SALON

Gaming

Tuesday, Jan 20, 2004 8:30 PM UTC

The gamer of Baghdad

While missiles crashed around him, Zeyad struggled to keep Crash Bandicoot alive. Today, he continues to play, even as Baathist holdouts rage on and his frustrated countrymen demand a better future.

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The gamer of Baghdad

While the shock-and-awe bombing raged outside, Zeyad spent a lot of time playing “Crash Bandicoot” on his Playstation. Bandicoot is a humanoid fox who must escape the dangers coming at him from all sides (polar bears, lethal blowfish and so on), and as the walls of Zeyad’s family home in Baghdad trembled from the precision-guided aftershocks, the dental student kept putting the agile mammal through his paces.

“It was really strange,” Zeyad tells me now by e-mail. “But it was better than having to listen to the bombings.” So he played it with the volume blasting. In his hands, Bandicoot died and was reborn, then died again. Meanwhile, outside, airstrikes kept ripping the sky. And so, as he recently wrote of “Crash Bandicoot” on his blog Healing Iraq, “I experience dèjá vu whenever I play it now.”

While millions of gamers have their own associations with the game, Zeyad is surely among the first to couple “Crash” to a massive military campaign. But he’s likely not the only one — during the invasion of Iraq, reporters observed American soldiers hunched in the steel wombs of Bradleys and M1s, engrossed in their own portable game consoles, as they rumbled by night toward Zeyad’s hometown.

The invasion has been a boon to the country’s high-tech consumer market, according to Zeyad. “After the war,” he says, “computer and console prices dropped drastically and became available for a larger section of Iraqis. You can get the fastest Pentium IV PC with the best components and accessories at $500, whereas it usually cost $800 before the war … As to consoles, the cheapest are the Dreamcast at around $80 (or less) and the Playstation at an average of $100. Playstation 2′s are more expensive and therefore less common (around $200-$250).”

That the PS2 is openly sold at all is actually another benefit of the war’s aftermath, for under U.N. sanctions, units of the Sony console were apparently classified “dual use” devices which Saddam’s scientists might bundle up to create a supercomputer, for use in long-range missile guidance. But Zeyad says the PS2 was still available under the dictator’s regime, despite that interdiction: “They were smuggled through Jordan and Turkey. Most of these came from Southeast Asia and the United Arab Emirates.”

Despite postwar price drops, he continues, “Computers and consoles are not affordable for the majority of Iraqis, and that is why there are so many Internet, LAN, and console cafes opening all over Iraq for people who can’t afford them.” For as he recently wrote on Healing Iraq, “Iraqis are hardcore gamers. Almost every neighborhood in Baghdad has what you might call a ‘videogame cafe’ with several consoles where people can play for about a dollar an hour … . We have a special gamers’ district at Bab Al-Sharj at the heart of the city, where you can find hundreds of videogame vendors.” (Maybe that’s where Hans Blix should have sent his weapon inspectors, since they could have verified evidence of dual use violations by digging up copies of “Grand Theft Auto III.”)

Zeyad describes a Baghdad that few in the West know — certainly not from reports that seem only to depict a Third World city beset on all sides by anarchy, ethnic and religious conflict, and terrorist attack. When the world media reports on Iraqi anger over the Coalition Provisional Authority’s failure to restore the electric grid, for example, little is written about what Iraqis are using the power for. There is a difference between reporting that Iraqis are angry at a neighborhood power outage and reporting, say, that a lot of them are irked because the blackout interrupted a killer session of “Counter Strike” at their local LAN cafe.

So Zeyad’s insights into his country’s burgeoning digital culture provide a missing piece in the American dialog on Iraq’s reconstruction, and Iraqis’ own perception of Americans. And in his account of that subculture — and by his own efforts as a wired blogger — one perceives an Iraq that is ready and essentially equipped, despite temporary appearances, to join the interconnected tapestry of modern democracy.

Zeyad (he prefers not to publicize his family name) was born in Baghdad in 1979, and as a boy he moved to the West for a time with his Sunni parents (though Zeyad describes himself as atheist). They pursued graduate degrees in England, and voluntarily returned in 1987 to Saddam’s Iraq.

“My parents weren’t planning to stay in the U.K.,” he tells me. “They were there for study on the [Iraqi] government’s expense and they still had jobs back in Baghdad. Moreover, the situation in Iraq during the ’80s wasn’t so bad as compared to the ’90s.” (At the time, Saddam was still seen by many as a harsh but relatively progressive autocrat — certainly compared to the hostage-taking mullahs in Iran he was then waging war against.)

Zeyad’s family had a P.C., and computer games became both a hobby and a cross-cultural conduit out of a rapidly closing society. “When I was 11 or 12,” he says, “I started playing Sierra adventure games. I was a huge fan of ‘Leisure Suit Larry’ and ‘Police Quest.’ I learned a lot about American culture from these games, and I started to understand some American expressions and their usage of the English language. These games were very educational to me.”

(In “Police Quest: In Pursuit Of The Death Angel”, you’re a by-the-book cop who must track down a powerful drug dealer, and in “Leisure Suit Larry: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards,” you’re a virginal would-be swinger who must sex up three EGA babes with ’80s hair. (So as an education in Americana, perfect.) Then came the first Gulf War, and suddenly Iraq itself became a setting for U.S.-made P.C. games. “There was a game called ‘F-15 Flight Simulator’ which was about the first Gulf War,” says Zeyad. “I spent a lot of time playing that game and specifically missions in Iraq.”

Saddam’s security apparatus eventually took notice of games like this as well. “At one time we even had Mukhabarat agents rummaging through gaming stores looking for these games. As far as I know, when someone brought a military game from Jordan, it would have to stay for a few days at the Ministry of Information for checking. When we were still playing ‘Mortal Kombat’ on the Sega Megadrive, we heard rumors that there was a specific code or combo that would spawn Saddam Hussein and his bodyguards to finish the opponent, but these were just rumors.”

The Mukhabarat created what must be the strangest assignment in the history of secret police, anywhere.

“They had people,” says Zeyad, “whose jobs were to play and finish these games to find out if there was any mention of Iraq or Saddam.”

In other words, they employed totalitarian play testers.

When the country went online in the late ’90s, all Internet traffic was monitored by the Mukhabarat, who kept a watchful eye on political dissent. But Zeyad was still able to access apparently apolitical gaming sites, and these became a kind of backdoor for a limited form of self-expression. For the last three years, “I hanged around gamefaqs.com message boards and in Yahoo groups and chatted with gamers from many countries. Normally we just discuss favorite games, ask questions about plot theories, gameplay tips, puzzle solutions and similar stuff.”

But as rumors of war loomed, conversations shifted away from virtual combat to the real, imminent thing. “We had some discussions about the war,” says Zeyad. “Many people expressed incredulity or astonishment to the fact that Iraqis played P.C. or console games, or had access to the Internet. They used to ask me many embarrassing questions about the situation or about the regime, which I was a bit hesitant to respond to, given the fact that all Internet use in Iraq was under surveillance by the Mukhabarat. At one point I stopped participating in these discussions altogether, just to avoid the trouble.”

Last year, he returned to the global discourse on his country in a big way, when he joined a second wave of Iraqi bloggers. They were following the path laid by Salam Pax, the original “Baghdad blogger” who has since leveraged his notoriety into a book deal and a U.K. Guardian column. Inspired and then assisted by New York blogger Jeff Jarvis, Zeyad’s Healing Iraq blog went online shortly after the debut of Baghdad Burning, the acerbically pessimistic blog from Riverbend (who didn’t even seem very happy to see Saddam captured).

In the main, though, the Iraqi bloggers tend to be tentatively optimistic advocates of the U.S.-led invasion and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Omar’s Iraq the Model (with contributions from Ali and Mohammed) shines with blistering takedowns of the Western antiwar movement, while the dignified ruminations by Alaa of The Mesopotamian are interspersed by florid bursts of Arabic-tinged prose. (“The bones in the mass graves salute you, Avenger of the Bones,” wrote Alaa, greeting Bush after his brief Thanksgiving visit. “Hail, Friend and Ally, Hail, Sheikh of Sheikhs, GWB; Descendant of the Noble Ancient Celt.”)

But then there is Zeyad’s teenage brother Nabil, who launched his own blog last November, and even here there is something stirring, in the kid’s gusto to get his opinion out to the world, Baathist holdouts or fractured English be damned. (“This man is an American man,” writes Nabil, rudely dismissing Pentagon-backed CPA council member Ahmed Chalabi, “he gets out of Iraq when he was a kid and now he comes to Iraq and wants to be the president of the new Iraq, his age about 50-60, he is a thieve he steal a bank in JORDAN and the Jordanian police want him now.”)

While Zeyad is also a supporter of the American-led occupation, he is not, however, occupation’s apologist. In fact, his most recent entries have advocated the pleas of a relative who believes her son died after being abused by U.S. patrolmen, a claim hotly disputed in the blog’s forum by his mostly American readers. (Zeyad sought assistance for an investigation into these allegations by contacting “Chief Wiggles,” another Iraq-based blogger — who also happens to be an American Army intelligence officer and a freelance humanitarian. It may be the first instance in which blogging has aided a wartime misconduct claim.)

To his own surprise, Zeyad’s ambivalence on the occupation extended even to Saddam’s capture. “I felt humiliated,” he wrote. “I sank into an overwhelming depression and sadness, and I had a desperate need to get terribly drunk. I should have felt joy but I didn’t. And I’m still disappointed with myself.” (His brother Nabil was a lot less ambivalent: “Mr. Poll Bremer goes on TV and he said we got him,” he posted. “What a great thing the American forces arrest Saddam in a spider hole that he was hidden in, he is so loser because of why he didn’t kill him self when he heard the soldiers near him.”)

Zeyad’s forthright reflections on contemporary Iraqi politics have earned him an international following, but his accounts of the Baghdad gaming scene have perhaps garnered him about as much attention. “I should have made this a gaming blog instead of a political one!” he wrote, after his first entry on the topic was swamped by reader response. Both it and his photo log of game cafes were linked to by Slashdot.org (the ultimate URL in techie cachet) and thus disseminated throughout the global geek consortium.

None of this should come as a surprise. Computer and video games are the universal cultural referent for the young, in a way that Hollywood films were the catalyst of an earlier generation, as soldiers greeted each other across the battle lines. Nabil employs them as an icebreaker when talking with U.S. soldiers he meets (and sometimes plays basketball with): “At first the Americans were shocked to know that Iraqis had access to games and consoles and knew so much about it,” says Zeyad, “but after a while they started to discuss game strategies, exchange tips and so [on].”

The kind of games they talk about may also provide insight into the way this new generation perceives Americans. Among the most popular titles in Iraq is 2002′s “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.”

“It’s a very popular game here,” says Zeyad. “Iraqi gamers love first-person shooter games, and this one was a hit for some time and is still being played at LAN cafes.” A painstakingly realistic depiction of the American GI during World War II, its key level is a brutal re-creation of the D-Day assault on Omaha Beach, based on the same scene from “Saving Private Ryan.” As in “Ryan,” the level is so punishing (you must die dozens of times to even reach the beachhead) it almost plays like a simulated self-flagellator, which you endure as a way of honoring the resolve of America’s soldiers, even in the face of grinding death.

“I’m not really sure if the game story itself had any effect on opinion [of Americans],” Zeyad says. “Since most Iraqi gamers don’t really pay much attention to plot or story line, and usually focus on gameplay.” Still, in the game’s Allied vs. Axis multiplayer mode, he says, “most of the gamers I notice play as Allied.” And you have to think something so vivid would work its way into the subconscious of the Iraqis who play it. (Then again, another hit game with Iraqis is the P.C. game adaptation of “Black Hawk Down.”)

Zeyad also sees gaming potential in a more recent American conflict — or rather, the one that is still playing out. “I think the operations in Iraq deserve their own game,” he says. “I would like the game to be accurate and represent the existing terrain and conditions in Iraq. Other games like ‘Conflict: Desert Storm’ are poor in this area, for example, the terrain and buildings don’t look the same as the real thing, and the voice acting was terrible — the Iraqi soldiers talked in an Egyptian accent. Also, the player should be able to choose either side, for example a Republican Guard soldier, or a foreign terrorist, in addition to coalition soldiers.”

But more than the theme of any particular title, it’s the pervasiveness of gaming itself, even well before Saddam’s fall, that strikes one as the most telling pointer of the country’s future.

Gamers know the digital age in their body. They grasp a game’s farrago of diverse stimuli, the onscreen rush of icons, meters, text, 3D visuals and audio cues, and make a cascade of split-second decisions that become, after a time, second nature, like a limbic response. Interfaces are intuitively understood, complex systems are quickly comprehended without the need of predigested orientation. For gamers, understanding other computer applications (the Internet, digital cameras, etc.) becomes a trivial effort, and this is where the growing constellation of game cafes throughout the cities of Iraq becomes so crucial. If computer literacy is a prerequisite for reaching the height of globally connected pluralism (and it is) then consoles are the stepladder, and PC games, the escalator.

For now, though, Iraqis as gamers are still trapped behind disconnected borders. “LAN cafes don’t have Internet connections,” says Zeyad. “Internet cafes don’t allow software and games to be installed on their computers.” But when the connection comes, he’ll enter the lobbies of the world’s multiplayer combat zones. “I’m looking forward to play mainly ‘Unreal Tournament’ and ‘Empire Earth,’ but it would be fun to try other games like ‘Battlefield 1942,’ ‘Quake III,’ ‘Medal of Honor,’ and ‘Counter Strike.’”

I sometimes play the odd Unreal Tournament match online myself, and so I tell Zeyad to look for a player with the username “Coriolanus,” when he can come on via the Internet.

“At local LAN cafes,” Zeyad e-mails me, “I go by the handle ‘Soul Reaper,’ so I think I’ll use the same.”

Inshallah, the Soul Reaper will hunt down Coriolanus with a rocket launcher, and kill him again and again, as a way of announcing Iraq’s arrival to the free world at play.

In my work as a journalist of the medium, I interviewed a fellow gamer who is also a Green Beret who once called down airstrikes on the Taliban in Kandahar. For an entirely unrelated assignment, a year later, I happened to meet another fellow gamer who is also an Air Force bomber pilot, and it turned out he unleashed some of those very bombs on Kandahar’s Taliban — and then last year, dropped more munitions on Saddam’s forces in Iraq. That pilot flies an F15e — the same jet that Zeyad of Iraq is more than familiar with, from his days of playing the Gulf War-era flight simulator of the same name. (Though Zeyad was more preoccupied with controlling Crash Bandicoot, when the real F15s returned over his family’s house last year.) As a gamer, I have myself played with peers living throughout the E.U., from Japan, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. (Unsurprisingly, given the prominence of its high-tech economy, Israel is the only Middle Eastern country with a sizable gaming community; but that, it seems, will change soon.)

The brotherhood of gamers crosses all borders, ignores all cultural, political and economic distinctions, and brings together some of the most technologically savvy of every nation into the same creative commons.

I think about the play-testers of the Mukhabarat, the men who once had to play through video games in search of potential anti-regime content. (In “Conflict: Desert Storm”, for example, the end mission involves killing a general who looks suspiciously like the recently de-spider-holed leader.) I picture a middle-aged Baathist with a Playstation controller teetering on a voluminous gut, trying without success to maneuver his British commando into Saddam’s lair before the Republican Guard can get a bead on him. Instead he’s the one who keeps getting mercilessly snuffed. Maybe before this he manned Qusay’s plastic shredders, or worked shifts at what his résumé tactfully describes as “despoiler of women’s virtue.” Now here he is, fumbling with a medium where cruelty counts for nothing, and the game kids of the Bab al-Sharj can own his ass with their eyes closed. (Down the halls of the Ministry of Information, he bellows, “How do I use this ‘God mode’?!”) Because he can’t beat the game fairly, because it demands a proficiency he could never earn, and there are no means with which to torture its hard-edged causal logic into submission. In the very near future, he will be dead, or retired to the indignity of hawking diesel fuel to passing farmers and truckers outside town.

But even in the electrified neighborhoods of the Sunni Triangle, the game kids will be busy inside, applying their skills. And they will be in the game rooms and the Internet cafes springing up with just as much frequency, opening up new avenues of possibility. We will benefit from them as well, for in between death-match sessions, some of them will let us in on the news of an emerging Iraq that our own media cannot be troubled to keep pace with — clicking through to new windows of opportunity which open up slowly, but with progress meters that steadily move in the right direction.

Wagner James Au is a frequent contributor to Salon, and also writes "Notes from a New World," an online journal for Second Life, an upcoming MMOG. More Wagner James Au.

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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