Pheon
John Maccabee, founder of CityMystery, helped to create Ghosts of a Chance, American Art's first alternate reality game which was a first for museums everywhere. He and his team recently helped us launch Pheon, which has an online component as well. We caught up with the San Francisco-based Maccabee when he stopped by the museum last week.
Eye Level: Tell me about CityMystery. What have been some of your more interesting projects? When you walk into a museum today do you think, "Hmmm. Now, here's a story that would make a great game."
John Maccabee: CityMystery came about after I found ARGs. Wikipedia defines ARGs as games that use the real world as a platform—in other words, games that encourage players to interact with the real world as part of the game. Our most interesting projects? Among our first games was one I designed for an alumni weekend at George Washington University. It was cellphone based and had players interacting, via cell, with in-game characters played by student actors. Each character had a particular neurosis (utterly depressed, or over compensating, hysterical or paranoid). Players won if they used the correct approach to get the loopy character to divulge a clue. That was a lot of fun and took about an hour to play through. And, yes, to answer your question about walking into museums and thinking in terms of their narratives. Objects are narratives, setting is another, and curatorial choice is yet another. It is a many-layered experience.
EL: When you created Ghosts of a Chance for American Art it was the first museum ARG. What inspired you to create this game?
JM: Time inspired much of Ghosts of a Chance. We knew it would end the week of Halloween and that made a ghost story possible. Also, we wanted to introduce the game to early adopter ARGers. And there was a convocation of them in Boston three months before our official launch. At that point I wanted to influence gamers' suppositions about museums, which is why I introduced the game by having a near-naked and henna tattooed professional body builder (Mr. New England, three years in a row) show up in the middle of a conference. He flexed and posed for about five minutes and gamers surged forward with phones clicking off pictures of him. Above his heart was a tattoo of a lover's eye miniature, which resides in the Luce Foundation Center. It took the players several hours to find the connection to the Smithsonian. It worked well because it fooled them. They didn't associate body builders with American art.
EL: You recently launched Pheon which also has an online component. Are the two ARGs related?
JM: They are related because they ask players to make things for the game. For Ghosts of a Chance when the players made more, more of the story was unlocked. In Pheon players complete missions to prove humanity's worth. Pheon is about a more evolved civilization threatening to destroy us because we have become worthless. The game has a comic book; it also has in-game characters communicating through tweets and they hack our official site. A new iteration of the game will have seasoned players creating missions for newer ones. We also have prizes. This will debut the third week in March.
EL: Tell me about your work with your colleague Sean Mahan.
JM: Sean and I have worked together on both Smithsonian American Art Museum games. He and two other partners designed and operate sf0, which has been running for five years on at least two continents. Sean and I work at coffee places, of which San Francisco has many, and on the phone. And we work on site—our Smithsonian American Art games have a live, on site component that take about an hour and a half to play through.
EL: What inspires you and what's next for CityMystery?
JM: Innovation inspires me: placing innovation in an understandable and compelling context, giving it a historical perspective. Games are games and they are also stories. You can’t have games without them. As far as what is next, we are designing an on-site game with some online components and we continue to explore partnerships with schools to develop transmedia curricula. It is time for curricula to be expressed in terms that students understand, using venues, techniques, and tools they use every day.
EL: Thank you, John. Go forth and innovate!
