Paranoia for fun and profit

Especially on the Internet, which is so conspiracy-friendly. That was what was so interesting about the game; you couldn't tell whether the sites you were visiting were Majestic-created or normal Web sites.

A lot of them are actually made by regular people. One of the things that is neat about Majestic, from a Web-browsing experience, is that we editorialize content dynamically relative to the fiction. The sites that are being shown to you are relevant to where you are in the story. You don't know what's real and not real, and it enhances the fiction because it anchors it in a reality -- the way "Indiana Jones" anchors itself in the World War II Nazi occupation of Africa.

Maybe it's too hard to tell what's real or not: One of my game "allies" told me he called Sandia Laboratories [an actual government research center] because Majestic linked to it, and he thought it was a clue. Is that happening a lot?

[Laughing] Bad! Bad! The lady at Sandia is probably not very happy. That really hasn't happened very much at all. There are subconscious winks and nods, and probably in the case of Sandia, I know why someone might want to call them. We actually changed the link because it was pointing to a bad place.

How many Web pages did you create for the game?

Probably 60 for the first two episodes. It's difficult to measure because it constantly grows. And now we're integrating fan content into the experience. One of the ideas that I really like about the medium is fan fiction: It's akin to watching "The X-Files" and writing your own vignettes that connect with the fiction in some way.

We've opened up these second-level game characters for fans to start creating content around. An example would be when you get the news clipping on the character Howard Deakins, which talks about his recent heart surgery and mentions the name of his wife. If you search for the name of his wife, we don't have the resources to create all the content that would sit behind that.

Rather than leave the game without that depth, we've said to our fans, "You can create content, provided it fits inside this framework and doesn't break these rules." We've leaked surveillance documentation on second-level people that connect through real conspiracies and back into our fiction in different points. We have a fictional character called Solitaire, who has been communicating with fans of the game through the newsletters -- embedding hidden text in the newsletters that you can find if you highlight white-on-white text, which references search terms and phone numbers.

For example, in Episode 1, you'll get an e-mail from Solitaire saying, "You're involved in something that's so much more than a game. I want to tell you the history of this conspiracy," and that sets you a challenge that is dramatically more difficult than the main thread of the story. This allows you to dig deeper and invest untold hours in solving puzzles that fill in your mental picture of what was the start of the conspiracy.

That's given to the fan community as a mechanism to spur their creativity but also preserve the integrity of the fiction.

How many fans have been participating in this?

We have about 30 bio sites, and about 380 fan sites, for Majestic.

How much research, outside of the sites that Majestic itself created, are players required to do? Is the game designed to be research-intensive?

The game doesn't require that -- though there's a search engine built into the game that's built on top of the open directory project. What I find is that people begin to explore based on their interests. We've tried to get an interesting range of sites that sometimes are scientific, sometimes political or spiritual. Individuals can explore the back story of the game from different angles -- there's an alien conspiracy, a science conspiracy, a New Age spiritual angle and a political angle.

There's always a risk that you'll go down a pathway that's interesting, that you expect to be fictional. But you end up exploring real sites, going off down a series of red herrings that are a dead end. That might not be rewarding. But the game has the mechanisms to always bring you back to the game.

Next Page: "It only takes one of those sightings to be right to change the way you look at the entire universe"

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