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There was an Alternate Reality Game created for the A.I movie that involved "living homes" going insane, murdering, and being murdered. This game was arguably more creative and involved than the movie.

The ARG site is gone, but there are still some notes on the living homes at the Cloudmakers site.

ignoti et quasi occulti

Evan Chan was murdered

evalso dark the con of man

Just to set the record straight, there was a game based on A.I. It was called The Beast, and it was the first commercial alternate reality game. It was set between the first and second endings of A.I. and really fleshed out the world about 20 years after David left his family. If you noticed a certain weird job title in the film's end credits - that was part of this game.

Apparently the early development was done at Microsoft, so maybe this is where the ideas for the XBox games ended up?

...Dr. Jeanine Salla. Duh.

Cloudmakers lives!

This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.

The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.

As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."

There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:

1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.

2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.

I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.

This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.

The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.

As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."

There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:

1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.

2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.

I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.

This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.

The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.

As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."

There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:

1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.

2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.

I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.

This is the most intelligent comment on this thread so far. I also played The Beast, I came into it a couple weeks after it started and was obsessed with it for most of it's life.

The main reason the game was fun was that you wanted to see what happened next, and you wanted to understand who these people were. Without a good plot and interesting characters it becomes a boring pattern of "we found a new puzzle, now solve it so we can find the next one". Solving the puzzles became something we did because we just had to know what happened next.

As far as I know this was the first game of its kind ever, and Sean Stewert learned very quickly how it worked and what was fun. That's why it was such a good game. I remember a post game interview with him were he said that once people had formed a giant group to solve the puzzles (Cloudmakers and to a lesser extent SphereWatch), he could make puzzles about ANYTHING and they would get solved. So he could make a puzzle about the mating habits of the blowfish and somewhere in the group would be a marine biologist who could say "I know this one!". There were puzzles involving Photoshop manipultion, the Fobbonacci Sequence, Base64, etc. And just ask someone who played about the time our buddy Dwayne was abducted and taken to the Statue of Liberty where we had to call and convince a security guard there named Mike Royal (who later turned out to be Sean Stewart), to take action and free him. From the Guide: "It's hard to describe exactly the excitement of all of this while it was happening, but while I was in the Cloudmakers IRC channel things were literally boiling over as people were comparing notes over what he'd said and what they should attempt later. It was a real triumph of the game, I think."

There were two things that occured to me while I was playing this game:

1) It could never be truely commercial. It takes a LOT of work done quickly to keep up with the gamers, who solve puzzles at unpredictable rates, and who is going to pay for a game where 99% of the time they are not solving anything, because someone else has already solved it? This was the problem with Majestic, it tried to parcel out the puzzles and make you pay for watching other people solve them.

2) There is a limit to how many people can play before it stops being fun. The Beast had zero promotion. The only way people even found out about the game was a credit in the trailer that said "Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla". If you searched for Jeanine Salla on Google you found the first site of the game. If 500,000 people were playing there would be so many posts and things would get solved so quickly it would be a complete mess. Even Cloudmakers was geting a little unweildy toward the end.

I think the only games like this that will be succesful are games made by people for fun, or promotions similar to this where making money is not the goal. Fans of the beast made a game (the solvers called themselves Jawbreakers) that was a success for the same reasons mentioned above.

Lot's of people have mentioned EA's failed Majestic game, but no one seems to talking about the one ARG that was a huge success: The game based around the movie A.I. It was run by Microsoft, and had a very loyal and fanatical fanbase. The fans were so in to the game that they actually changed the dynamics of the game as it went along, even going so far as to create a distributed.net-style program to sovle a puzzle that was inadvertainly left unsolvable by the team.

Read more at Cloudmakers.org.

This isn't the first time a movie studio has come up with an elaborate scheme to promote a movie.

One that comes to mind was the game associated with the release of "Artificial Intelligence". The studio left clues hidden in billboards, interviews, and answering machine messages that led players on a complex hunt over the Internet that told a story related to the movie. It had quite a following up until the end.

For those of you interested in the whole plot of the thing, a group called the Cloudmakers documented all of the puzzles and clues. It's a pretty interesting read.

The A.I. online promotion (archived at http://cloudmakers.org) had easter eggs at the heart of its premise. Clues/puzzles embedded in HTML code and images, pages that would serve different answers to puzzles depending on what browser you used from Mosaic to Earthnet 31 or thereabouts... Check it out, it was really cool.

Spielberg's movie AI had a game, also covered on /., to promote it that in my opinion, and that of the majority of the other players I know, was much better than Majestic (and free). This paradigm of online interaction and collaberation is very hot, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see more and more (free or not) of these things springing up. Roll on, I say.

Speaking of that, I stumbled into a 'game' put in place by the makers of the movie. If you watch the trailer online, you'll notice this name in the credits:

Jeanine Salla: Sentient Machine Therapist

Using a Google search on that name will launch you into a murder mystery game that spans multiple websites, locations and telephone numbers. Very cool marketing idea -- better than Blair Witch.

Check out this site for more information: Cloudmakers.


--

[begin self-plug]

I've written a very comprehensive guide to the entire game so far which, I'm told, is very good for beginners. It's quite long (40,000 words) since it covers every website and puzzle but it's a good read and I can promise you that the story of the game will get you hooked. I've also written a couple of editorials.

[end self-plug]

[begin self-plug]

I've written a very comprehensive guide to the entire game so far which, I'm told, is very good for beginners. It's quite long (40,000 words) since it covers every website and puzzle but it's a good read and I can promise you that the story of the game will get you hooked. I've also written a couple of editorials.

[end self-plug]

I'm the admin of www.cloudmakers.org. The article here doesn't really give a very good explanation of why one of the members of Cloudmakers has created the brute force script, so here's a little background...

A couple of weeks ago, the game makers organized "anti-robot rallies" (see http://www.unite-and-resist.org) in LA, Chicago, and New York. One of the puzzles were given at these rallies were jigsaw puzzles (one for each city). LA and New York were able to keep their puzzles until they were completed and we translated the missing pieces into binary (thus hex) code that is seen on the puzzle page linked on slashdot. However, Chicago was not allowed to keep their puzzle and they only completed enough of it to give us one of the 4 digit hex fields. So we have 8 hex digits to figure out. While this is still pretty daunting, there have been no clues to tell help us out. We've successfully brute forced other pages in the game before, so perhaps the game makers _want_ us to do this, even though some people think it's against the "rules" of the game. But we've never been told the rules, so who knows?

I think it's important to say that there's much, much more to this game than this brute force script. Read the Trail and Guide to get up to speed. If you want to try to play the game yourself without spoilers, check out the Journey. And if you're really into it after that, join our mailing lists which are linked on the main page of cloudmakers.org.

---
Brian Seitz (praying to the slashdot effect gods)

I'm the admin of www.cloudmakers.org. The article here doesn't really give a very good explanation of why one of the members of Cloudmakers has created the brute force script, so here's a little background...

A couple of weeks ago, the game makers organized "anti-robot rallies" (see http://www.unite-and-resist.org) in LA, Chicago, and New York. One of the puzzles were given at these rallies were jigsaw puzzles (one for each city). LA and New York were able to keep their puzzles until they were completed and we translated the missing pieces into binary (thus hex) code that is seen on the puzzle page linked on slashdot. However, Chicago was not allowed to keep their puzzle and they only completed enough of it to give us one of the 4 digit hex fields. So we have 8 hex digits to figure out. While this is still pretty daunting, there have been no clues to tell help us out. We've successfully brute forced other pages in the game before, so perhaps the game makers _want_ us to do this, even though some people think it's against the "rules" of the game. But we've never been told the rules, so who knows?

I think it's important to say that there's much, much more to this game than this brute force script. Read the Trail and Guide to get up to speed. If you want to try to play the game yourself without spoilers, check out the Journey. And if you're really into it after that, join our mailing lists which are linked on the main page of cloudmakers.org.

---
Brian Seitz (praying to the slashdot effect gods)

I'm the admin of www.cloudmakers.org. The article here doesn't really give a very good explanation of why one of the members of Cloudmakers has created the brute force script, so here's a little background...

A couple of weeks ago, the game makers organized "anti-robot rallies" (see http://www.unite-and-resist.org) in LA, Chicago, and New York. One of the puzzles were given at these rallies were jigsaw puzzles (one for each city). LA and New York were able to keep their puzzles until they were completed and we translated the missing pieces into binary (thus hex) code that is seen on the puzzle page linked on slashdot. However, Chicago was not allowed to keep their puzzle and they only completed enough of it to give us one of the 4 digit hex fields. So we have 8 hex digits to figure out. While this is still pretty daunting, there have been no clues to tell help us out. We've successfully brute forced other pages in the game before, so perhaps the game makers _want_ us to do this, even though some people think it's against the "rules" of the game. But we've never been told the rules, so who knows?

I think it's important to say that there's much, much more to this game than this brute force script. Read the Trail and Guide to get up to speed. If you want to try to play the game yourself without spoilers, check out the Journey. And if you're really into it after that, join our mailing lists which are linked on the main page of cloudmakers.org.

---
Brian Seitz (praying to the slashdot effect gods)

I'm the admin of www.cloudmakers.org. The article here doesn't really give a very good explanation of why one of the members of Cloudmakers has created the brute force script, so here's a little background...

A couple of weeks ago, the game makers organized "anti-robot rallies" (see http://www.unite-and-resist.org) in LA, Chicago, and New York. One of the puzzles were given at these rallies were jigsaw puzzles (one for each city). LA and New York were able to keep their puzzles until they were completed and we translated the missing pieces into binary (thus hex) code that is seen on the puzzle page linked on slashdot. However, Chicago was not allowed to keep their puzzle and they only completed enough of it to give us one of the 4 digit hex fields. So we have 8 hex digits to figure out. While this is still pretty daunting, there have been no clues to tell help us out. We've successfully brute forced other pages in the game before, so perhaps the game makers _want_ us to do this, even though some people think it's against the "rules" of the game. But we've never been told the rules, so who knows?

I think it's important to say that there's much, much more to this game than this brute force script. Read the Trail and Guide to get up to speed. If you want to try to play the game yourself without spoilers, check out the Journey. And if you're really into it after that, join our mailing lists which are linked on the main page of cloudmakers.org.

---
Brian Seitz (praying to the slashdot effect gods)

Welcome to the A.I. game from the maintainer of the Trail. Please check out the Cloudmakers website--we've put a lot of work into this and there's a tonne of resources for people who are new to the game.

Come join us! We need heads :)

Dan (a Cloudmaker, a Cloudmaker Moderator and the Trail Guy)

Welcome to the A.I. game from the maintainer of the Trail. Please check out the Cloudmakers website--we've put a lot of work into this and there's a tonne of resources for people who are new to the game.

Come join us! We need heads :)

Dan (a Cloudmaker, a Cloudmaker Moderator and the Trail Guy)

I'm one of the moderators for Cloudmakers. Those looking to get involved should definitely start at the Cloudmakers home page.

We're always looking for new players to jump on board, so read the FAQ and subscribe!

<humor>Oh, and buy CM T-shirts too!

I'm one of the moderators for Cloudmakers. Those looking to get involved should definitely start at the Cloudmakers home page.

We're always looking for new players to jump on board, so read the FAQ and subscribe!

<humor>Oh, and buy CM T-shirts too!