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'Truman Show'-Style Online Game Uses Actors, Not Animation


A man is trapped in the cabin of a floating boat. He says he's been abducted and needs your help.

You tell him to stick his camera phone out of a tiny window that you notice behind him. There's a combination written on the side of the boat that unlocks his door, and he opens it to a deck scattered with riddles and puzzles that will ultimately — with your help cracking them — lead to his rescue.

This is a computer game, of course, but there are no animations. There are no special effects, no rules and no prizes.

There's just a living, breathing man floating in a real boat.

"They yell back," says Anthony Purzycki, one of the game's creators, about the difference between a game with live actors and a traditional computer game. "If you stop playing for a minute, for example the old Mario games, Mario stops and taps his foot.

"With this, if you stop playing, there is a person on the other end. They’re not just going to stop and tap their foot. They’re going to start yelling, 'Hey, let's go. Help me.'"

Purzycki and his six co-founders first set out to make an independent film, and the games they make reflect that. Technology is limited to a shared chat room, a live-streamed video of an actor and an occasional YouTube video.

The games' appeal relies on the improvisation skills of an actor, who responds to requests and questions from players as he works with them to peg down his location.

In Alternet Reality's first pilot game, players rescued an actor who was stranded in a boat.

The startup, Alternet Reality, launched its first pilot game with the boat-stranded actor in October. It took six hours for players to figure out where the actor was located and alert the in-game characters who rescued him.

In that time, the number of players increased from about 45 to about 1,200. Purzycki sees that growth as a testament to the game's potential.

The startup has no funding, and its production hasn't yet reached cinema quality. Still, it plans to launch eight more original games in October and hopes to eventually sell product placement.

For now, what they've created is a compelling experiment in the style of the 1999 movie The Truman Show, in which one man lived his life surrounded by actors playing the roles of his friends and neighbors.

"With this, you get to actually engage the character," Purzycki says. "It’s the idea that you’re really saving someone. You fall into that mind frame that this is real."

For the boat abduction game, the actor was blindfolded and brought to a lake in New Jersey without telling him where he was or what situation was in store for him.

"When we had him sign the waiver, he almost cried," Purzycki tells me "it was a very emotional moment."

I ask what the actor was afraid of.

"What if he falls off the boat?," Purzycki says.

Well, what if he falls of the boat?

"Then he swims."

Players read a case file that sets the scene before starting the game.

Alternet Reality doesn't put actors in real danger (in its most recent game, for instance, it did not actually bury the actor alive in order to achieve the effect), but it does put them in truly difficult situations. The startup is currently auditioning actors by having them talk to a video camera inside of a coffin.

"Your interaction is really controlling whether this person gets rescued," Purzycki says. "So, if the audience decides they don’t like you, they’re probably just going to leave you to die."

Sometimes it can be easy to forget the actor on the other end of the livestream is a person and not a video game character. A puzzle presented to the actor on the boat, for instance, was that he had a black light with no bulb. It was clear the black light would reveal a clue written somewhere on the boat.

One player, hearing that there was a chemical in blood that activated black light paint, suggested the actor cut himself. Others suggested he pee on the boat. The actor declined both suggestions, but they are a sign that this kind of reality-show game could enter dubious territory.

They're also what makes Alternet Reality different from "alternate reality games" in which a group of players collaborates on an online task without a real-time drama.

"You’re interacting as if this is really a real situation," Purzycki says. "In a slightly mundane world where we’re just working non-stop or taking care of family, it provides this escape hatch."

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, acitore

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