Introduction
About 18 months ago, my partner Rob Bevan and I completed a CD ROM called MindGym -ostensibly a training product designed to help middle managers think more creatively and become more flexible about problem solving. The disk was also marketed, though, as a consumer title and ended up winning awards BOTH as a comedy entertainment product -a game, if you will - AND as a serious business learning tool.
This comic merging of entertainment and play with adult education and business information has informed our work ever since. What I'm going to do now is give you a 15 minute dash through a major piece of work we've been developing since MindGym was completed. A lot of it is work in progress, and isn't by any means what we'll end up publishing - so be gentle with us!
It should though give you a very strong flavour of the themes that preoccupy us, and our attitude towards play
XMASPRESENT
For ten days in August 1997, we had the opportunity to attend a publicly funded workshop called European MultiMedia Labs where we were expected to develop a professional pitch for one of our product ideas.
We dreamed up XmasPresenT -a multiplayer network game, or rather a 'connected CD adventure' as we liked to call it then -but instead of a pitch Rob and I produced a 3 minute teaser trailer Ðsomething designed to whet the appetite and make you feel like this was a game you'd really like to play.
Our aim with XmasPresenT was to create an interactive multiplayer game that played like a good movie, and lived in the real world, not just on a computer/TV screen.
Based on a novel written by... er... me, it's a game with a narrative, characters, places and events. It starts with you receiving an offer from Sir Gerald Inomynte, chairman and chief executive of XPT Ltd. He wants to give you a present. The ultimate XmasPresent in fact. The one thing you wanted from life. Perhaps it's a secret. A desire you've been harbouring. Or perhaps it's something you want to get rid of.
All you have to do to tell Gerald what you want. Confess to him your heart's desire and he'll give it to you. Whatever You Want
Unfortunately, once you've defined this gift, it gets stolen and the real game commences.
You see, everyone who is playing this game has lost a parcel -a parcel which contains very personal information. So the goal is to be the first to find your package, which lies waiting for you in a secret room somewhere in London. And that means preventing anyone else from finding their package first.
As you travel through the world of XmasPresenT, you are forced to deal with a range of different activities: conversations, confrontations, clues, puzzles, mazes, games. You come across many secret rooms and many packages. These packages may or may not be worth keeping, since they will have a bearing on the ease with which you can complete specific tests and exercises.
You meet and deal with the game's central characters (people like Gerald); you have to cover up personal secrets and desires that have been let slip during the playing of the game; you have to decide whether to track down, pick up, trade or discard the mysterious packages you find, knowing full well that the combination of packages you choose to hang on to will have a bearing on how successful you can be as a player.
4 BASIC AIMS
We had four basic aims with XmasPresent:
- To produce a game that's fun to play, immersive, easy to pick up and difficult to put down, full of personality and style.
- To represent the game experience as a social activity: to use mail, chat and other communication functions to allow people to carry on their banter around the game, like they would around a poker table on a Friday night or a Monopoly board on a Sunday afternoon - teasing each other, ganging up on an individual, enjoying running gags, dredging up personal histories, embarrassing stories and so on.
- To create an imaginary world full of people and places, blurring the line between truth and fiction by telling lies about real places (like Ham House in Richmond) and real people (like Henry Kissinger), and telling the truth about made-up places (the SBS Building) and fictional people (Caroline, who we'll meet in a moment). This would also allow us to play games around the idea of virtual tourism - getting to know London without ever visiting it, and yet discovering when you did get round to visiting, it isn't quite like you imagined it to be...
- To use the Xmas theme and the rituals of gift giving as the engine for gameplay - allowing players to give, take, swap, barter, steal various packages and parcels. Through this gift giving and taking we wanted to explore the many motives that can lie behind the giving of a gift -an act of charity, bribery, patronage, power, a sense of debt, a sense of something owed, a gesture of affection -the list goes on
THE BARRIERS TO DEVELOPMENT
As it stood then, XmasPresenT was a mighty undertaking for us.
It was expensive to build -probably a million dollars of somebody's money
It relied on complex technology with (as yet) no appropriate mass consumer platform to develop it for.
It would require us to dedicate the whole company to this one project -a big risk for a small company.
It would be the first out and out game we had ever designed, so our inexperience was likely to show
It was not like other games and therefore difficult to sell into an established world of sport sims, beat em ups, strategy stuff and RPGs.
THE CONSTITUENT PARTS
So during 1998 we decided to look at different ways of achieving our four basic aims of playfulness, social activity, the blurring of fact and fiction and the art of give and take.
This has led us to breaking down XmasPresent into -so far - three constituent parts. They are: the XPT corporate Web site; a Webcam drama called Online Caroline, and an alternative game of give and take called Mynutes.
First the XPT site...
What we're trying to do with this site is create a fictional corporate presence to such a level of detail that people start to believe in it. We have a charismatic president...
We can take in the history of the company, information about its global hq, its regional centres, XPT fellows such as Baroness Mary Cheeseman, Henry Kissinger and Carl Lewis.
We can get details of its product and services, register for those services
We can find case studies on existing clients, both corporate and individuals.
We can click out to client web sites.
In the case of Caroline we have gone a bit further. For her we have developed a discreet drama all about her life as lived through a Webcam. She's looking for an online friend that could be you.
On the site you can watch the WebCam, check out Caroline's house, her work, her fridge, her bird in a cage, her boyfriend. You can also influence Caroline: tell her what to wear, what to do, what to eat. And she's going to email you every day, after every visit to her Webcam site, and over a period of a month you'll see her life unravel.
And all the time there is the shadow of XPT and an issue about certain packages appearing and disappearing... Just to give you some sense of what this might be like, Rob has built another teaser trailer about Online Caroline which I'll play for you now.
Finally there is the give & take game engine, that we're now calling Mynutes. In essence what we're doing here through Mynutes is working out the basic gameplay for the bigger XmasPresenT idea.
I'm going to move through some basic prototype screens which I hope will show you how the initial idea behind XmasPresenT - that of capturing personal information and then using that information as the basis of a poker-like trading game -is still alive. Again, this is real work in progress stuff...
I have received gifts -these could either be actual cards that you carry about with you or electronic tokens. It doesn't matter really as long as they're coded so that the central game database can keep track of who has which cards.
These cards are the key to unlocking secrets within the seven spaces that make up the first level of the Mynutes landscape. The goal is to unlock the secret of the seventh space. As well as seven cards, each player has to carry seven secrets.
So here's a basic system for unlocking a few personal secrets. I just click on the words and build my confession.
And then if I want to confess something closer to home...
For every secret you give up you get a secret in return. Such as that you are no the only one on these journeys. That you are in competition. That only one will unlock the secret of the seventh space
Another secret...
Something personal...
And another piece of information -the revelation that there is not just one journey, but seven journeys. Forty nine spaces and a whole host of people playing at the different levels, using their gifts to get on in the world, both the real world and the world of Mynutes
And their reward for all this effort?
Well, everything you ever wanted, of course, courtesy of XPT.
MYNUTES: BASIC GAMEPLAY
You'll see here how the basic pitch of XmasPresent hasn't changed. We're equipping players with seven cards and we're taking from them seven secrets. We're then giving them a target card combination that they must secure in order to travel to the next square on our Mynutes map. Players have to swap cards in order to get the right combinations. But your secrets always travel with your cards. And the more secrets you know about other players the more you can demand of them in terms of card swaps. In other words, the more secrets you gain access to, the more successful you will be at gift giving and taking, and travelling through the game. At the higher levels, the secrets get more serious and the gifts are not just cards but any object of a certain colour and with a certain code...
THE BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE CONSTITUENT PARTS
What really has changed about XmasPresenT is the business model For example the development budget for these three modules is roughly a fifth of the XmasPresenT budget. They addresses the burgeoning online audience, rather than the increasingly insular gaming community They can support sponsorship/advertising (and even online merchandising or shopping Each module can evolve into other formats (digital TV, console, print etc) We can connect and integrate players using existing communication tools (email, fax etc) And we can create a mythology around XPT, Mynutes and characters like Caroline that seeps into the real world -it's a platform for all kinds of stories, adventures... and games. The XPT corporation is our playground, if you will.
END
Still, of course, we have yet to find a commercial outlet for this work. The XPT site and Online Caroline were due to go on air this autumn, but our Canadian partners underwent a change of management and a change of heart. We're currently seeking new partners.
In the meantime, the plan for the new year is for Rob Bevan and myself to actually become XPT -register ourselves as a company under that name, so that our creation becomes both our playground AND our professional face to the world.
For us, the lines between our work and our play could dissolve completely in 1999.
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