Pervasive Games

During a lecture we learnt about pervasive games, these included games such as killer, which is a role playing game played in universities and colleges.

The game killer is where student, in the example of a uni or college, play undercover assassins that have to assassinate other people taking part in the game. At the same time of having a target to assassinate they have to watch out for the assassin that is also after them. To assassinate a participant you can either shoot them with a Nerf gun or use an alarm clock as a pretend bomb. This game can be derived back to the 1953 short story, "The Seventh Victim" by Robert Sheckley.

"La Decima Vittima" or "The 10th Victim" was an Italian made film, directed by Elio Petri, which told the story of The Seventh Victim, it was released in 1965 and sparked two sequels by the names of Victim Prime and Victim.

La Decima Vittima was an interesting watch to say the least, with every scene complicating me more and more. That said, I could not stop watching, every bad scene was accompanied by endless humor and laughter, which I cant actually tell if that was intended or an accident. In the film there is a group of people who are assassins and a group who are victims, and as the roles suggest the assassins hunt the victims, but this isn't the key part of the story, the most important part of this story is Marcello Polletti, played by Marcello Mastroianni (easy to remember Marcello plays Marcello), Marcello is a  world famous assassin in a world where countries no longer fight wars, they instead have assassins to assassinate the other countries assassins, this resolves the conflict. Marcello is the assassin for Italy and has been payed to assassinate Caroline Meredith, the assassin of America, who just so happens to have been payed to assassinate Marcello as well. They spend most of the film doing a little 'dance' with each other teasing and trying to trick the other person, with more and more elaborate assassination attempts, i think if lost track after i saw a crocodile being put in a swimming pool waiting for someone to be catapulted by a hidden spring into the pool. However, the climax to this film comes as Caroline betrays Marcello by shooting him with his own gun on TV for the advert she was paid for. However.... Plot twist time.... Marcello had changed the bullets in his gun for blanks and faked his own death only to shoot her on TV for the money the same people had promised him.... wait WHAT?!?!? oh it gets better, after everyone chanting that she should have drunk more Ming Tea and Marcello sulks away it turns out that she isn't dead...... and after a light hearted sexist comment about women and a small fist fight, Marcellos ex wife and mistress turn up shooting.

Over all I lost track of the main plot line through out most of the films and felt that half of it was confusing, however i enjoyed it a lot and thought it was an enjoyable film for some laughs, not sure if that was intended or not.

Any way, back to pervasive games, this isn't a film review.

In the game of killer, that i spoke about earlier, there is a considerable overlap between the real world and the game world, this means that the game world, or where the game happens, is in the same place as the real world, or life and/or work and/or education. More simply put, people in a person real world who aren't participating in the game world are asked question about the game world, and real people who are unaware of the game world, may become alarmed about actions happening in the game world, as to them, it is the real world.

This link between the real world and game world has a concept called the "magic circle" as a debated topic around it. The idea that spoke to me most was Montola, who stated that for hard-core gamers, there is no magic circle between the real world and game world, gaming has become ordinary and a 'way of life' so for them, the real world and game world are basically one. Montola cited Pargman and Jacobsson for this and using Malaby he states) Gaming isn't separate from the real world like the magic circle suggest, but has become and more and more so each day, part of every day life, it is become a part of the real world and because of it there are consequences in it.

That last part to me is something i can link back to a blog i did a few days ago about computer games. How a game like GTA can be criticized and sued for influencing people to do all manner of things that they may usually not do. This to me is clear evidence that there is a much larger link between real life and game life that some people don't realize, that games can be something that can influence certain people and that certain people take game life more seriously than they take their own real life.

Even outside of computer games people are considered to be taking game to seriously, and example of this is the street wars that used to happen in London where a group of people would have a massive water fight on the streets of London. This became an issue when innocent bystanders had their day 'ruin' because of people taking the game seriously. Now i am a strong believer that games are important and are something that are going to take a more and more integral role in every day life in the future, but i can agree that they need to be maintained and controlled, a computer game is less of an issue because you mainly play those at your home, however a large water fight, where it might be enjoyable for those taking part could get out of hand and is a lot harder to monitor, and the second it becomes something that gets in the way of someones real life, it becomes and bigger issue.

An answer to this would be a game played in San Francisco where people walk in groups of people and either greet, compliment or point out a destination, to each group and form larger groups of people until one group remains. This game is something that can be played out in the real world and still be something that never gets in the way of people not taking part, it is also a game that could be just as enjoyable as the killer game, hunting people to greet for example. and never have the issue of influencing people to do bad things. I mean who ever greeted someone to death.