice bellowing from the Cupcake Commons, “NONE SHALL PASS … UNTIL THEY PICK A PURPLE CARD FROM THE TOP OF THE PILE!” And that’s just from the top of my head! I could think of so many more jokes by the time the film actually came out.

So anyone who thought Berger was going to try to backpedal from that grandiose claim was badly mistaken. If anything, the writer wants audiences to know how committed he is to doing a J.R.R. Tolkien thing for the Hasbro game. Also, how committed he is to candy:

That’s precisely, I think, why we got the job on CANDY LAND. But that’s also why we were excited about getting the job on CANDY LAND. It’s something that, on the face of it, seems like a huge challenge: it’s a board game for kids, and there’s no strategy involved. But what it does have is the opportunity to set an action movie in a world made of candy. So when we meet with the director, Kevin Lima, and he says, “I want this to be LORD OF THE RINGS but with candy,” you could either laugh at that, or say, “If you could pull that off, that would be really cool. We’d love to be a part of that because we love LORD OF THE RINGS and we love candy.”

That should just be the film’s tag line: “Love ‘Lord of the Rings’? Love candy? You’ll love this movie!”

Hey, if you can think of a better tag line … or even a better “‘Candy Land’ meets ‘Lord of the Rings’” joke, let me hear them in the comments.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

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