From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Beast (game)
The Beast (game)
The Beast was an alternate reality game (ARG) created phone number. Following these clues leads the player to
by a team at Microsoft to promote the Steven Spielberg the homepage of Evan and Nancy Chan, family friends of
film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.[1] The Beast, which ran for the Sallas. Jeanine’s phone message revealed that Evan
twelve weeks in the spring and early summer of 2001, is recently died in an alleged boating accident on his A.I.-
one of the most influential early ARG games. enhanced boat, the Cloudmaker. From the beginning
some question the official story of Evan’s death. For in-
Defining ARG stance, on Laia’s web page memorial to Evan she writes
"He was a superb swimmer. He was a wonderful sailor. He
Main article: Alternate reality game died on the boat who loved him within sight of land."
An ARG is a game which deliberately blurs the line be- At this point the player joins the investigation into
tween the game and the real world. Players investigate Evan’s death. Over the course of the three months the
the world of the game using the same tools with which Beast went on, it incorporated thirty diverse in-game
they interact with the real world such as websites, email, websites, from the Anti-Robot Militia to the Coalition for
telephone conversations and even in-person discussions Robot Freedom; from an architectural magazine to a
with actors playing game characters. sleep clinic, and from the coroner’s office to a hat store.
The mantra of The Beast, and most other ARGs, is As the game progressed, the players came across addi-
"This is not a game." When a player reads a character’s tional mysteries, such as who is killing A.I.-enhanced
blog, or looks at his employer’s website, or even speaks to houses, the location of the sexbot with whom Evan had
him on the phone, the character never indicates that he an affair, and malfunctions in the weather-control sys-
is anything but what the game says he is, whether that’s tem. By the end of the twelve weeks, players had also had
a professor of biology, a kidnapped child, a DP artist, or a live phone conversations with a game character and par-
robot bounty hunter. ticipated in Anti-Robot Militia rallies in New York, Chica-
go, and Los Angeles.
The game The team
The plot The Beast was created by a small team led by co-design-
ers Sean Stewart (head writer) and Elan Lee (lead director
The Beast was set in the year 2142, 16 years after the
and producer) and Pete Fenlon (content lead) under the
events chronicled in A.I. (A.I. was located in 2126) There
supervision of Jordan Weisman, then Creative Director of
were three overlapping entry points to the game, or
Microsoft’s Entertainment Division. This team kept their
"rabbit holes" in ARG parlance. First, some trailers and
identities secret until the end of the game, as consis-
posters for A.I. had a credit for Jeanine Salla as Sentient
tent with the "this is not a game" philosophy, and play-
Machine Therapist hidden among the credits for Spiel-
ers referred to them as the Puppetmasters, mostly because
berg and the actors. Second, one of the trailers encoded a
whois searches on the game URLs were under the name
telephone number in markings on the promotional text;
of Geppetto. The name The Beast was actually the design
if a player called this number and followed the given in-
team’s internal appellation which remained undisclosed
structions he/she eventually received an email stating in
until the Puppetmasters pulled back the curtain; at the
part that "Jeanine is the key" and that "you’ve seen her
time players referred to this endeavor as the A.I. webgame
name before." Third, an A.I. promotional poster sent to
or, simply, The Game. The narrative visual content fell to
some technology and entertainment media outlets had a
director/dp Tarquin Cardona and producers Rudy Calle-
very simple code stating "Evan Chan was murdered. Jea-
gari and Bob Fagan.
nine is the key."
Each rabbit hole led to questions about Jeanine Salla,
especially since one would not expect a film made in 2001 The Cloudmakers
to require the services of a robotherapist. Googling Jea- Cloudmakers was the name of a Yahoo group created to
nine brought up several web pages set in the fictional tackle the game, named after Evan’s boat. The group had
world of the game such as the homepage of Salla’s em- thousands of members at its peak and generated over
ployer, Bangalore World University. Reading Salla’s bio forty thousand messages amongst players. The game was
page, the player encountered a link to the personal page being developed as it was played. While most players
of Salla’s granddaughter, Laia Salla, as well as Jeanine’s
1
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Beast (game)
came to the plotlines after they had been solidified, the derlying story. While the killing of boat "Cloudmaker"
Cloudmakers group was constantly on the cutting edge of seemed collateral to the murder of Evan Chan, it was the
the game, pushing the game’s developers and influenc- ultimate goal of men afraid of empathetic machines… for
ing the plot. Warnings and messages sent by Cloudmak- Cloudmaker’s AI contained the essence of Dr. Allen Hob-
ers members to characters in the story regularly turned by’s design.
up in the plot, and designs/blueprints and databases pro-
duced by the group were referenced by and even fea-
tured on in-game websites and magazines (as were the
References
efforts of a smaller group, SphereWatch). After the game, [1] http://www.42entertainment.com/beast.html
the Puppetmasters admitted that they relied on the vast
storehouse of knowledge amongst the Cloudmakers and
other player groups to be able to meet any puzzle the
External links
designers created. For instance, a puzzle near the end • Cloudmakers Official Site
of The Beast required that the players understand lute • The Cloudmakers Yahoo group
tablature, and sure enough there were Cloudmakers who • "Strange A,I, Sites Online’"
could solve it. Ironically, the group unwittingly (and • "Reality blurs, hype builds with ’A.I.’ game"
amazingly) took the name of the central AI in the un-
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Beast_(game)&oldid=453725187"
Categories:
• Alternate reality games
• Internet properties disestablished in 2001
• Jordan Weisman games
This page was last modified on 3 October 2011 at 16:48. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of
the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.Contact us
Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers Mobile view
2