Blast Theory

I've just added a new link to Brighton's Blast Theory, a playful interactive art group who's work deals with the boundaries between actual and virtual, between the serious and play, with convergence and our relationships to technology.

I once had the pleasure to play one of their games, I Like Frank, which was physically based in Adelaide, the city I used to make video games in when I lived in Australia, but which also co-existed simultaneously online. Players ran around the city looking for clues, while communicating to online players who were hunting for clues on the project's website and trying to direct their real world counterparts.

It was interesting and fun. I was playing with a close friend who I'd not seen for months, and it gave us a way to be co-present in a shared space: partly the real city, partly a virtual representation of the city, and partly our imaginations and memories of the other. I was able to see her avatar on the virtual map reflecting where she physically was, and she was able to see my avatar on the same virtual map displayed on her mobile phone. My avatar was like a ghost - it was physically located but only visible through the map on her phone. Our interaction and 'communication' was limited to being able to move our avatars relative to one another, as well as me being able to send SMSes through the game to her, which she could only reply 'yes' or 'no' to. Despite these incredibly limited means of expression, our shared knowledge of one another facilitated a wonderfully rich level of signification and interpretation to these acts.

This kind of mediated interaction fascinates me, and is incredibly important to games like poker. Think about our session last week and how we were trying to second-guess one another, trying to emphasise with each other and interpret body language and playing style. I was intentionally using what I knew about each other's personality to guide my play - to estimate when I could force other players out of the game with a bluff, or to know when someone else was trying to do the same.

In professional poker this kind of unintentional semiotics is probably more important than the individual's 'skill'. As Ben mentioned, it is technically classified as a game of 'chance' (hence gambling), but the skill involved is more subtle than statistical analysis or card counting; it is the skill of 'reading' obfuscated human communication mediated by the unusual, novel channels of the game. By this I do not only mean the formal rules of the game, but the environment and actions the game affords and the cultural history developed through play that inform our current relationship to it; Poker is a 'serious' game, it has a wealth of associations in film which can lend it an intimidating presence. We've all heard stories about the crazy things that can happen if it goes too far. It's interesting to think about this in terms of crossing the 'magic circle', where bluring the lines between play and the real world can be dangerous. This is a common argument against recreational drug use too.