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KENDRA sounded panicky over the phone. She and Mike were on the run, holed up
in a motel somewhere in Utah. I’d been trying to help them for a few days, but I
was starting to wonder if I was in over my head. Suddenly there were shouts, the
sound of a door being kicked down, Kendra’s scream, and then the line went
dead.

Later that day I was sat at my computer trying to figure out what was going
on when my phone rang. It was a threatening call from a gruff-voiced man,
warning me that I already knew too much. If I didn’t stop helping these people
my life would never be the same again.

This is Majestic, a new kind of game developed by Electronic Arts of Redwood
City, California. EA is known for computer games such as Quake, SimCity and FIFA
Soccer. But Majestic isn’t a computer game in the traditional sense. It’s an
immersive, interactive fantasy that uses technology to put you at the heart of a
violent conspiracy.

What Majestic promises is a game that you can’t switch off, one that blurs
the line between fantasy and reality. It’s a game that exploits your reliance on
communications technology to infiltrate your life. It calls you up in the middle
of the night with threatening phone calls, sends you faxes and e-mails, and
contacts you unannounced via Internet instant messaging. “We’ll go to any length
to suspend your disbelief,” says Neil Young, the game’s creator.

The promise of an Internet game that takes control of your life struck a
nerve. In the run-up to the game’s release this summer, reporters speculated
about just how frightening the game might be. “Majestic is basically a game that
invades your life,” said USA Today. “You’re just a pawn,” said CNN.com.

It’s a spooky idea, but also an exciting one —exciting enough that so
far 100,000 people in the US and Canada have signed up to play. I was among the
first, and I did so with trepidation. Did I really want my privacy invaded, my
notions of reality bent? How bad would it get?

The first step towards surrendering my freedom is to install a program on my
PC that communicates with a central Majestic server. This will monitor my
progress—which Web pages I look at, the messages and phone calls I
receive—and collate the evidence I accumulate. It also provides me with a
list of other players I can communicate with, which it calls my “allies”.

Majestic gets off to a cracking start. On my first night I’m watching a video
tutorial about the game when the sound and picture distort and the video clip
crashes. While I’m wondering what to do next, I start to get messages on my
screen from people I’ve never met asking me what’s going on.

These turn out to be my allies. Some of them tell me they’ve received a phone
call informing them that the game’s designers have been the victim of an arson
attack and it’s up to us to figure it out.

Over the next few days I start to get a handle on the game’s storyline. The
central plot concerns the game designers Mike, Kendra and Shintaro, who
accidentally uncover a shadowy government program on mind control. Soon they’re
too close to the truth and must be silenced. Their software company, Anim-X, is
attacked. But they escape and go on the run. It’s my job to help them work out
who’s behind the attack while evading the shadowy bad guys trying to track them
down.

As part of the game, you use the Majestic website as a search engine to look
for clues. The search engine gives you access to the real Web, but also directs
you to phoney pages posted specifically for the game. Some give you useful
clues. Others are calculated to throw you off the scent.

The mixture of real and fictional Web pages is a clever device. With so much
pseudoscience and paranoia on the Internet already, it’s tough to decide which
websites exist only in the game and which are for real. The result is an odd
blurring of fantasy and reality. I experience this while researching a scientist
named John Lilly, whose name crops up in some “secret” documents sent to me by
e-mail. Through an Internet search I find a magazine interview that reveals
Lilly as a pioneering neurophysiologist who started experimenting with
hallucinogenic drugs and now spends all his time trying to communicate with
dolphins. I assume he’s a character invented for the game. Later I find out he’s
for real.

If only the rest of the game worked this well. But the cracks begin to show
almost immediately. For example, it quickly becomes apparent that some “allies”
are not fellow gamers at all but characters planted by Majestic. That’s a nice
touch, but they’re not real people, they’re “chatbots”—simple programs
that try to respond conversationally, but which come across as comically
thick-headed. Early in the game, in my guise of BKurtK, I have the following
exchange with Silent Partner, an ally I suspected wasn’t all he seemed:

Silent Partner: Have you had any interactions with your allies yet?

BKurtK: Yes, we’ve been interacting quite a bit, to no apparent purpose.

Silent Partner: I encourage you to communicate with your allies often.
In any event, EA will likely announce the suspension of Majestic tomorrow morning.
Then we can begin.

BKurtK: Yowza.

Silent Partner: When you’ve received the suspension notice, I’ll contact you
again with more information.

BKurtK: Looking forward to hearing from you. Give my regards to Emily and the
kids.

Silent Partner: Right now it’s essential that you get to know your allies.
You need to determine who can be trusted.

BKurtK: Thanks for the good advice. I’ve found baking soda removes
most stains.

Silent Partner: That’s all I can say right now. In the morning things
will start to become clearer.

After a few exchanges like this I start to feel a little deflated. Majestic
doesn’t seem to be living up to the hype. But to stay in the spirit of the game,
I try to act in a way I think the chatbots expect. This improves their responses
a bit. But even then, they’re annoying to deal with. Like a talkative elderly
neighbour, they pretend to listen to what I’m saying then pick up their train of
thought undisturbed. I try to warn three different characters that I think one
of them has been implanted with a mind-control device. None shows the slightest
interest.

This is one of the problems with Majestic. It promises to be an interactive
game, but can only offer the illusion of interactivity. The storyline is
necessarily predetermined, and as you are led along it step by step the illusion
wears pretty thin. If you’re a little slow on the uptake, the game steps in and
spoon-feeds you the necessary information.

Once, when I delay investigating a Web address I’ve seen on a document,
Silent Partner contacts me and suggests I go there. If I didn’t, the game
couldn’t advance. In this sense Majestic does take over. But where’s the
fun?

Other actions involve a modicum of detective work. In a photo of mysterious
agents raiding a motel, the most conspicuous detail is a rental agreement from
“Provo Rent-A-Car” in the back pocket of one of the agents. The licence plate of
the car he’s standing next to is clearly visible. I do a Majestic Web search for
Provo Rent-A-Car, find its (fictional) website, call the phone number, and
discover I’m able to input the licence number and get the name of the person who
rented it. It’s an important clue. But that’s as hard as the sleuthing gets.

Maybe I overlooked some more subtle clues along the way (I’m still not sure
why I received a map of Paris early on). But even if I miss something vital, the
game is sure to nudge me in the right direction. EA presumably figures that if
the game is too hard, people will stop paying their $9.99 a month
subscription. Developers say the puzzles will get harder. But they also promise
that the game will always help out if you get stuck.

Majestic is also supposed to be an entertaining mystery story, which unfolds
like a movie or TV show. But the characters are cardboard and the plot
machinations far from intriguing. The game required me to figure lots of things
out: where are Mike and Kendra? Is Los Alamos somehow involved? Yet somehow it
never made me care.

That said, it’s an intriguing idea. There’s something strangely alluring
about surrendering control of your life to a game. And Majestic isn’t the only
one of its kind. Just as the game was released, an Internet mystery tied to
Steven Spielberg’s movie AI: Artificial Intelligence reached its conclusion. The
AI game was superior to Majestic in almost every way. It had fiendishly
difficult puzzles and an intelligent story with complex characters who engaged
your sympathy. Players had to work together to solve puzzles, allowing them to
read the next portion of the story in the form of diary entries, transcripts of
conversations and hidden Web pages. Because the story relied so heavily on text,
it had some of the richness of a novel.

This is where Majestic falls short. It doesn’t matter how cleverly you use
technology if the content isn’t compelling. True, the game’s events excite a
basic interest—that primal urge to know what happens next. After I
finished the free pilot episode I signed up to the first real one.

I’ll play Majestic to the end of the current episode, the same way you might
stick with a mediocre movie just to see how it all comes out. But I’ll probably
cancel after that. And in the meantime, when my phone rings late at night, I’m
not going to sweat it.