Friday, May 16, 2008
It must be a conspiracy. Everyone is talking about the computer game Majestic -- even the aliens.
Aug 10, 2001 | Alien technology salvaged from Roswell, N.M. Government experimentation on human subjects. Men in black, everywhere. Brain implants. A CIA conspiracy to take over the world. Sounds like your typical "X-Files" episode, but, of course, it's also simply another day on the World Wide Web.
The Net's deep database of conspiracy theories and paranoia is at the root of the summer's most-talked-about new game, Majestic. Produced by Electronic Arts, Majestic is best described as an interactive, immersive and invasive online mystery that combines fiction with (debatable) reality in a very Webby way. For $10 a month, you too can receive mysterious midnight phone calls, anonymous e-mails and tips about a boggling number of surreal goings-on for the next six months of your life.
The conceit of the game is that Anim-X, the Oregon game developer behind Majestic, has uncovered a government conspiracy; when Anim-X suddenly goes up in flames, you are asked to help the surviving staffers solve what's going on. The game becomes a wild goose chase across the Net as you receive phone calls, faxes, e-mails and instant messages from a variety of Anim-X staffers and mysterious informers, directing you to research any number of strange alien conspiracies and nefarious government activities.
A cross between the Michael Douglas movie "The Game" and the online mystery "A.I." (a tie-in to the Steven Spielberg movie that sent thousands of rabid fans chasing across the Net to find clues to a murder), Majestic is a cerebral experience that is part story, part investigation and part adrenaline. Although the game is slightly obvious at moments, there is a solid mystery to solve and voluminous amounts of fascinating material to parse. Did you know that the war in Kuwait was simply part of a CIA conspiracy to take over the world via the Falkland Islands? Play Majestic and you'll find out why.
Salon spoke to Neil Young, the 31-year-old, British-born executive in charge of production (and Majestic's creator), about the making of an interactive experience for adults, the American fascination with paranoia -- and how invasive mysteries like Majestic could herald a whole new genre of gaming.
Majestic is a pretty unique concept. How did it come into being?
I grew up playing games; I can't remember a time when there wasn't a video game machine in my home, or a computer in my school, or an arcade down the street. But what was frustrating was that I'd kind of grown out of developing my dexterity, and I was looking for interactive entertainment.
As you age, your ability to spend six hours a night playing a game changes. There are other demands on your life -- you get a career, maybe a partner and children. When I first started thinking about this, I had been married for a couple of years and my wife was two months away from expecting our first child. I was struggling to find 30 minutes to an hour a night to invest in any type of entertainment, and wanted to create something that didn't require you to spend hours with it each night in order to feel successful at it.
I was also looking at the Internet at that time and trying to seek out interactive entertainment and couldn't find any. All I could find were PC games that were using the communications infrastructure of the Internet to broadcast the locations of players or connect with a server that was handling the economy of a world. And at the other end of the spectrum were cartoons done in Flash, which might have been done better on television. It didn't feel like there was anything created specifically for the medium.
Define what you mean by "for the medium."
For most people the Internet means the Web, but it's so much more than that -- it touches lots of different things, which is where we began to explore the ideas of the game. It extends into devices like the telephone, which the Internet can connect to through voice-over IP. Once you can connect with a telephone, you can connect with a fax. And 30 percent of the traffic on the Net is instant-messaging traffic, so to have a built-for-the-medium experience that didn't touch messaging didn't make any sense. And there's the Web as well -- streaming video and audio. So that ended up defining a canvas for us that we then started to paint a picture on.
And that's where the third idea collided: the concept of blurring the lines between fact and fiction, specifically around conspiracies. I found myself on a Web site for the conspiracy theory radio show by Art Bell, and I was listening to clips from his archives. There was one clip called "Area 51 Caller" -- part of a recurring segment on the show in which government and military employees can call in and give away secrets.
This guy called in, and he either was a fabulous actor or totally believed what he was saying. In a very scared and nervous way, he said that he couldn't talk for long because the government was on to him, they had already caught him once and he just escaped, and there were a lot of things he had to tell people about experimentation that the government was doing and how it knew about the existence of aliens. He started reeling off these locations and, bang, got cut off. There were 10 seconds of silence until Art Bell came back on and said, "Wow, that's pretty weird. We lost the telephone connection, and at the exact time we lost the connection we lost our satellite uplink. We can't get in touch with this guy, and we're on backup satellite broadcasting now."
As a listener, I couldn't tell if that was real or fictional or coincidental. It just led me to think that the Internet is such a fabulous medium to blur those lines between fact and fiction and conspiracy, because you begin to make connections between things. It's a natural human reaction -- we connect these dots around our fears.
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