A new kind of game...

It's not a coincidence, right? This interest of mine in these online puzzles. Starting with that silly nonsense show "Nemesis Game", then that website with Escape from Crimson Room that Key introduced, and then that notpron site where I'm currently at level 19 (of 135), and today, while I was surfing http://www.fictionwise.com for more free e-books for my Axim, I come across "The Beast" due to a link to Sean Stewart's e-book.

What's the Beast? A reality computer game.. they left pieces of dialogue and stuff all over the net and all over real life and the community at large tried to make sense of it. It seemed to be based on the AI movie so it's a long while now.. old hat maybe, but I'm going to try to figure it out. Seems like an informational site at http://www.cloudmakers.org, and one of the founders wrote a perfect introduction here.

This seems to be the kind of game I'm really looking for.. something challenging and difficult, involves real life, I can pause anytime I want. And most importantly, a good storyline to work out, some kind of conspiracy that I have to discover, or a picture or series of perspectives that makes things clear. That's what I liked about Viridian room over Crimson room, which was the sense of completion in the ending, when you go like, "ohhhh..." And it helps when the individual stories are good stuff too, like this part of the Beast storyline. (Note to self: remember, truth is about internal and external consistency. With these, who knows?)

Anyway, while I go searching for more of these, it seems like there's one to investigate now. Avant games seems to have come up with a game "I love bees", headquartered at a blog and puppetmastered by Jane McGonigal. It happened during the US presidential election I think, so I'm way behind, but at least Jane offered a way to jump into the game. Heh. Well. Off into the rabbithole, and who knows? At least this seems more like what Neo should have done to escape the matrix, rather than being approached..