(logged via lyd:) Have you been to Cloudmakers.org? In my inestimably humble opinions, it is by far the best and most innovative use of the web ever, for anything… or, more accurately, is is the result of that innovation (and it only took me two whole hours of reading the same html document to come to this conclusion). Cloudmakers it the group that monitors the web-integrated real-time story that ties in to the new Spielberg flick (originally Kubric) movie AI, except this story takes place nearly a century after the movie and seems to include only one or two of the same characters. And, even more thrilling and chilling, the game has integrated into real-life with actual rallies that dispersed clues… so that if people didn’t attend the game would have stalled out. With a month left still until the movie is released, the mystery seems to be still far from its end. Meanwhile, the game features a full cast of characters, hundreds of dynamic pages of html, (long distance) phone numbers with actual messages to hear, email responders that continuously talk back, fax numbers to obtain information from, and nearly impossible puzzles that integrate information from all of the above sources and more. At a recent panel about the movie there were business cards for an special effects director who shares a name with the first character introduced into the game, and the back of the business cards contained a clue that wasn’t released in the web aspect for a few more day. The game itself occasionally refers to Cloudmakers as a multi-person problem solving scheme that equates to group AI, and occasionally links fan sites as in-game news. Also, if you’re the first person to solve a puzzle you can occasionally effect the game environment, as one person got to write a faked autopsy for one of the primary players in the puzzle.
The game itself is a bit too involved for me, but following it is nothing but a delight and joy. Second to journalism (or stardom), i’d love to be employed to design stuff like this, whether it be storyboarding or web designing. In the meantime, i can just hope that the movie is half as good as what has been conjured up to accompany it.