Together, these trends shift ubiquitous gaming culture toward a
  more massively collaborative co-production and reproduction of ludic affordances. They
  indicate the historical emergence of an open ubiquitous game network, through which a
  massively-scaled community of players are empowered to create their own real little
  games and to develop their own more gameful reality.
  
  
  These accidental and intentional hacks to the puppet master system signify a
  momentum toward applying an open-source philosophy of play to the real world, a
  momentum also observed in the explosion of grassroots alternate reality games and the
  demonstrated ability of ARG players to continue perceiving patterns of their games after
  the games have ended.
  
  For players, then, the pleasures and challenges of real-world
  gaming missions are very much the pleasures and challenges of dramatic performance.
  
  flash mobs, which like reality-based superhero games are mission-based and
  authored by an anonymous puppet-master, as offering a kind of middle ground between
  reality and optionality.
  
  The designers and gamers who embrace the puppet master model are
  establishing together a new criterion for realism in gameplay.a psychological realism
  that perfectly complements the .immersed in reality. aesthetic of ubiquitous gaming.
  
  
  For Caillois, .this
  latitude of the player,. or well-defined scope for freedom of action, confirms that
  autonomy is the phenomenological heart of play (8).
  
  
  In Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman observe: .Games create social contexts in
  which, very often, behaviors take place that would be strictly forbidden in society at
  large. (478).
  
  They point to a variety of popular games that .permit and often encourage
  normally taboo behavior..such as the folk game Spin the Bottle, which allows romantic
  416
  intimacy outside the context of a romantic relationship; the party game Twister, which
  encourages players to invade each other.s personal space; the board game Diplomacy,
  which explicitly permits lying and backstabbing; the competitive computer game
  Counter-Strike, which promotes aggressive trash-talking among players; and the
  massively-multiplayer game The Sims Online, which allows for gender-crossing role play
  (478). All of these game-based interactions, according to Salen and Zimmerman,
  represent .forbidden play. (478).
  
  the player is not only creating a physical
  representation of a virtual act, but also pointing out that the computer function is itself
  conceived linguistically as a virtual representation of a physical act.
  
  crudely constructed, obviously homemade, but also capable of
  provoking a moment of ludic frisson for the person who finds it among the commercial
  maps.
  
  The missions are created to demonstrate just how often the external reality will submit to
  the ludic desires generated by the game.
  *
  
  However, in all cases, the mission
  continues until a team has established dramatic .proof., the term used to refer to the
  404
  digital documentation of staged interventions, that the environment has yielded to their
  superheroic intervention.
  
  the superheroic feeling of a Go Gamer arises
  through a reverse transitional play.
  
  In the essay .Playing and Reality., Winnicott identifies a form of child.s play called
  transitional play, in which the player wonders if he or she exerts an extraordinary,
  .magical control. over everything in the environment (47).
  
  
  discover missions:
  These open-ended challenges are also
  called .creative missions..creative in the sense that the players are building their own
  interactive systems. The puppet master provides the mechanic, but the players provide the
  context and the parts.
  
  But what kind of interaction would be most satisfying? We opted for a
  combination of close observation, physical stunt, and public art intervention.
  
  As did .Fill the Frame., the .Face First. mission augmented the built environment.
  this time, with symbols and tool.in order to make such a satisfying interaction possible.
  
  Since the affordance of an empty frame is to be filled, the mission that naturally
  suggested itself around this sculpture took the form of a public art intervention.
  
  
  Both the explicit use of the term .heroic. and the
  decision to call games challenges .missions. evokes the language of superhero texts.
  
  
  The game offers to reveal the
  true nature not only of the city, but also of the players.
  
  an environment that is pulsing with ludic
  signals.
  
  Whereas
  ARGs adopt the real world as a platform for play, RBSGs are designed to help players
  experience real life as a platform for play.
  
  
  Rushkoff argues that games, by exposing the nature and malleability of their
  systems, in fact encourage gamers to see the entire world as their open source playground.
  
  
  Because real life doesn.t come with a
  help file, Lee explained, players must figure out the rules of the game on their own.
  
  By
  performing a belief in the game, players serve as active co-producers of the game.s
  illusion and co-constructors of its ludic frame.
  
  Ultimately, the ability to detect the game among things that claim to be
  real, rather than detecting the real that intrudes on the game, is the true challenge of
  ubiquitous games like The Beast.
  
  The TINAG rhetoric was
  not taken as a denial of gameness, but rather as an expansion of the definition of what a
  game can be.
  
  In
  The Rise of Network Society, Manuel Castells describes the coming culture of real
  virtuality as a world .where make believe is belief in the making. (375).
  
  emergent phenomenon, I will consider the three primary elements of the ludic system that
  produced it: ubiquitous gaming.s interactive platform, it aesthetics, and its community
  structures.all of which, I will argue, seek to virtualize reality by bringing the
  technological, formal, and social limits of play into a more intimate and flexible relation
  with everyday life, respectively.
  
  The clarity of a
  game mechanic is proposed as an alternative to the often alienating complexity and
  inscrutability of everyday events and encounters.
  Multiplayer gameplay is proposed as an
  alternative to passive reception of media content, and as an alternative to social isolation
  both in the private and the public sphere.
  
  Indeed, the greatest
  evidence of the computer science revolution predicted by Xerox PARC is found currently
  in the category of massively multi-player works I call ubiquitous games.
  
  What makes games .exceptionally tasty., or
  fun, according to Koster, is their design as formal systems that strip away much of the
  noise of everyday reality. A good game makes it challenging, but ultimately possible, to
  discern the essential signal of its interactive pattern
  
  In A Theory of Fun, game designer Raph
  Koster argues that pattern recognition is in fact the quintessence of all gameplay.
  
  media theorist N. Katherine Hayles writes: .Virtuality is the cultural perception that
  material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns. (69).
  
  Cultures are made up of
  communications processes,. he writes,
  and all forms of communication, as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard
  taught us many years ago, are based on the production and consumption of
  signs.
  
  
  
  Kuhn calls the successful emergence of a conceptual framework that
  fundamentally changes scientific practice a paradigm shift.
  
  pervasive gaming most closely approaches truly ubiquitous play and
  performance in its ability to teach and to inspire others to draw their own magic circles
  
  imitating an art project is perceived as an innocuous
  public act, whereas playing a secret game was considered a sign of possible malicious
  intent.
  
  It resituates this desire in
  a more critical context, where novel technological concepts are deployed as metaphors
  rather than mediating platforms for social engagement. The result is a new urban gaming
  agenda: to enact social reconfiguration through technological critique.
  
  the inability of digital
  semblances to replicate the diversity of direct experiences afforded by physical objects
  
  Gold's first slide reads: "In societies where modern conditions
  of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of
  'spectacles'. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. -
  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle" ([1]).
  
  
  
  urban landscapes contribute to our
  own formulation of identity, community, and self
  
  
  
  Whereas computer emulators are designed to allow us to play
  games from the past, could ubicomp emulators let us play games from a hoped-for
  technological future?
  
  (www.theoldcomputer.com)
  
  The main challenge of ubiquitous computing is to envision smart environments that
  provide a reasonable advantage for people using it, without violating the social and legal
  rules of our society and life. (371)
  
  p95
  
  Games become the platform for discovering the weaknesses of a technological
  system so that it can be re-designed and re-engineered.not for better play, but for better
  computing. 117
  
  In .Open House., a 1996 essay for New York
  University.s Interactive Telecommunications Program Review, Weiser claims: .The
  defining words of ubiquitous computing will not be .intelligent. or .agent., but rather
  .invisible. and .calm. and .connection.. (1). 129
  
  in fact only invisible in the real-world. It is perfectly visible in the virtual environment!
  This distinction creates a clear incentive for virtual participation rather than material
  engagement.
  
  To the
  extent that ubicomp values an .escape from the screen., ubicomp games do not seem to
  have been very successful to date at making that escape (Wellner et al 24).
  
  Indeed, this fear of loss of control is what Rich Gold evokes in his classic ubicomp
  presentation: .How Smart Does Your Bed Have to Be Before You.re Afraid to Go to
  Sleep at Night?.
  
  In a paper titled .Intimate (Ubiquitous)
  Computing., they write:
  This next era is predicated on a sense that the appliances and algorithms of
  the future will respond better to our needs, delivering .smarter. more
  context-appropriate, computing power. Underlying such a vision is the
  notion that computers in their many forms will be pervasive and
  anticipatory. Arguably, to achieve this, computing appliances will have to
  become more intimate, more knowing of who we are and what we desire,