Gaming and digital storytelling
The concept of Star Trek's holodeck is appealing because it not only provides realistic 3D environments but also lets the show's characters play games and act out stories in those settings. In her groundbreaking book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Dr. Janet Murray defined immersion as one of the key aesthetic characteristics of the interactive storytelling medium. One way to think of immersion might be as a willing suspension of disbelief--your ability to choose to ignore the fact you're sitting in a theatre, for example, or in front of a monitor and to accept the events and the characters as real. MIT's media guru Henry Jenkins has been teaching the folks at Electronic Arts (EA) about story and character. EA is about to release a game that takes a new approach to immersion. Majestic takes the game out of the computer and imbeds it in your real life.
Majestic follows you everywhere--literally, not figuratively: it puts you in the midst of a conspiracy to overthrow an autocratic government. To play it to its fullest, you give it all your contact information--phone, fax, email addresses, instant messenger, and such--so that impassioned messages from your virtual co-conspirators reach you wherever you go. To play the game, you will also have to send mail and place calls to your virtual cell members. You'll also have to search the Web for clues and participate in streaming audio and video sessions to unravel the mystery.
Should you wish to retain some control of your own life, Majestic provides some opportunities to set constraints on its pursuit of you. For example, you can put limits on the times you can be called and faxed or use a Web-based virtual voicemail box provided by the Majestic team, and so forth.
Though it was supposed to be released by now, Majestic has suffered the usual delays of game development. It should go into a second user test in the near future and will demo at the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles.
Personally, I'm ready to buy into Majestic as soon as it's available, and I'm tempted to sign up for the full-access version. As a professor in the information age, I experience the occasional interruption of class by the ringing of students' mobile phones, and I've also caught some students playing solitaire on a laptop or a PDA during class. So it would be too cool to interrupt my own lecture to answer my mobile because my game is calling me.
