from: Jane MacGonical

        
    Together, these trends shift ubiquitous gaming culture toward a
    more massively collaborative co-production and reproduction of ludic affordances. They
    indicate the historical emergence of an open ubiquitous game network, through which a
    massively-scaled community of players are empowered to create their own real little
    games and to develop their own more gameful reality.
    
    
    These accidental and intentional hacks to the puppet master system signify a
    momentum toward applying an open-source philosophy of play to the real world, a
    momentum also observed in the explosion of grassroots alternate reality games and the
    demonstrated ability of ARG players to continue perceiving patterns of their games after
    the games have ended.
    
    For players, then, the pleasures and challenges of real-world
    gaming missions are very much the pleasures and challenges of dramatic performance.
    
    flash mobs, which like reality-based superhero games are mission-based and
    authored by an anonymous puppet-master, as offering a kind of middle ground between
    reality and optionality.
    
    The designers and gamers who embrace the puppet master model are
    establishing together a new criterion for realism in gameplay.a psychological realism
    that perfectly complements the .immersed in reality. aesthetic of ubiquitous gaming.
    
    
    For Caillois, .this
    latitude of the player,. or well-defined scope for freedom of action, confirms that
    autonomy is the phenomenological heart of play (8).
    
    
    In Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman observe: .Games create social contexts in
    which, very often, behaviors take place that would be strictly forbidden in society at
    large. (478).
    
    They point to a variety of popular games that .permit and often encourage
    normally taboo behavior..such as the folk game Spin the Bottle, which allows romantic
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    intimacy outside the context of a romantic relationship; the party game Twister, which
    encourages players to invade each other.s personal space; the board game Diplomacy,
    which explicitly permits lying and backstabbing; the competitive computer game
    Counter-Strike, which promotes aggressive trash-talking among players; and the
    massively-multiplayer game The Sims Online, which allows for gender-crossing role play
    (478). All of these game-based interactions, according to Salen and Zimmerman,
    represent .forbidden play. (478).
    
    the player is not only creating a physical
    representation of a virtual act, but also pointing out that the computer function is itself
    conceived linguistically as a virtual representation of a physical act.
    
    crudely constructed, obviously homemade, but also capable of
    provoking a moment of ludic frisson for the person who finds it among the commercial
    maps.
    
    The missions are created to demonstrate just how often the external reality will submit to
    the ludic desires generated by the game.
    *
    
    However, in all cases, the mission
    continues until a team has established dramatic .proof., the term used to refer to the
    404
    digital documentation of staged interventions, that the environment has yielded to their
    superheroic intervention.
    
    the superheroic feeling of a Go Gamer arises
    through a reverse transitional play.
    
    In the essay .Playing and Reality., Winnicott identifies a form of child.s play called
    transitional play, in which the player wonders if he or she exerts an extraordinary,
    .magical control. over everything in the environment (47).
    
    
    discover missions:
    These open-ended challenges are also
    called .creative missions..creative in the sense that the players are building their own
    interactive systems. The puppet master provides the mechanic, but the players provide the
    context and the parts.
    
    But what kind of interaction would be most satisfying? We opted for a
    combination of close observation, physical stunt, and public art intervention.
    
    As did .Fill the Frame., the .Face First. mission augmented the built environment.
    this time, with symbols and tool.in order to make such a satisfying interaction possible.
    
    Since the affordance of an empty frame is to be filled, the mission that naturally
    suggested itself around this sculpture took the form of a public art intervention.
    
    
    Both the explicit use of the term .heroic. and the
    decision to call games challenges .missions. evokes the language of superhero texts.
    
    
    The game offers to reveal the
    true nature not only of the city, but also of the players.
    
    an environment that is pulsing with ludic
    signals.
    
    Whereas
    ARGs adopt the real world as a platform for play, RBSGs are designed to help players
    experience real life as a platform for play.
    
    
    Rushkoff argues that games, by exposing the nature and malleability of their
    systems, in fact encourage gamers to see the entire world as their open source playground.
    
    
    Because real life doesn.t come with a
    help file, Lee explained, players must figure out the rules of the game on their own.
    
    By
    performing a belief in the game, players serve as active co-producers of the game.s
    illusion and co-constructors of its ludic frame.
    
    Ultimately, the ability to detect the game among things that claim to be
    real, rather than detecting the real that intrudes on the game, is the true challenge of
    ubiquitous games like The Beast.
    
    The TINAG rhetoric was
    not taken as a denial of gameness, but rather as an expansion of the definition of what a
    game can be.
    
    In
    The Rise of Network Society, Manuel Castells describes the coming culture of real
    virtuality as a world .where make believe is belief in the making. (375).
    
    emergent phenomenon, I will consider the three primary elements of the ludic system that
    produced it: ubiquitous gaming.s interactive platform, it aesthetics, and its community
    structures.all of which, I will argue, seek to virtualize reality by bringing the
    technological, formal, and social limits of play into a more intimate and flexible relation
    with everyday life, respectively.
    
    The clarity of a
    game mechanic is proposed as an alternative to the often alienating complexity and
    inscrutability of everyday events and encounters.
    Multiplayer gameplay is proposed as an
    alternative to passive reception of media content, and as an alternative to social isolation
    both in the private and the public sphere.
    
    Indeed, the greatest
    evidence of the computer science revolution predicted by Xerox PARC is found currently
    in the category of massively multi-player works I call ubiquitous games.
    
    What makes games .exceptionally tasty., or
    fun, according to Koster, is their design as formal systems that strip away much of the
    noise of everyday reality. A good game makes it challenging, but ultimately possible, to
    discern the essential signal of its interactive pattern
    
    In A Theory of Fun, game designer Raph
    Koster argues that pattern recognition is in fact the quintessence of all gameplay.
    
    media theorist N. Katherine Hayles writes: .Virtuality is the cultural perception that
    material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns. (69).
    
    Cultures are made up of
    communications processes,. he writes,
    and all forms of communication, as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard
    taught us many years ago, are based on the production and consumption of
    signs.
    
    
    
    Kuhn calls the successful emergence of a conceptual framework that
    fundamentally changes scientific practice a paradigm shift.
    
    pervasive gaming most closely approaches truly ubiquitous play and
    performance in its ability to teach and to inspire others to draw their own magic circles
    
    imitating an art project is perceived as an innocuous
    public act, whereas playing a secret game was considered a sign of possible malicious
    intent.
    
    It resituates this desire in
    a more critical context, where novel technological concepts are deployed as metaphors
    rather than mediating platforms for social engagement. The result is a new urban gaming
    agenda: to enact social reconfiguration through technological critique.
    
    the inability of digital
    semblances to replicate the diversity of direct experiences afforded by physical objects
    
    Gold's first slide reads: "In societies where modern conditions
    of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of
    'spectacles'. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. -
    Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle" ([1]).
    
    
    
    urban landscapes contribute to our
    own formulation of identity, community, and self
    
    
    
    Whereas computer emulators are designed to allow us to play
    games from the past, could ubicomp emulators let us play games from a hoped-for
    technological future?
    
    (www.theoldcomputer.com)
    
    The main challenge of ubiquitous computing is to envision smart environments that
    provide a reasonable advantage for people using it, without violating the social and legal
    rules of our society and life. (371)
    
    p95
    
    Games become the platform for discovering the weaknesses of a technological
    system so that it can be re-designed and re-engineered.not for better play, but for better
    computing. 117
    
    In .Open House., a 1996 essay for New York
    University.s Interactive Telecommunications Program Review, Weiser claims: .The
    defining words of ubiquitous computing will not be .intelligent. or .agent., but rather
    .invisible. and .calm. and .connection.. (1). 129
    
    in fact only invisible in the real-world. It is perfectly visible in the virtual environment!
    This distinction creates a clear incentive for virtual participation rather than material
    engagement.
    
    To the
    extent that ubicomp values an .escape from the screen., ubicomp games do not seem to
    have been very successful to date at making that escape (Wellner et al 24).
    
    Indeed, this fear of loss of control is what Rich Gold evokes in his classic ubicomp
    presentation: .How Smart Does Your Bed Have to Be Before You.re Afraid to Go to
    Sleep at Night?.
    
    In a paper titled .Intimate (Ubiquitous)
    Computing., they write:
    This next era is predicated on a sense that the appliances and algorithms of
    the future will respond better to our needs, delivering .smarter. more
    context-appropriate, computing power. Underlying such a vision is the
    notion that computers in their many forms will be pervasive and
    anticipatory. Arguably, to achieve this, computing appliances will have to
    become more intimate, more knowing of who we are and what we desire,