Many a moviegoer has seen a preview that turned out to be more entertaining than the film it promoted. Now some players of an ambitious Internet game that is part of the marketing push for the film A.I. say it is more absorbing than watching the much-anticipated movie.
"The game is great. The movie is garbage," wrote Arie Rubenstein of Staten Island, New York, discussing the latest game developments in an online chat room last week.
"The game did get a lot of people excited for the film," said another chat-room participant from New York. "Sadly, many of those people were disappointed by the reality of the film."
The online game was set up without fanfare in March. It has been an effort by the A.I. distributors, AOL Time Warner's Warner Brothers unit and DreamWorks SKG -- assisted by Microsoft -- to generate a subtle groundswell of interest in the movie among computer cognoscenti, who might be presumed to be receptive to the film's science fiction exploration of software-driven life forms. But the game's relation to the movie is only tangential. And the game's complexity allowed only a tiny sliver of the Web audience to become caught up in it, meaning its direct box-office impact was probably negligible.
"I don't know how effective it was as a wide-reaching promotional tool," said Harry Knowles, editor of the movie site AintItCoolNews.com. "I thought it was quite a bit of fun. But I know it scared a lot of people off because they felt it was just too involving." The game did receive a lot of attention from the news media, which increased awareness of the film, he said.
But game players have not exactly been evangelists for the film. In an informal online poll set up by one avid game player after the film's release, 65 respondents as of last Friday said the game was better than the film, while nine said it was a tossup. Just two people picked the film over the game.
That is hardly the word of mouth, or word of mouse, a movie marketer hopes for.
With A.I. generating about US$30 million at the box office in its opening weekend two weeks ago, and an estimated US$14 million this past weekend, the film seems on its way to becoming one of the summer's top-grossing movies. So the impact of the game promotion may not matter, even if it proves to have been little more than an interesting experiment.
The core of the online game -- which has attracted several hundred thousand players, according to Elan Lee, a Microsoft game designer -- is an elaborate sprawl of Web sites for fictitious people and companies, peppered with clues to a murder.
The action is set in a futuristic world much like that in the film, but the game has little connection to the film's plot. It incorporates devious puzzles that require familiarity with, among other super-Jeopardy categories, sound analysis software and the languages of southern India. To tackle these, players have organized themselves into a community that collaborates in a manner that one player half-jokingly dubbed "distributed biological processing."
The game, which is still progressing, is part novel, part scavenger hunt and part soap opera, with plot twists and character development unfolding as a Microsoft team updates game sites and reveals new ones. It seems to sprawl across cyberspace, with clues buried in HTML code, audio files and nonsensical e-mail messages.
If many game players can take or leave the movie, many also seem to appreciate the promotion's decidedly soft-sell approach.
"Whoever did this, however it was constructed, someone stood firm from the beginning," Maria Bonasia, a self-described addict of the game, wrote last month on a site for players, Cloudmakers.org. "Someone kept the commercials out, kept the hype downand kept us curious."
It did take a while for the game to get noticed. In March, its creators set up several Web sites that appeared to have been transmitted from a future filled with intelligent robots and smart houses. None of the sites directly referred to the film, although they did outline a struggle between robots and humans, which is a central theme of the movie.
The sites received few visitors until mid-April, when an attentive movie fan noticed a credit for a "sentient machine therapist" at the end of an A.I. preview. Typing the name into a search engine led to one of the sites and the start of a trail of clues. Word was posted on AintItCoolNews.com, and the game was on.
Within days, thousands of people were following the trail and swapping information. The game's obscurity, like that of a nightclub with no sign outside, seemed only to increase its appeal. Cloudmakers.org, a site created entirely by players and named after the boat of a murdered character in the game, became the focus of the collaborative puzzle-solving effort.
Clues about the game's origins were initially hard to come by. For weeks this spring, Warner and DreamWorks coyly refused even to acknowledge that the string of mysterious game sites was a promotion for the film -- although the game was by then generating a wave of attention from the news media. Only recently have the studios confirmed that the game was first proposed by some Microsoft employees, who fleshed it out with the help of a science fiction writer and input from Steven Spielberg, the movie's director and screenplay writer.
Microsoft, which has licensed the right to develop game products based on A.I., split the cost of the promotion with Warner Brothers. It would not disclose how much the game cost, but Lee said it was well below US$1 million.
Lee, lead designer for Microsoft's concept development group and the creator of the game's puzzles, said his team had been concerned that "people would be too into the movie to even notice that the game existed."
But word spread online that this was no ordinary game. Its tentacles have even reached into players' nonvirtual lives. Some have received phone calls and faxes at numbers they entered on game sites, spoken on the phone with a person pretending to be a game character, and even attended rallies in major cities where more clues were distributed.
All along, the game's creators have been monitoring the players and using their feedback to shape the game's content. Players say that this responsiveness and the connections that have developed among players have generated an emotional involvement that the film cannot hope to match.
Stewart, a well-known science fiction author who was hired by Microsoft to do most of the writing for the game, said he had "tried as hard as possible to forget" that it was part of a marketing campaign for a film.
"Of course we want people to see the movie," he said. "Ostensibly that's what it's about. But everybody also knows that we're on to something big and really fundamental. There is an art form here, and there is a chance that it will be one of the big art forms of the next century."
Lee of Microsoft, who co-produced the game with Jordan Weisman, said his company was already working on a new game incorporating the spirit of teamwork and the complex interactivity that have been crucial to the success of the A.I. game. The game will be "tied with a Microsoft franchise," he said.
Lee's team is part of the research group for Microsoft's Xbox game console, which is scheduled for release in November and will have online game-playing capabilities.
But how to turn a game like this into a money-making venture? After all, part of the A.I. game's appeal is its anti-marketing stance and the community spirit generated by the Cloudmakers.org crew -- attributes that would be hard to replicate in a more blatantly commercial product. And then there is the fact that the game is free.
Lee said there were ways other than the obvious subscription model that these games could bring in revenue. He said Microsoft was talking to other companies that might be willing to pay to make their products or sites part of the game and thinking about "what those players' attention is worth to other companies."
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