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Now declassified & available online! Russian Quantum Leap technology enhances RNA, DNA & health, cures diseases

Posted by Magnus Olsson on December 11, 2016
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Mind Control, Mindcomputers, Tech News. Tagged: artificial intelligence, behavior control, brain, cell phone technology, computer, diseases, dna, Health and nutrition, magnus olsson, Microwaves, Military, mind control, mindtech, mindtech enterprises, Quantum Leap, rna, russian, science, SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY, Technology. Leave a comment

Now declassified & available online! Russian Quantum Leap by the American Company Wave Genome enhances RNA, DNA & health, cures diseases ( e.g. diabetes, cancer 2), stops TI targeting. 

December 6, 2016

Now declassified & available online! Russian Quantum Leap technology enhances RNA, DNA & health, cures diseases (e.g. diabetes, cancer 2), stops TI targeting.

By Alfred Lambremont Webre

WATCH QUANTUM LEAP PANEL INTERVIEW

 

 

alfred-webre-morton-hernebring-magnus-ollson

alfred-webre-mårten-hernebring-magnus-olsson

Watch Russian Television RT Interview with Magnus Olsson [Seen by 14 million persons]

Mind Control – Remote Neural Monitoring: Daniel Estulin and Magnus Olsson on Russia Today

You Tube:      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9bd-B2dqCM  

VANCOUVER, BC – Newly arrived from Russian Quantum Leap by the American Reaserch and Development Company Wave Genome and its Founder and Sole Owner Irene Caesar Ph.D. Magnus Olsson and Madlen Namro, are joined by their colleagues Mohamed Ali Yuusuf, and Mårten Hernebring to launch the public version of Quantum Leap technology of Wave Genome Irene Caesar Ph.D, a declassified technology used by Russian Special Forces to enhance DNA, RNA, personal health profile and performance, eye and vision health, as well as provide personal protection against Transhumanist agenda weaponry including remote directed energy weapon [DEW] and psychetronic attacks, such as “V2K (Voice To Skull) and cancer guns, subliminal advertising and psychic attacks”.

According to MindTechEnterprises, authorized distributors outside Russia for the ULTIMATE TESLA GENERATOR, created and produced by the American company Wave Genome and its President, Sole Owner and Founder Irene Caesar Ph D,”
and other products of Wave Genome LLC.

“The information-wave technology of the Laser Bioholography has been perfected by decades of research experience and clinical trials; it has been patented, licensed and certified by the Russian Ministry of Health; and, at the present moment, it is widely commercialized all over Russia. The information-wave technology of Laser Bioholography is based upon the application of Quantum Physics to Genetics, a new theory of Genetics, which is called Structuralist Genetics (© Irene Caesar, Ph.D., 2010), and the application of the stabilized He-Ne lasers with internal mirrors.”

MindTechEnterprises Website

Mindtech

Full details of this first-ever public roll-out of Russian classified protective and health-status enhancing technology are set out in the above Panel interview and at Quantum Leap’s distributors website at:

www.MindTechEnterprises.com

Quantum Leap Scalar Technology online

Quantum Leap technology, now available online through mini-Tesla Psi generators from the www.MindTechEnterprises.com website and through smart-phone apps, reportedly enhances the user’s RNA, DNA & health profile, prevents and cures diseases such as diabetes, Stage 2 cancer, and stops Transhumanist Agenda weapons such as Voice to Skull and electromagnetic remote targeting.

The Quantum Leap technology’s Mini-Tesla Generators come with Digital Pharmacy and a subscription service.

Quantum Leap technology, in applications developed in conjunction with Russian scientist Irene Caesar PhD. According to Dr. Caesar, the technology results in “Rejuvenation of all the Physiological systems, including endocrine system, digestive system, cardiovascular system, hearing / eye sight, reproductive system, intellectual abilities, improvement of memory.”

Services offered by MindTechEnterprises at their website include

  • Purchase of Mini-Tesla Psi Generators
  • Laboratory Therapy Visits (Moscow) and

Quantum Internet Therapy via remote laser signal

  • On Demand Wave Genome [RNA, DNA] rejuvenation
  • also vist the website Wave Genome Irene Caesar Ph D
  • http://wavegenome.com/

Some features of the Quantum Leap Ultimate Generator

According to Wave Genome Irene Caesar Ph.D, “The device is easy to wear in the form of a pendant cased in pearl, completely unobtrusive, and people can’t tell exactly what it is because it is cased in pearl and does not look too unusual or like a “medical device”, etc. The device is indestructible.  The device is waterproof for basic small splashes, but should not be immersed in water.

Global Brain

The team uses a high resolution picture of yourself from early childhood (around 4-6 years of age) to develop sophisticated holography matrices from the picture using laser technologies and quantum technologies including scalar waves.  They are able to recreate your energy field from when you were a child in a personal digital wave matrix and then use the device to continuously feed your current energy field with information from your childhood energy field.  This helps to restore your current energy field to healthier conditions.  This newer model has logarithmically more powerful protection features compared to the older versions of this device. 

This new model still comes with all the health features of the older model including the E-Pharmacy, and ongoing health monitoring by professionals.  The older more generic version of the device has been worn by members of parliament and Special Forces in Russia as well as the Russian Olympic Team. Over 5000 scientists/researchers from Russia have collaborated to work on this special project developing this device using the most advanced science in the world.

Some benefits of the Ultimate Generator:

The advanced technologies in the device can neutralize psychotronic/electronic attacks.  The device is able to eliminate V2K.   You can sign up for a monthly membership service to have the expert professional staff at the Moscow clinic in Russia monitor your health on an ongoing basis.  If anything goes wrong with your health they are able to correct deviations from normal even before you notice symptoms of any actual medical condition.  If medical conditions exist, many of them can be completely healed. You can receive medications remotely administered through the device.  They get filtered through your own energy field and are guaranteed to never cause any adverse side effects. 

The device helps to boost your immune system to diminish susceptibility to any illness.  The device can help neutralize the negative effects of cosmic radiation when you fly in an airplane long distances.  It can also reduce jet lag as well as keep you healthy while traveling. The device can help boost your energy, can help you sleep better, and can help you recover from any stressful events, sleep deprivation, etc., much faster.  It can help you think more clearly and improve overall cognitive function. ( Irene Caesar Ph.D.)

How purchasing works:

You can buy online at the website or through a smartphone app.  Please see

https://mindtechenterprises.com/purchase.html

Choose which version of the product you want to purchase.  We recommend the Ultimate Generator as it is the most powerful version.  Payments are processed using Paypal and other methods.  You will be contacted to send a high resolution childhood picture of yourself.  You will receive the device in the mail within 6 weeks.  It takes this long to produce this device and to customize it for each individual.  But don’t worry, it will be worth the wait!

Tesla Glasses

IRENE CAESAR, PH.D.: ON TECHNOLOGY AND THEORY OF TESTLA GLASSES

The Panel also discusses Tesla glasses that have been developed and successfully used by Russian Security Forces for prevention and correction of:

  • Stress and its consequences;
  • Deterioration of the physical and mental performance;
  • Reduction of immunity and the bodily defenses;
  • Eye diseases;
  • Diseases of the internal organs and physiological systems

Tesla Glasses

Tesla Glasses

According to Wave Genome Tesla Glasses use the method of Polarized Holography. Polarized Holography is the application of Quantum Physics for the purpose of rejuvenating all organs of the person through the Eye Crystal (Eye Lens and Iris). It is proven to provide significant physical and mental improvement, including a significant improvement in brain functions: decision speed, attention and memory.

The method consists in the control of the brain via triggering the holographic signal in the eye, and its modulation. This control overwrites any verbal and mental imperatives, is non-local (can be used for instantaneous transmission of information at infinitely large distances), instantaneous (exceeds speed of light), and simultaneously reaching out towards every cell in the body.

The method is based upon Quantum Physics, specifically, upon the theory and technology of Polarized Holography, which uses the modulation of the holographic signal according to the Kozyrev Mirror principle.

The method is based upon the special ability of an eye to convert any linear signal into the holographic signal. The process of this conversion consists in the emergence of the scalar wave diffraction grating, polarization and refraction toward the zero center of the wave crystal (torus). Since the universe is holographic, we can record and transmit information only via the holographic signal, and through the zero center of the wave crystal. The zero center of every toroidal wave crystal coincides from the zero center of every chromosome on the cellular level, and every atom and subatomic particle on the subatomic level to the zero center of our galaxy.

Any healing, rejuvenation, and mental, psychic, and physical enhancement are based upon the ability to produce, control and enhance the holographic signal. The holographic signal instantaneously reaches the zero center of every wave crystal in our body, from the subatomic and atomic to the molecular levels – from the zero center of our skull and every bone to the zero center of every metacentric chromosome. Our eyes, skull, bones and chromosomes are centered and focused similar to our eye crystal according to the laws of the geometrical optics.

Hence, the eye is a very unique receiver, transmitter, and producer of the holographic signal. And that is precisely why vision is a trigger of brain activity. Via correct triggering the holographic signal in the zero center of the eye crystal, we can immediately reach the zero center of the toroidal wave crystal of our brain, thus delivering controlling information instantaneously into the zero center of the wave crystal of every metacentric chromosome in cell division, and into the zero center of the wave crystal of every bone, so that stem cells are programmed in a correct way in the bone marrow.

Mindtech

Correct triggering consists in the modulation of the holographic signal in the eye. The modulation of the holographic signal in Tesla Glasses consists in (1) modulation by the Schumann holographic signal; (2) modulation by human Brain holographic signal; (3) modulation by the holographic signal of a healthy organ and physiological system, recorded upon the chip in the glasses. It is combined with the modulation by the narrowband light-emitting diode sources of five colors. Research had shown that five colors, used by the glasses, benefit organs and physiological systems. The signal for every color is produced from the holographic signal of healthy organs and physiological systems, and, then, it is matched with the color. The signal of the color is not simply the color frequency.

The carrier holographic signal is the individual holographic signal of the user – the unique [indestructible and uncreated] non-local wave matrix of the user. This is the primary holographic signal. The modulation holographic signals are the holographic enhancers, which help the unique [indestructible and uncreated] non-local wave matrix of the user get centered and focused in this dimension (on this planet). These are secondary holographic signals.

The advantage of the glasses over other Quantum Leap Polarized Holography devices is that glasses use an eye as a filter for filtering out all harmful linear signals, which unseal wave crystals. For example, microwave radiation shortens brain waves via “unsealing” the involuted wave crystals, thus, literally lowering the intellectual potential of people.

Mindtech

Thus, the effect of the Tesla Glasses is based not simply upon the superficial stimulation of innervation. The stimulation of innervation, tone of the eye muscles, blood circulation, regeneration, and enhancement of all other biochemical and bioelectrical processes in the body are based upon the structural efficacy of Polarized Holography, which centers and focuses chromosomes, and prevents the transformation of metacentric chromosomes into acrocentric chromosomes.

The modulation via secondary holographic signals (see above) allows for the emergence of the most coherent and sophisticated scalar wave diffraction grating that produces the more clear zero focus within the wave crystal (of a wave torus on every level from the atomic, subatomic to cellular and molecular levels).

The modulation occurs through the designated areas of Iris, each one corresponding to a specific organ in the body. As a result, the user achieves the stimulation of the projection zones in the Iris, each one being connected to a specific organ in the body.

In addition, Tesla Glasses use the same effect as the binaural therapy. Binaural therapy uses the stereo effect, when signal in one ear gets into the brain with delay in relation to signal in the other ear. This produces the emergence of the complex scalar wave diffraction grating in the skull, based upon Kozyrev Mirror principle (polarization, refraction and emergence of the zero center of the wave crystal). Similar to this, Tesla Glasses use the stereo effect of color signal, when color signal in one eye gets into the brain with delay in relation to signal in the other eye.

Ophthalmologists have found that all healthy people have rhythmic alternation visual perception. Man sees in turn by the right eye, and, then, by the left eye at regular intervals.

These intervals last for 2-3 seconds. The research was conducted using modern 3D technologies. And if one eye is covered by a blue filter, and the other eyes is covered by the red filter, the healthy person sees both colors simultaneously and separately. The left eye sees 20% of the image, and the right eye sees 80% of the image.

With age, these rhythms get broken. But the restoration of the “biological clock” is possible using Polarized Holography, modulated by color signals, with the frequency of the alpha rhythm of the brain of a healthy person. And, as the positive effect, we can achieve a significant rejuvenation of the body.© Irene Caesar 2015

The text is quoted from http://www.wavegenome.com

More information on Tesla Glasses is available, and Tesla Glasses can be purchased at:

https://mindtechenterprises.com

References

Quantum Leap, available from:

Wave Genome

http://wavegenome.com/

MindTechEnterprises

https://mindtechenterprises.com

Contact:

Email:

mintechtrade@gmail.com

Send A Message:

https://mindtechenterprises.com/contact.html

 

Alfred Lambremont Webre Contact/News:

Related

PART I: Magnus Olsson reveals artificial crystals in his blood, spread via smart dust, are a Transhumanist remote neural weapon for control

PART I: Magnus Olsson reveals artificial crystals in his blood, spread via smart dust, are a Transhumanist remote neural weapon for control

PART I: Magnus Olsson reveals artificial crystals in his blood, spread via smart dust, are a Transhumanist remote neural weapon for control Transhumanist think tanks foreshadowed revelation in 2011 VOLVO TV ad – “Magnus Olsson: it gets in your blood” NewsInsideOut.com By Alfred Lambremont Webre WATCH EXOPOLITICSTV INTERVIEW VANCOUVER, BC…

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EUCACH Director: Dr. Rauni Kilde radiated for four days with DEW.

EUCACH Director: Dr. Rauni Kilde radiated for four days with DEW. Remotely assassinated by NSA? By Alfred Lambremont Webre NewsInsideOut.com WATCH ON YOU TUBE VANCOUVER, BC – Magnus Olsson, director of the European Coalition against Covert Harassment (EUCACH.ORG), revealed today in a NewsInsideOut.com interview that EUCACH Board of Directors member,…

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A new DARPA program will explore using peripheral nerve stimulation to enhance learning processes in the brain

Posted by Magnus Olsson on May 18, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

Boosting Synaptic Plasticity to Accelerate Learning

A new DARPA program will explore using peripheral nerve stimulation to enhance learning processes in the brain

As envisioned by DARPA, the external TNT device will deliver safe and precise stimulation through the skin at specific points in the training process to release neuromodulators that promote synaptic plasticity. This triggered reorganization of neuronal connections in response to specific experiences is expected to accelerate learning and support long-term retention of learned skills.

The body’s branching network of peripheral nerves connects neurons in the brain and spinal cord to organs, skin, and muscles, regulating a host of biological functions from digestion to sensation to locomotion. But the peripheral nervous system can do even more than that, which is why DARPA already has research programs underway to harness it for a number of functions—as a substitute for drugs to treat diseases and accelerate healing, for example, as well as to control advanced prosthetic limbs and restore tactile sensation to their users.

military brain

Now, pushing those limits further, DARPA aims to enlist the body’s peripheral nerves to achieve something that has long been considered the brain’s domain alone: facilitating learning. The effort will turn on its head the usual notion that the brain tells the peripheral nervous system what to do.

The new program, Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT), seeks to advance the pace and effectiveness of a specific kind of learning—cognitive skills training—through the precise activation of peripheral nerves that can in turn promote and strengthen neuronal connections in the brain. TNT will pursue development of a platform technology to enhance learning of a wide range of cognitive skills, with a goal of reducing the cost and duration of the Defense Department’s extensive training regimen, while improving outcomes. If successful, TNT could accelerate learning and reduce the time needed to train foreign language specialists, intelligence analysts, cryptographers, and others.

brain computer

The program is also notable because, unlike many of DARPA’s previous neuroscience and neurotechnology endeavors, it will aim not just to restore lost function but to advance capabilities beyond normal levels.

“Recent research has shown that stimulation of certain peripheral nerves, easily and painlessly achieved through the skin, can activate regions of the brain involved with learning,” said TNT Program Manager Doug Weber, adding that the signals can potentially trigger the release of neurochemicals in the brain that reorganize neural connections in response to specific experiences. “This natural process of synaptic plasticity is pivotal for learning, but much is unknown about the physiological mechanisms that link peripheral nerve stimulation to improved plasticity and learning,” Weber said. “You can think of peripheral nerve stimulation as a way to reopen the so-called ‘Critical Period’ when the brain is more facile and adaptive. TNT technology will be designed to safely and precisely modulate peripheral nerves to control plasticity at optimal points in the learning process.”

mind weapon

DARPA intends to take a layered approach to exploring this new terrain. Fundamental research will focus on gaining a clearer and more complete understanding of how nerve stimulation influences synaptic plasticity, how cognitive skill learning processes are regulated in the brain, and how to boost these processes to safely accelerate skill acquisition while avoiding potential side effects. The engineering side of the program will target development of a non-invasive device that delivers peripheral nerve stimulation to enhance plasticity in brain regions responsible for cognitive functions. The goal is to optimize training protocols that expedite the pace of learning and maximize long-term retention of even the most complicated cognitive skills. To meet these diverse objectives, TNT expects to attract multidisciplinary teams spanning backgrounds such as cognitive neuroscience, neural plasticity, electrophysiology, systems neurophysiology, biomedical engineering, human performance, and computational modeling.

To familiarize potential participants with the technical objectives of TNT, DARPA will host a Proposers Day on Friday, April 8, 2016, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Va. The DARPA Special Notice announcing the Proposers Day and describing the specific capabilities sought is available at https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-SN-16-20/listing.html. A Broad Agency Announcement with full technical details on TNT will be forthcoming. For more information, please email DARPA-SN-16-20@darpa.mil.

Image caption: TNT technology will be designed to safely and precisely modulate peripheral nerves to control synaptic plasticity during cognitive skill training.

Boosting Synaptic Plasticity to Accelerate Learning/Resources/libraries/jQuery/01_09_01/jquery.js?cdv=49/Resources/libraries/jQuery-Migrate/01_02_01/jquery-migrate.js?cdv=49/Resources/libraries/jQuery-UI/01_10_03/jquery-ui.js?cdv=49

###

Media with inquiries should contact DARPA Public Affairs at outreach@darpa.mil

Associated images posted on www.darpa.mil and video posted at www.youtube.com/darpatv may be reused according to the terms of the DARPA User Agreement, available here: http://www.darpa.mil/policy/usage-policy.

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Weapons of perception: neuroscience and mind-controlled weapons…

Posted by Magnus Olsson on April 5, 2016
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: eucach, european space agency, gaming, Health and nutrition, magnus olsson, medicine, medium resolution imaging, mind control magnus olsson, nanotechnology, SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY. 2 Comments

Weapons of perception: neuroscience and mind-controlled weapons…

imagesCAFIY05T

Advances in neuroscience offer the military the potential of mind-controlled weapons and performance enhancement. Are mind-controlled weapons and extra-sensory enhanced warfare techniques mere science fiction? Recent developments in neuroscience suggest not, with a new Royal Society report claiming that research in areas such as neuropharmacology, functional neuroimaging and neural interface systems could create a new breed of super soldier and diminish enemy ability.

Neuroscience is one of the most rapidly advancing fields in medicine, with highly-detailed imaging offering new insights into the way the brain works and direct brain interfaces enabling weapons to be targeted and fired with just a thought. The technology is not speculative – just last week scientists unveiled an implant called BrainGate that enabled a woman who had lost the use of her limbs after a devastating stroke to control a robot arm using thought processes alone.

Neuroscience, conflict and security.

mind control

The new report, “Neuroscience, Conflict and Security”, formed part of a series that examined the impact of neuroscience on society, dealing specifically with the potential application of advances in neuroscience to the armed forces and security personnel.

It was chaired by Prof Rod Flower FRS, professor of biochemical pharmacology at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, and brought together international experts to discuss new developments in the field and the laws and ethics that apply to their application in a military and civil context. According to Flower, it was the first time the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) had worked with academia in neuroscience.

“A key advance in neuroscience has been improvements in real-time neuro-imaging, which can indicate in great detail which parts of the brain ‘light up’ when undertaking certain activities.”

“The people we were in contact with there were the horizon scanning team whose job it is to look out for potential new applications of research,” Flower said. “We relied on what was publicly available, and while the US is extremely open about what its military does, the UK is not so open, and countries like Russia and China are a complete cipher.”

mind control

A key advance in neuroscience has been improvements in real-time neuro-imaging, which can indicate in great detail which parts of the brain “light up” when undertaking certain activities. One of its applications could be to screen potential recruits for a specific role, for example to see if they are temperamentally suited to be a commander, pilot or diver.

“At the moment it’s very much a case of taking people on and subjecting them to high-stress exercises and choosing the ones who make it,” says Flower. “If they could be subjected to imaging during assessment you could identify who has good risk-taking behaviour, strategy and planning ability, or 3D analytical skills.”

mind police

Brain scanning for target identification

Brain scanning could also speed up and improve target recognition or identify changes in surveillance satellite images by recognising subconscious objective identification rather than an operator having to process and actively react.

“It has been discovered that when you show the brain different images, it spots the differences between them even though they may not reach conscious awareness,” says Flower. “Wearing a helmet like a hairnet can pick up a spike in brain activity which you can correlate to differences identified between two images, even if they were flashed up too quickly to process consciously.”

That potentially has the ability not only to speed up the process of target selection but also improve accuracy. It could also reduce problems associated with fatigue, which is a big issue facing people whose job involves scanning images for a long time, especially in the dark, such as surveillance UAV operators.

Mind controlled weapons and aircrafts

Solutions for situational awareness – battlefield innovations

Situational awareness solutions allow soldiers to make effective use of varied information in a battlefield context.

brain control

Technologies such as the BrainGate implant have already shown that machinery can be controlled with the mind alone, and games manufacturers have already brought out low-cost helmet controllers than enable wearers to play by mind power alone. The obvious application for the military is mind-controlled weaponry and remotely-piloted aircraft, which could make operation and reactions far faster.

“If you couple that with your subconscious mind being much faster at dealing with information you can see a situation sometime in the future where you’re not thinking about flying the aircraft, but your subconscious is doing it without interfering in any way,” says Flower. “You would probably have a much better appreciation of an incoming threat and fire off a couple of missiles without having to consciously think.”

digital brain

Drugs to stimulate troops and disable enemies

The report also examines evidence that certain drugs can improve the performance of personnel performing certain military tasks. Among these, drugs developed to relieve the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, such as Ritalin, have shown great promise on unaffected adults who want to focus their attention on a specific task.

“It could help when flying a long mission where you may become fatigued and your attention begins to drift off,” says Flower. “It could also help you focus when you have a lot of information to process, like being a fighter pilot in a particularly tense situation when you’re trying to get a missile lock on a target while the aircraft and radio are bombarding you with information and you have to communicate back.”

Another approach that could improve the way the brain works is known as trans-cranial electrical stimulation where electrodes attached to a 9V battery are clamped to the head. Control studies showed it can improve the rate at which things are learnt, and possibly result in better memory formation.

“One controversial subject the report touches on is that of neuropsychology-inspired chemical weapons.”

One controversial subject the report touches on is that of neuropsychology-inspired chemical weapons, discussing the fact that although the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) bans the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, they are allowed for civil law-enforcement purposes.

“One of the problems is as far as anyone in our field can find, it’s not possible to find a totally safe drug that you could use,” says Flower, citing the example of the Moscow theatre siege in which 150 civilians died alongside their Chechen rebel captors.

“It’s partly because everyone’s unique and responds in different ways. If you start spraying it around you may affect children, women, men, pregnant women, old men, people taking other drugs, and people with heart disease. It won’t just be the 70kg healthy young men on which these drugs are tested.”

Flower is also keen to bust some myths about some chemicals that were reportedly tested for their effects on enemy troops.

“Oxytocin is a hormone that’s produced in pregnancy that produces a feeling of emotional closeness and trust,” says Flower. “There was a lot of talk that you may be able to use this as an interrogation tool to make your captive trust you and tell you all his secrets. But as far as we can tell that’s all nonsense.”

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The ethics of neural war

Like automated weaponry and battlefield robotics, however, these new techniques could require an overhaul of ethical guidelines, especially with regards to civilian casualties. Currently the last person who gave the order to fire is responsible, but if it came from the operator’s subconscious, the line becomes blurred.

With advances in neuroscience holding such great potential for military applications, Flower would like to see the MoD to work closer with academia. One approach would be to have a two-way intern exchange between the MoD and academia.

“It’s not rocket science, the research is all out there, and most of it gets published,” says Flower. “It’s just a question of them being aware of it and able to pick up the ideas and exploit them before they read about it in Nature.”

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ADVISORS TO USA AND WORLD CACH

Posted by Magnus Olsson on March 5, 2016
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Micro/Nano Brain Implant, Mindcomputers, Uncategorized. Tagged: artificial intelligence, brain, brain computer interface, brainchip, magnus olsson, Military, mind control, nanobots, nanotechnology, wibe, william binney, world cach. 1 Comment

 ADVISORS TO USA AND WORLD CACH

We are honored to have American heroes William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe as advisors to the board of directors of WORLD CACH (Coalition Against Covert Harassment). Mr. Binney and Mr. Wiebe worked at the NSA for over 30 years. William Binney is the former NSA crypto-mathematician and J. Kirk Wiebe is a former NSA senior analyst.
Both worked in Signals Intelligence (specifically SARC – Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center): Mr. Wiebe, as a senior analyst and recipient of the Meritous Civilian Service Award and Mr. Binney as Technical Director of the World Geopolitical & Military Analysis Reporting Group.
Kirk W
The first World Covert Harassment Conference took place in the autumn of 2014 and William Binney was a featured speaker, explaining NSA’s system of logging of all communication systems data and the method of analysis. They both work tirelessly at bringing to light the violation of protections of personal freedoms that have occurred both in the United States and the European Union.
At the NSA, Binney’s team, including Wiebe, developed a program, THIN THREAD, which was ready in January 2001, prior to the 9-11 attack. However, General Hayden ignored THIN THREAD and chose an undeveloped program called TRAILBLAZER. TRAILBLAZER was only on paper and cost billions whereas THIN THREAD was only a $3 million price tag.
brainchip
TRAILBLAZER’s larger budget would benefit private contractors where THIN THREAD was strictly internal. In 2000, Binney and Wiebe went to Congress to blow the whistle on mismanagement and waste of funds in connection to Trailblazer. General Hayden was furious and sent out a memo accusing the whistleblowers of betraying the agency and stating “…I cannot tolerate them.”
In response to 9-11, President Bush began a secretive domestic surveillance program which included “STELLAR WIND”, based on Binney’s THIN THREAD, but with US Citizens’ protection removed, thus violating the Constitution.
Both Binney & Wiebe and others (Ed Loomis, Diane Rourke, and Thomas Drake) had their homes raided by the FBI and personal possessions seized. No charges were ever filed and in early 2010 the Department of Justice issued letters of immunity to our honorable advisors.  They are the subject of a recently released documentary, A GOOD AMERICAN.

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Google exec: With robots in our brains, we’ll be godlike…

Posted by Magnus Olsson on October 3, 2015
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Mind Control, Tech News. Tagged: artifical-intelligence, artificial mind, brain, control of the mind, Cracking the Code of the Mind, magnus olsson, mind control, SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY. Leave a comment

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.


usa brain

Futurist and Google exec Ray Kurzweil thinks that once we have robotic implants, we’ll be funnier, sexier and more loving. Because that’s what artificial intelligence can do for you.

I don’t know about godlike but we will be enhanced and this is inevitable unless the Middle East spreads into a world wide conflict then who knows what can happen.

We will have to do this or you will have 2 sets of humans. You will have regular and enhanced and regular humans will be like animals to enhanced humans especially as the brain implants become more complex. People will also opt for robotic arms and legs will will make things much easier until we’re basically a brain surrounded by robotic parts and maybe we will not even need a brain one day.

“Evolution creates structures and patterns that over time are more complicated, more knowledgeable, more intelligent, more creative, more capable of expressing higher sentiments like being loving,” he said. “So it’s moving in the direction that God has been described as having — these qualities without limit.”

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SICS Pervasive life take down…Humans to be killed…

Posted by Magnus Olsson on August 26, 2015
Posted in: Micro/Nano Brain Implant, Mindcomputers, Tech News, Uncategorized. Tagged: artifical-intelligence, artificial cognitive architecture, artificial mind, behavior control, brain, deep, deep mind ai, killing, magnus olsson, mind, mind control, nano brain implants, olsson. 1 Comment

SICS (The Swedish Institute of Computer Science) Pervasive life take down…Humans to be killed.

SICS Pervasive Game-Ethics. Personal Take Down… A way to kill…
Magnus Olsson (bionicgate@live.se)

mind bionic

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Public IPerG Deliverable 13/10 2006

Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

WorkPackage WP5: Design & Evaluation

Deliverable D5.5:

Ethics of Pervasive Gaming

Markus Montola (University of Tampere)

Annika Waern (SICS)

Jussi Kuittinen (University of Tampere)

Jaakko Stenros (University of Tampere)

Release date: October 13 2006

Status: public

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Executive Summary

In this report we discuss ethical issues related to pervasive gaming. Due to their nature, the

pervasive games influence the ordinary life outside the game in many ways, some of which

are beneficent while others are problematic. In this report we focus on the latter issues, while

also demonstrating the power for beneficence and social commentary. The problematic issues

that we rise involve questions of involuntary participation, power use, privacy and deception.

Involuntary and unaware participation is relevant, as the nature of a typical game is

contractual, and in pervasive games outsiders are drawn to the game without their explicit

consent. Power use is relevant, as the game organizers and operators typically hold significant

power over player, who seek to complete tasks set by operators during the game. This power

division is typically very asymmetric and non­transparent. Privacy is a natural concern in

games that pervade everyday life bringing the required surveillance technology along.

Deception takes place in many ways from purposeful reality fabrication to players discussing

game issues casually with outsiders.

In discussing ethics the concept of harm is critical; differentiating lasting setbacks to one’s

interests or assets from momentary nuisances that are a natural part of being a part of a

society. While ethics can be applied to both categories, in practice the latter issues especially

are better solved by politics that ethics. When harm is caused by pervasive game, the question of accountability remains. Usually such

harm is caused accidentally by unforeseen circumstances. Obviously the accidents that

happen in pervasive games are typically not physical like the ones in sports, but psychological

and social. Responsibility of such accident is typically shared by players and game organizers:

While the game designers, orchestrators and operators strongly guide the player activities, the

only the players can react in real time to unforeseeable circumstances and incidents. We study the ethical issues by analyzing several cases of pervasive gaming. While the most of

our detailed studies focus on past games, one examines an upcoming one and one game is

constructed on concept­level only for the purposes of this report.

Even though this report focuses on problematic pervasive games, we want to emphasize that

only few pervasive games are offensive or harmful. The purpose of this report is to make that

portion even smaller in future.

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Deliverable Identification Sheet

IST Project No. FP6 – 004457

Acronym IPerG

Full title Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

Project URL http://iperg.sics.se/

EU Project Officer Albert GAUTHIER

Deliverable D5.5 Ethics of Pervasive Gaming

Work package WP5 Design & Evaluation

Date of delivery Contractual M24 Actual M24

Status final ̨

Nature Prototype p Report ̨ Dissemination p

Dissemination

Level

Public ̨ Consortium (CO) p

Authors (Partner) Markus Montola (UTA), Jussi Kuittinen (UTA), Jaakko Stenros (UTA),

Annika Waern (SICS)

Responsible Markus Montola Email markus.montola@uta.fi

Author Partner University of

Tampere

Phone +358 44 544 2445

Abstract

(for

dissemination)

This report discusses the ethics of

pervasive gaming, based on five case

examples as well as brief review of

central ethical standpoints related to

pervasive gaming. Keywords pervasive game, unaware participation, social expansion, temporal expansion, ambiguous gameplay, ethics

Version Log

Issue Date Rev No. Author Change

9

th of Aug. 0.1 Montola First draft

14

th of Aug 0.2 Montola Added EM2 etc.

18

th of Aug 0.3 Montola Added ethics chapters from Jussi and Annika etc.

24

th of Aug 0.4 Montola Added autonomy and deception from Jussi etc.

4

th of Sept 0.5 Montola Reorganized, added stuff.

10

th of Oct 0.9 Montola Addressed reviewer comments, added text.

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary …………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………… 4

1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………. 5

2 Introduction to Ethics……………………………………………………………………. 6

2.1 Traditional Starting Points………………………………………………………………………….6

2.2 Applied Ethics………………………………………………………………………………………….7

2.3 The Ethics of Technology Usage …………………………………………………………………8

2.4 Artistic Motivation and Societal Commentary……………………………………………..14

3 Case Studies ……………………………………………………………………………….. 15

3.1 Vem Gråter ……………………………………………………………………………………………16

3.2 Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där Vi Föll………………………………………………………………19

3.3 Epidemic Menace 2…………………………………………………………………………………22

3.4 Beneficent Gaming, a Casuistic Exercise…………………………………………………….24

4 Practical Considerations ……………………………………………………………… 25

4.1 Unaware Participation ……………………………………………………………………………..25

4.2 Public Space…………………………………………………………………………………………..27

4.3 Ludic Interpretation…………………………………………………………………………………27

4.4 Story Spin ……………………………………………………………………………………………..28

4.5 Reality Fabrication………………………………………………………………………………….29

4.6 Player Rights………………………………………………………………………………………….29

4.7 Operator Power………………………………………………………………………………………30

5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….. 31

6 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………… 32

7 References………………………………………………………………………………….. 32

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1 Introduction

The salient feature of pervasive games is the way the borders of game and non­game are

blurred (see Montola 2005; Montola, Waern & Nieuwdorp 2006 for definitions and

discussion). As the interface of the pervasive game is ambiguous, the game actions conducted

by players and game orchestrators are both game actions and non­game actions.1 In addition

of wondering what is acceptable in the context of game, the pervasive game designer needs to

contemplate on what is acceptable in real life. Perhaps the two most important aspects are

fabrication and surveillance.

Pervasive games are structures of make­believe fabrication overlapping with the ordinary life

of the players. This fabrication ranges for example from playing combat robots (Botfighters)

to vampires (Vampire: The Masquerade), medical scientists (Epidemic Menace 2), ghosts

(Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll) and assassins (Killer: The Game of Assassination). For the

gamer the context of game is accessible, but to a bystander the game might appear as a prank,

a weird event or everyday reality. This friction of ludic and ordinary is an important source of

ethical conflicts and opportunities, as a game can directly influence ordinary lives of the

participants. (See Montola & Waern 2006a for discussion on unaware game participation).

Surveillance is important for orchestration of most pervasive games. The sensory functions

vary greatly, but they might include video surveillance (Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll), player­based reporting (Isle of Saints), cell phone positioning (Botfighters), GPS (Epidemic

Menace 2) et cetera. The ethics of surveillance are relevant for the privacy of the player, but

also it’s important to avoid the surveillance of outsiders or bystanders.

The purpose of this report is to open ethical discussion on what makes a pervasive game

design feature acceptable or unacceptable from the ethical point of view. Thus, it can also be

read as a guideline document for reflecting individual game designs.

In the work leading to this report we have found out that many ethical issues described in here

easily spark controversy. Apparently the most challenging, risky and unique ways of creating

pervasive games also hold the potential for the most interesting artistic expression, the

sharpest political commentary and the most engaging gaming experiences. We try to cover

both permissive and restrictive arguments in this report without taking sides as such. Thus,

there are few clear answers in this report, but rather some ethical guidelines for the use of the

reader’s own moral compass.

The concepts and most of the game examples used in this report have been earlier discussed

in an earlier IPerG report, D5.3B: The Domain of Pervasive Gaming (Montola, Waern &

Nieuwdorp 2005), which is publicly available in Internet.

Ethical issues have been touched earlier within IPerG at several occasions. D5.1 Initial

Design and Evaluation Guidelines provided a few considerations, and the work on social

adaptability and interaction design in D9.1 Guidelines for Socially Adaptable Games partially

touched a couple of related issues. Pervasive gaming business ethics have been briefly

discussed in D4.1 Business Guidelines.

1 This phenomenon, discussed earlier as interface ambiguity, stems from the fact that pervasive games are not played entirely inside the so-called ”magic circle of gameplay”. Walking into a shop with Botfighters on in one’s cellphone

constitutes a game action, as the player’s bot is moving in space – even though the player’s intent was not to perform

game action but to go get some groceries.

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This document does not discuss legislation and should not be used as legal advice.

2 Introduction to Ethics

In this report, we discuss the ethics of the pervasive aspects of pervasive games in particular.

Our discussion does not include ethics of gaming or ethics of pervasive applications, but is

restricted to pervasive games only. As discussed in previous reports, games are needless and

voluntary activities2 (Huizinga 1938); this distinguishes games from other pervasive

applications and poses particular ethical requirements.

2.1 Traditional Starting Points

The basic starting point for all professional ethics is the question of the right action: what

action in a given situation might be considered the right one and on what grounds. This

underlying fundamental issue is reflected in approaches such as utilitarianism and deontology.

2.1.1 Utilitarianism

The theoretical approach most notably put forth by Mill (1987) and Bentham (1982), utilitarianism relies on evaluating the consequences of actions. Utilitarianists hold that all

ethical considerations should be based on calculating the utility of an act, which is the amount

of good it produces, so that when faced with a moral dilemma, one must consider the

consequences of each possible act and choose the one that produces the most good. This is the

crudest form of utilitarianism aptly called the act­utilitarianism.

There are quite many problems associated with act­utilitarianism. First off, predicting future

consequences is very hard. Secondly, the biggest moral problems are often those that require

instant decisions, but utilitarianism forces the agent to consider all the alternatives and

calculate their consequences as far into the future as possible. Thirdly, although act­ utilitarianism might maximize goodness on individual situations, it might produce worse

results if everyone were to act in certain act­utilitarian ways. For instance, stealing money

from a bank to help a family in need might maximize happiness in a single instance, but if

everyone started doing it, the macro­economical consequences would produce great amounts

of unhappiness.

Rule­utilitarianism tries to address the two latter problems by stating that it is not the utility of

an individual act that should be considered but the utility of a rule. If there is a rule that

maximizes goodness when followed constantly, then it should be chosen. Although this would

reduce the time needed to make decisions, this would still leave the utilitarian with one major

problem: how to make good rules that address the needs of individual situations. For instance, a rule stating that one should never lie would need an exception that would allow lying in

order save a life. This exception in turn might need an exception that would deny lying in

situations where saving a life by lying would risk more lives, e.g. when one would lie to save

a known murderer, and so on forth. This formulation of exceptions and sub­rules can in fact

reduce the rule­utilitarianism back to the act­utilitarianism as Lyons (1965, 137) has argued.

2.1.2 Deontology

The other predominant traditional theory on right action is the deontology, a term and theory

created by Kant (1998) in the 18 th century. If utilitarianism is teleological, then deontologism

2 Needless does not mean useless or worthless. Pervasive gaming offers many opportunities for education (Regensburg

Explorer, Visby Under) and physical excercise (PacManhattan, Wanderer), for example.

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might be considered as causal in its application: there are some a priori duties that always

oblige one to act in a certain way regardless of the situation. Instead of looking at the

consequences of the action, the agent should focus on the duties having relevance with the

particular act.

So, how does one know one’s duties? For Kant, these were the product of the rational human

mind. If a rational human would think about it hard enough, he could have no other choice but

to come to a certain conclusion i.e. a rule Kant called the Categorical Imperative, which in

one form stated that one should only act according to a rule that one could at the same time

will to become a universal law. For Kant the Categorical Imperative imposed an

unconditional duty to all individuals and was the basis for all other moral duties.

The difference between deontology and utilitarianism is difference between the right and the

good as Rawls (1980, 30) puts it. While utilitarianists argue that an act is right when it

produces the most good, deontologists claim that an act may produce the most good even

though it is clearly wrong by violating another person’s universally acknowledged right or

some other generally agreed upon ethical principle. So, deontological thinking is not

dependent only on the considerations, but also on other issues.

The question now becomes, what are these rights and principles and how can they be agreed

upon by all the members of the society? Rawls’ answer is the hypothetical concept of original

position. He argues that if a group of rational people each acting as a representative for a

group of citizens, were stripped of, for example, such information as the wealth, race and

gender of the citizens they represent, they would choose a set of rights and principles that

would also benefit those citizens that have the least in terms of talent or wealth.

2.2 Applied Ethics

The problem of utilitarianism and deontology is that they are not concrete enough to be easily

applicable to everyday moral dilemmas, that is, they are more concerned with creating a

general theory of ethics instead of providing means to solve ethical problems. Applied ethics

is specifically aimed at creating methodology for solving practical ethical issues.

Before going further with the different approaches in applied ethics, it is necessary to go

through two central notions in contemporary ethical discussions: rights and principles.

2.2.1 Rights and Principles

Put simply, rights impose duties on other people or society to either act or refrain from acting

in a certain way. If a right imposes a restraint on acting, then it is a negative right and when a

right imposes a duty to act, it is a positive right. As an example, a right to life is a negative

right, since it imposes a duty to restrain from acting in manner that would kill someone, and

the right to social security is a positive right as it imposes a duty on society to provide social

services to those in need. Rights can also be absolute, in which case it is always inviolable

and should be respected regardless of any other considerations, or prima facie meaning that in

some cases other rights might outweigh the right.

In ethics a moral principle is a universal rule i.e. notion that defines a duty. Deontology and

utilitarianism are monistic theories in that they rely on one single moral principle. The

former’s principle is the Categorical Imperative and the latter’s the principle of utility. The

methods in applied ethics are usually pluralistic defining a set of principles, which in turn can

be either prima facie or absolute.

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2.2.2 Principlism

Beauchamp and Childress (2001) introduce four principles upon which the medical

professionals could base their reasoning in moral dilemmas. Each of these principles is

supposed to be prima facie, so that depending on the circumstances any principle could

outweigh the other. These principles are:

­ Respect for autonomy i.e. the duty to respect the right of every individual to make

decisions regarding their own life. ­ Beneficence i.e. the duty to try to do good to other people. ­ Non­maleficence i.e. the duty to not harm or offend other people. ­ Justice i.e. the duty to treat all individuals equally in similar situations.

The view purported by principlism is not an altogether unproblematic one. When a conflict

between the principles occurs, the method can actually produce several different outcomes

instead of a single correct one. Although not necessarily a bad thing, it can lead to confusion

and dispute over the decision.

The benefits of the four principles approach lie in the practicality and the usefulness of the

method. As almost a checklist, it helps medical professionals to both identify the possible

ethical conflicts and also provides a terminology to discuss them. One can argue whether the

selected principles actually constitute the most important ones in healthcare professions, but

as it often is in ethics, no single set can be selected with absolute certainty.

2.2.3 Communitarianism

Principlism has been criticised for being overly individualistic by emphasizing autonomy as

the key factor in ethical considerations. Although the four principles are supposed to be

equally strong in preference, some critics have claimed that the other three principles are in

fact more or less defined by autonomy. In the case of casuistry 3

this criticism has stemmed

mostly from the fact that some western societies such as United States and Great Britain have

a long history of individualistic preference.

Communitarianism is a somewhat loose term for those philosophers and political scientists

who emphasize the importance of the community over that of an individual. Communitarianism itself is not as much a method than criticism over the prevalent principles

in both the casuistry and the principlism. For instance, Callahan (2003) notes that in case of

an ethical problem, the questions should focus on “its social meaning, implications, and

context, even in those cases which seem to affect individuals only”.

Although the criticism raised by communitarians is often valid and well justified, it can make

ethical problems more complex requiring even more professionalism from the reviewers and

thereby rendering ethics out of reach for the practical everyday problems.

2.3 The Ethics of Technology Usage

When technology is put to use, it affects individuals as well as the society as a whole. The

value of those changes are typically judged in other terms than purely economical; Friedman

(2004)) uses the term human values to represent ethical and moral values that people take into

account when describing such changes. As there are large individual and cultural differences

in how such values are described and judged, it can be debated (and has been debated) to what

3 See chapter 3.5.

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extent they are universal. However, as we can see from the debates arising around computer

technology, it is still possible to provide terms and classifications that help us analyse the

values embodied in a particular application design and its usage. Although such

categorisations never become complete, they provide a common ground for analysis, standardisation, and debate.

Starting in the analysis provided by Friedman, we can classify values that commonly are

embodied by computer technology as privacy, accountability, (freedom of) bias, autonomy

and universal access. We can start by noting that as games are voluntary and needless, the last

one is less applicable to games than to most other computer applications. The impossibility to

access a particular type of game may be frustrating but does not cause any secondary harm

(e.g. limited access to central societal functions). Similarly, autonomy is de­emphasised by

the game rules; entering a game usually implies accepting to be bound by its rules. For games,

the autonomy is relevant for player’s ability to stop playing at any time; and even this is often

compromised e.g. in team­based games where the common good of the team may be

dependent on players not quitting. As we will see in our case analysis, accountability, bias and

privacy are central values in the ethics of pervasive games.

As noted by Friedman, the actual technology used in an application will sometimes directly

impact these values. More commonly however, the way the technology is distributed and its

usage regulated is much more critical. In our analysis, we will not primarily analyse the

technology as such, but the whole game setting, including the rules, the selection of players,

and in particular the relationship between players and bystanders. 4

2.3.1 Privacy

Privacy is a critical and delicate consideration for designing pervasive games, as the games

may considerably intrude on both players and bystanders. As noted by many authors, privacy

is primarily a socially regulated contract, where people regulate their openness about private

issues depending on the social context.

According to Allen (1996), there are three typically used dimensions as to how the concept of

privacy is defined:

­ physical privacy, meaning that people have the right to private physical space from

where other people may be excluded (e.g. private toilets), ­ informational privacy, meaning that a person has the right to control access to

information about oneself (e.g. privacy of information on one’s health), and ­ decisional privacy, meaning that people have the right to exclude other people from

the decisions concerning oneself (e.g. the decision to make an abortion).

These dimensions of privacy are intertwined and overlapping on some situations. For

instance, placing a hidden camera without her consent in a person’s toilet would clearly

violate her right to physical privacy, but also the right to informational privacy by violating

her right to control access to sensitive information about herself. In the same way, physical

and decisional privacies would be overlapping in a situation where a group of religious

missionaries are forcefully trying to convert an atheist.

4 This is due to the claim (Montola, Waern & Nieuwdorp 2005) that pervasive games are not explicitly defined by the

technology used, because pervasive experiences can be constructed without any computer equipment.

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Informational privacy is regulated by the most legal systems in Europe (as in other parts of

the world), in terms of unsolicited information solicitation and use. These laws typically rely

on the informed consent for information sharing (Zevenbergen 2004). However, Grudin

(2001) has argued that the major privacy problem with modern information technology is a

lack of immediacy. The effects of information sharing are not obvious at the time of

disclosure, and this harms the individual’s ability to adapt their openness according to context. Bearing this in mind, supporting explicit privacy agreements (Ackerman et al 2001) is not a

sufficient solution, as the immediacy may be compromised both by the explicit representation

and lack of timing. Palen and Dourish (2003) provide a more useful basis for privacy

negotiations by deconstructing the potential negotiation into three aspects: negotiation of

content, negotiation of identity, and negotiation of time (past, present, and future solicitation

and usage of information).

Palen and Dourish’s analysis makes it possible to restrict privacy negotiations to contexts that

are naturally graspable. For ordinary, non­pervasive games, the magic circle of gameplay and

the decision to enter into or leave a game forms a natural and easily graspable boundary to

which such contextual negotiations can be associated (Montola 2005). Both the solicitation

and usage of information can be restricted to the game context. It is common for players to

adopt a game identity, which exists solely within the gaming context. Finally, due to the

voluntary and needless properties of a game, players will typically only accept that the game

gathers such information that is needed to run the game. For example, players may agree to

solicit personal data about their past, but only under the conditions that the data is shared only

in the present (during the game) and under a temporal identity. For pervasive games however,

the lack of a clearly defined boundary between the game and ordinary life compromises the

ability to negotiate information disclosure both for players and non­players.

Physical privacy is probably the most problematic dimension in pervasive games. The

structure of games as systems of rules where players are constantly required to make

decisions in an artificial context will rarely create situations where one’s decisional privacy

could be intruded upon.

Although fundamental, right to privacy is not absolute. In western legal tradition it is common

to make an exception if the person in question could be seen to have given implicit consent,

like in the case of active publicity seekers. A person’s right to privacy can also be limited if

she has no reason to expect privacy, for example in public places. Thirdly, privacy can be

outweighed by other rights that are considered more important, such as the right to security. As mentioned previously, most privacy regulating laws also provide the option of signing

privacy away.

Looking at the different groups of people whose privacy can be violated in a pervasive game,

there are at least players, aware spectators, unaware participants, and unaware spectators. There are some differences between these groups as to the types of ethical problems arise.

The key distinguishing factor between these groups is clearly the awareness of the game. Both

the players and the aware spectators have some understanding about the game i.e. its name,

concept and so on forth, so that they have some idea what to expect. Players will also have to

know at least part of the rules so that they should have even more reasonable expectations and

also consent regarding the rules they have information of.

Although seemingly unproblematic, the issue of consent can be rather complex in some

pervasive games. Once participants have given their consent to the game by opting to play it,

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their privacy protection could be considered void from the game in question. But this assumes

that players have reasonable expectations on the nature and the content of the game. But in

order to be able to give full and informed consent, the participant would have to know all the

events and rules in the game before consenting. This of course is impossible with some

games. One potential solution would be to allow players to quit the game once they run into a

situation where they feel that their privacy has been or will be violated: This may happen for

example in some alternate reality games based on “this is not a game” aesthetic, when the

players may realize their participation in a game well after the game has started. In any case,

the game designers and operators should never infringe privacy without sufficient and

justifiable reason.

The right to privacy of the aware spectators is higher than for players. Again, physical and

informational privacy are primarily considered: the aware spectator will for example expect to

be able to escape from the game to carry out private activities. Unaware participation and

unaware spectatorship pose even higher challenges for game design. They cannot be seen to

give any other consent than the possible implicit consent maybe given by entering a public

space.

2.3.2 Accountability

Following Friedman, we will use the term accountability to refer to an individual’s

responsibility for a given harm. In juridical systems, the ability to identify such individuals

(or juridical persons including organisations and companies) forms the basis of providing

retribution for harm (e.g. indemnity). Within the context of a game, such retributions are often

part of the rules governing the game (e.g. the yellow and red cards used in soccer).

In this report we mostly discuss psychological harm, as has been earlier done by e.g.

Feinberg, Vandeveer and Ellis: Harms include lasting setbacks to one’s assets, including

physical and psychological setbacks. Offences include harms, but also minor, ‘harmless’ nuisances. Ellis (1984) works on Feinberg’s listing of offensive, but not necessarily harmful, nuisances, classifying them as: 1) Irritants to senses, 2) Excessively bad manners, 3) Flaunting

one’s contempt for people’s values as an insult as well as pointless flaunting of one’s

contempt for people’s values and 4) Indecency. Vandeveer (1979) points out that many

offensive actions are offensive only to certain group, as dictated by traditions, beliefs or

cultural identity. Thus, it’s important to consider the needs of an average person (“almost

anyone chosen at random”) as well as the needs of the minorities. Weighing the good of all

versus the good of minority remains a question of reasonability, where no clear answers can

be given.

According to Feinberg, an individual is morally blameworthy for a harm if his or her actions

caused the harm, and his or her actions were ‘faulty’; that is, that the responsible person had

either intended the harm, neglected the risk of causing harm, or failed to realise a risk for

harm that he or she should have been able to realise.

For computer applications as well as games, the individual’s moral responsibility for a harm is

lessened by the fact that there are a host of people involved in each activity; a game

development project involves people in roles such as distributors and producers, sales

representatives, managers, designers, and developers, and many people partake in a game

event in a multitude of roles such as spectators, organisers, referees and players. In such

complex and long­term projects, where decisions are taken collectively in obscure processes,

it will often be difficult to find individuals who fulfil the requirements above to be held

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accountable. A specific problem for complex systems of software and hardware is the

omnipresence of bugs; when a system becomes sufficiently complex it always contains bugs, no matter how conscientious and clever the programming staff has been. Who then can be

held accountable for the effects of those bugs?

When individuals cannot be held accountable, organisations (and sometimes non­organised

collectives) will often be informally (or even legally) blamed. This is in general not desirable,

as it leads to ‘guilt by association’; the blame rubs off to individuals of the organisation that

were completely innocent in the matter at hand. For some organisations, the solution has been

to appoint a single person who is officially responsible for the organisation; examples of this

include ship captains and newspaper editors­in­chief. This practice is useful in fields where

accidents are statistically bound to happen, and minimization requires strong concentration of

power and responsibility. In a context of game, the responsible producer can only take

responsibility of choices of designers and operators, but in games such as Prosopopeia Bardo

1: Där vi föll, the high unpredictability of player means that the responsible producer can’t

take the responsibility of every potential problem scenario.

A distinct difference between game and non­game activities is that within games, accountability is partly regulated within the rule set of the game. This is closely related to the

fact that games occur in a magic circle, within which the rules are different from those of the

social world outside of the game. What is considered an offence may be a vastly different

thing within a game setting; ice­hockey players and boxers execute harmful violence within

the game that would lead straight to court if used outside the game. Secondly, even for actions

that are considered offensive, the sanctions are regulated within the game context rather than

by external authorities (legal or otherwise). If a soccer player intentionally trips another

player, the accountable player will be punished within the game – he will not be (typically)

charged in a court. As we will see from our analysis of case examples, similar approaches can

be used also in pervasive games.

In pervasive games the players’ perception of the game rules may clash with what is

considered legal or appropriate behaviour within the real world social context, and as the

magic circle is blurred in many fashions, this becomes a very relevant concern. Speeding on

the highway to catch up with another player is just as unlawful as speeding for any other

reason (and, as games are voluntary and needless, may be considered even less morally

acceptable). But from the player perspective, he or she may consider the accountability to lie

with the game designer or game organiser, as they developed a rule set that rewarded

speeding. Again, as with privacy clear player and participant agreements only partly alleviate

the problem as they lack immediacy. In the heat of the game, it may be difficult to remember

what responsibilities you have accepted as a player.

In addition to harm and offence, a third important concept for thinking about accountability is

risk. Even though drunk driving is harmless most of the time, it’s considered unacceptable

and punishable because it involves a small risk of significant harm to outsiders. Drunk driving

is especially condemnable because it’s harmful to individuals in the scale of the whole

society: the harsh punishments are legitimate due to statistically large number of accidents

caused by recklessness, even though the risk in a particular case (driving slowly in desolate

area) might be very small. Understanding the risks of pervasive gaming is only possible after

more large­scale games are organized, as currently most of the occurring problems are

“isolated incidents”.

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2.3.3 Freedom of Bias

Again following Friedman, we use the term ‘bias’ to refer to activities that systematically and

unfairly discriminate against certain individuals or groups, in favour of others.

For traditional games, it is hard to claim that they ever are biased in favour of one player to

another. The player whose children beat him in Counter Strike may get aggravated and

frustrated, but will probably not blame the game for bias. The ‘bias’ is in this case an

emergent effect of the rule set, and when volunteering to enter the game you thereby agree

with those effects ­ the discrimination is systematic but it is not unfair. Computer games may

however introduce bias based on their dependence on technology. For example, real­time

games such as Counter Strike will often systematically discriminate against players with

lower bandwidth or less optimal computer hardware. Some games have also been accused of

bias when they contain hidden rules that affect game play in ways that players were not able

to foresee. More serious bias is sometimes introduced between different categories of participants. Online games will often provide game operators with abilities that are not necessarily

perceived as ‘fair’ by the players. Many pervasive games give considerable power to game

masters over the participants, as the orchestrators keep secrets, issue assignments, and

technologically observe the players. Often the organizers also operate in secrecy, not

revealing their identity to the players during the game, and the transparency of the game

orchestration is kept to minimum. Personal relationships of players and game orchestrators

might become especially problematic as due to this asymmetry; maybe the jealous game

orchestrator can use the exact position information to track his girlfriend who signed a broad

disclaimer to participate in the game, or maybe he gives her a privileged status in the game.

For pervasive games, there can be a serious bias between aware and unaware participants in

several roles. This is further discussed below.

2.3.4 Autonomy and Deception

In addition to privacy, the right to autonomy is often regarded as one of the fundamental

human rights enjoying strong protection. In ethics autonomy is essentially the individual’s

right to self­determination i.e. the right to make one’s own decisions, and as a concept it is

close to the right of decisional privacy. The difference between these two rights is that

whereas decisional privacy entails more the right to withhold one’s decisions from other

people, autonomy refers both to the right to make decisions but also to the capacity to make

them. If a person’s capacity to make an informed, ethical decision is harmed, then one’s right

to autonomy is violated.

The need for consent is also a question of autonomy: the ability to give an informed consent

on a matter concerning oneself is dependent on the autonomy of the subject (Patry 2001). Therefore this question is particularly evident with the case of unaware participation, since

there is a possibility that using unaware participants requires some sort of deceiving, as was

the case in Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll.

Psychology and social sciences in general use deception in research experiments where there

would be a possibility that being truthful would somehow affect the results of the test. This

used to be more widespread and less controlled in the 1960’s, but ever since Milgram’s

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obedience­experiment 5

, deception has become a criticised practice and its use is quite

commonly controlled by ethical boards. Nowadays it is common to distinguish unnecessary

and justified deception, where the latter is deemed to hold more benefits than harm.

The discussion and criticism on the Milgram experiment offers good insight into ethics of

deception. In his assessment of the criticism, Herrera (2001) notes that the Milgram’s test and

the use of deception in research has been mainly criticised for causing harm and involving

significant risks for the participants, generally invading the autonomy of the participants. However, Herrera continues, there have been numerous studies on the effects of deception on

test subjects and the contention of them is that deception causes little or no harm at all. Similarly, a survey conducted among the Milgram test subjects showed that the majority of

the subjects thought of the experiment as a positive thing (Milgram 1964).

As Herrera points out, the test subjects in Milgram’s experiment were not tricked to doing

anything that they would not have done without the deception (Herrera 2001). The invasion

on the right of autonomy is questionable on the same grounds: the choice to administer the

electric shocks was always the subjects’ alone. The teacher­learner –setting could not have

given them to believe that the shocks were in any way more acceptable that in their normal

life. So, if their freedom to make a choice and the capacity to make ethical decisions were not

diminished, it cannot be said that their autonomy was in any way compromised.

Even so, Milgram’s experiments have been heavily criticized. We will have reason to come

back to this in our analysis of the Vem gråter example, where one informant explicitly

mentioned the deception as problematic in itself; independent of the harm it might have

caused. Deception introduces a bias between the people ‘in the know’, typically game masters

and some players, and the people who are unaware. There are situations where deception can

cause real harm on the game’s participants and spectators.

2.4 Artistic Motivation and Societal Commentary

Discussing offenses not causing bodily harm, Vandeveer (1979) points out that in political

conflicts, it’s in the interests of the third parties to have both sides of the conflict brought to

public, and offensive provocation is often the only or the best way to do so. From the

perspective of this third party interest, he formulates what he calls the Standard of

Permissiveness toward Conscientious Offence:

Individuals engaged in conscientiously motivated dissent aimed at securing what

dissenters judge to be more desirable social arrangements have a claim to restraint

from coercive interference even if their dissent is seriously offensive.

Applied to pervasive gaming, Vandeveer’s argument is that if a pervasive game is aimed at

improving the social system, it should be tolerated even if it might offend someone, as long as

it’s motivated by the organizers’ conscience. In the spirit of free speech, the benefit of the

society demands tolerance for such expressions.

5 Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiment on obedience was a series of controversial tests conducted in 1960’s, on which the participants were deceived to be participating on a test on the effectiveness of punishment in

education. In the experiment, the participants were ordered to give electric shocks for every wrong answer to

“another test subject”, who was in fact an actor faking the shocks. The results of the test were staggering with 65 %

(26 out of 40) of the people willing to give the final shock of 450 volts to the student. (Milgram 1963)

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Deciding what counts as such “conscientiously motivated dissent” is a complicated question;

Vandeveer discusses the examples of anti­abortion activism and Neo­Nazism, concluding that

“We must, as the standard insists, tolerate the conscientiously offensive; it is not obvious that

we must exercise similar permissiveness toward the unconscientiously offensive, or, as some

have put it, tolerate (to the same degree) the intolerant”. Thus, the acceptability depends on

the conscientious motivation or lack of it. Whether a game can be “conscientiously motivated

dissent” as well as a commercial product depends on the case; it’s certainly possible, as many

profitable yet also conscientiously motivated books and documentaries demonstrate. As a

principle, the freedom of expression includes playful expression as well.

This argumentation is valid when discussing Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll, as – for

example – one of the points consciously planned into the game was that all reality is

construction, we should open people’s eyes to see the fabrication – be it done by mainstream

media, the Pentagon, or pervasive gamers. Seeing this fabrication and acting against societal

norms empowers people to better criticize the constructed society.6 Many gamelike flash mob

events, such as Whirling Dervishes (McGonigal 2005), also fall under this definition, demanding the society to engage in more public playfulness and claiming the streets back to

people (from car traffic).

3 Case Studies

In this chapter we analyze some relevant case examples that have attracted our interested

during IPerG. Some of the examples have been created within the project, while some of them

come from external games. In some examples we have focused on some detail in game design

or execution, while in other cases we have evaluated complete game designs. In addition to

the case examples presented here, we have sought to integrate our other experiences in

pervasive gaming in this report as well. Most of the ethical issues are related to social expansion, or, expanding the game beyond the

people who start to play the game. Several game designs offer ambiguous roles for players

and spectators through a deliberately ambiguous game context. When a person first makes

contact with the game, it does not make itself fully known. It will be noticeable that

something is taking place, but not exactly what is happening. The typical pattern is that people

become aware of the game through passing through three broad stages of awareness.

(Montola & Waern 2006a.)

­ Unaware state: The game experiences go unnoticed or are interpreted as ‘everyday’ phenomena.

­ Ambiguous state: The experiences produced by the game are too obvious or too

closely related to each other to be ignored; still there is no frame of reference that

would reveal and confirm the fact that it is a game, which we will refer to as the

gameness of the experience.

­ Conscious state: The game context is accessible to the person.

The critical stage is that of ambiguity, as this is when it is possible to misinterpret the

experience as reality. The game experience in this state is that of a reality game, a piece of

6 Based on email discussions with lead designer Martin Ericsson (in 2005 and 2006).

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fabricated reality that is a game but does not reveal itself as such.7 A particular problem is that

the audience will form their own interpretation of the context. Unless the ambiguous

experience is carefully designed, these interpretations can very well be much more dangerous

and worrying than the true explanation (that it was a game).

It should be noted that the ambiguous state can still support a playful, ludic, interpretation

both for the people in ambiguous state and the people in conscious state.

3.1 Vem Gråter

Vem gråter was planned to be a weeklong sequence of mysterious poltergeist­events staged

within the Gotland University premises, in winter 2005 – a project work on a course on

pervasive gaming. We got the opportunity to study Vem gråter after the game had concluded,

by interviewing players, organizers and university staff.

Vem gråter created a series of events with hidden clues allowing the participants to dig deeper

into the mystery, a ghost story based on historic events concerning the role of Sweden and

Gotland in the Second World War. The game comprised of the following elements:

­ A set of staged paranormal events, carried out at the university, including a tape

recorder hidden in a ventilation shaft, sending out sounds of a crying child, a tower of

furniture built overnight, and coal scribbles on a wall. The installations were staged

late in the evenings when the premises were relatively empty. ­ An actor pretending to be ‘Spiricom­Thomas’, an occult investigator. He appeared

at a couple of occasions in the university and in some cafés. ­ Two web sites, ‘created by’ Spiricom­Thomas and a local ghost hunter society. ­ Announcements at university bulletin boards. Two of these were from Spiricom­ Thomas and the third announced a fake seminar on parapsychology. ­ A set of hidden clues around the town intended for the people solving the riddle.

All events and clues were supposed to point towards a final scene concluding the game. For

numerous reasons this final event was never staged. These game elements were also the only

possible way of learning that there was a mystery puzzle; there were no invitations or

possibilities to sign up. Rules of the game were not explained anywhere.

The game did not work out as intended. Instead of students or teachers, the maintenance staff

of the university turned out to be the main audience. In their frame of interpretation, the

historical and ethical perspectives of the ghost story were lost, and the game elements were

interpreted in the frame of vandalism instead of the frame of playfulness or mystery. Thus, the

police and local newspapers became also interested.

3.1.1 Contextual States

In our research it soon became clear that the vast majority of bystanders had never noticed

anything at all, or interpreted their experiences as ordinary life. Thus, we only interviewed six

people, and only one of these people was actually a student trying to solve the puzzle as

intended by the organizers.

The game managed to keep many participants in the ambiguous state for the most of the time.

The ambiguous state is a labile, transitional state, which most people try to resolve by making

7 Candid camera, scambaiting and invisible theater are practices deceiving outsiders in a similar fashion.

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assumptions regarding truth behind the events faced. Summarizing our interviews, we ended

up in four prototypical interpretations for Vem gråter:

1. Ghosts are real. This was the interpretation implied in the game design, although the

organizers did not intend this interpretation to be made. This interpretation did not

show up in our interviews. 2. The ghost investigator is dangerous and mentally unstable. This interpretation

accepts that Spiricom­Thomas exists, but he is crazy and potentially dangerous

intruder instead of any kind of an investigator. This interpretation was not intended by

the organizers but became widespread among the university staff. 3. Students are making pranks. This interpretation indicates that the students are

making trouble at the school. This interpretation prevailed among the staff, even after

the true nature of the events was uncovered.

4. Someone has created a cool adventure. This ludic interpretation is the driving force

of alternate reality gaming. It requires an understanding of the fact that the events are

fabricated, even though they become more engaging through ambiguity. The player is

thrilled by the fact that he does not know what is going on or what could happen next.

Obviously the professional role and personal history strongly influence the interpretation

made. In the case of Vem gråter a younger, game­oriented audience would probably have

been more inclined towards an adventurous interpretation, while in the eyes of a janitor

already frustrated with students, the same events appear as vandalism. In order to enjoy Vem

gråter the observer had to make the cool adventure interpretation. However, the second and

third interpretations were dominant.

3.1.2 Spiricom­Thomas Story Spin

The university administration quite quickly figured out that a student group must have put up

the posters8

. However, the other game elements were not immediately thought to be planted

by students, but rather by the external person Spiricom­Thomas, who had been visible in the

student cafeteria a couple of times.

This suspicion was interpreted as potentially dangerous, and measures were taken to protect

the university staff from the potentially dangerous person lurking in the corridors. We thought that he was not well, and there is an uncertainty when a person is

psychically ill how they act, and since we have personnel here in the evenings we had

to take action immediately. (Head of the janitor staff)

They had not made the connection between the parapsychology investigator and the

game, so they thought that he was a schizophrenic psychopath who had been attracted

by the game… they thought that they had to deal with a real psychopath. (Teacher at

the game design education)

According to one of our informants, some women had got in contact with Kvinnojouren, a

phone service for harassed women, expressing fear for the person playing Spiricom­Thomas.

It was this amateur researcher, the actor, who went around and made contact with the

students, that was perceived as scaring in particular by women… one woman at

8 The posters contained a web address to a server with an IP address from within the university.

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Kvinnojouren at Gotland has received a lot of phone calls from scared women, she told

me about this… (Woman aware of the gameness of the events)

The student group was however highly sceptical towards the idea that Spiricom­Thomas was

actually able to scare anybody. The following cite is from the interview with the developer

team:

R4: These rumours that were spread that this Thomas would be a threat against

people, I found that almost shocking. R2: And it was strange. R4: He was acting, and I don’t know if it was due to bad planning or something like

that but…

R1: and some of it might be rumours spreading… R4: A tad eccentric, but not to the extent so that he actually acted as ‘off’ as people

claimed towards the end.

It is quite possible that the students are right in this. After all, a simpler explanation would

have been to immediately suspect the students (which the university staff already knew were

behind some of the posters) to be responsible for the whole set of events. But as we will see

from the following quote, the university staff had an independent incitement to end up in a

‘lunatic’ explanation. The head of the janitor staff described his thoughts at the first encounter

with the events – a tower of chairs in one of the classrooms – the following way. We have a student here, who used to be a student, who hangs around here and is not

entirely well, but we have still let him hang around here because he wants to be here

and we have some staff that have some contact with him. But then we thought that it

was him who was fooling around, because he likes this particular room. He is often

there and just stands in the dark, so our first thought was that it must be him. But it

turned out that he had nothing at all to do with this. (Head of janitor staff)

There was thus an incidental connection between one of the very first observations made by

the janitors, and a person who was mentally ill. When the university staff started to connect

the events to the appearance of Spiricom­Thomas, they were already mentally prepared for

the ‘lunatic’ interpretation of the events.

3.1.3 Vandalism

A largely unforeseen problem was that the game was, to a very large extent, perceived as

vandalism by the university staff. Installations such as scribbles and piled chairs were

considered messy, unpleasant and potentially dangerous to clean up. Also, they were seen as

purposefully scary. To some extent, the staff continued to look on the events as vandalism

even after the game had been outed as a reality game.

This is about our profession and our job, it is not acceptable to create this kind of

situations for us, not from the perspective that this is our working environment. (Head

of janitor staff)

This reaction should have been foreseeable, but the student group was only semi­aware of the

problem even at the time of the interview. The problem was recognized in conjunction with

the wall scribbles, as these were reported to the police.

In a sense the vandalism interpretation is related to the issue of bias. The janitors guessed

quite correctly that the Vem gråter installations were created by students, but their previous

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experience of some students lead to the assumption that the students might have done the

installations in order to intentionally cause harm – differentiating a “prank” from an “act of

vandalism”. Apparently, in addition to requiring game designers and operators to be free of

bias, it is important to convince the players and unaware participants of the lack of bias and

good­willed nature of the game. Otherwise the perceived or assumed bias may destroy the

experience.

3.2 Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där Vi Föll

Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll9 was a pervasive larp 10 about players being possessed. In a

nutshell, the players were expected to role­play themselves in Stockholm mostly identical to

ours, where they were possessed by ghosts of deceased people. For 52 hours, the players

mixed role­playing themselves and the possessing ghosts, going on with their everyday lives

while simultaneously role­playing ghosts walking in the world of living (see Jonsson & al

2006, Montola & Jonsson 2006).

In a sense, every player took the role similar to that of Spiricom­Thomas, engaging in

pretence play with unsuspecting people. As Prosopopeia was a role­playing game, the players

could have long, intricate and credible discussions with outsiders as part of the game. As they

could never know where the game ended and began, they had to often interact with outsiders

in order to progress in the game. Prosopopeia was an alternate reality game in the sense that it

was contextualized in the everyday lives of the players, and this feeling was heightened by the

fact that it was also contextualized in the everyday lives of the outsiders unaware of the game.

According to the players, perceiving the routines of the ordinary world, with the heightened

perspective of the game fiction, created an intense feeling of Prosopopeia being more than a

game.

The following citation from player feedback illustrates a typical encounter in the game. The

players met a complete outsider whom they thought to be a part of the game, even after the

game when writing their research debriefs.

First, there was a meeting on the cemetery, when a man came strolling by who

obviously had something to do with the game. I appreciate the way it was handled. He

introduced himself as passing­by, and waited for us to make a move, which we didn’t.

So he left. As I understand it, he had knowledge about the EVP­recorder, which we had

problems with. Even if this was not a roleplaying­encounter, it worked fine. And it

made me feel like it wasn’t hopeless; someone was looking out for us. In this particular

game it worked fine, as everything already made me feel part of a big conspiracy, and

he fit in there too. Many players were asked to conduct interactions of ghosts and unaware outsiders. For

example, one ghost (and thus the player) was to shelter a real, homeless person, having been

an activist working for the shelters for homeless in Stockholm. Another ghost had a message

to deliver to the local Catholic monsignor. These outsiders were not chosen by the game

organizers in any way, they had no connection to any homeless people or Catholics before the

game, but it was assumed that the players could find the unaware participants on their own. These were some the most serious, intense and engaging tasks in the game, in a sense a ‘price’ ghosts had to pay for returning to life.

9 A collaboration of IPerG project and volunteers, June 2005. By Martin Ericsson, Adriana Skarped, Staffan Jonsson

and others. 10 A live-action roleplaying game staged in a pervasive fashion.

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After the game, an ethical debate emerged on the message board of a Finnish role­playing

magazine where the game was presented, to discuss the dilemmas of unaware participation.11

Especially attempt to involve a priest in the game heated up discussion. The discussants of

Roolipelaaja forum used the following restrictive argumentation styles against Prosopopeia:

­ People should not play pranks on others without their consent. ­ Unaware participants are unwillingly commodified by the players. ­ Wasting person’s professional working time with a game is not right. ­ Helping an unfortunate person in a fashion that secretly is a game actually exploits his

plight. ­ Games should not toy with events and things that are considered holy. Many discussants argued on behalf of the game with following permissive arguments:

­ Art, including Prosopopeia, is supposed to break borders, and thus games classifying

as such should be allowed unaware participation. ­ If the unaware participant has a positive experience or benefits from the game, the

game is acceptable. ­ As all reality is constructed, fabrication motivated by gaming is just as right or wrong

as the construction made by e.g. media and governments. ­ Most of the people – professionals especially – play some kind of fabricated roles

anyway in their interactions with unknown people. Gaming is no worse.

Commodification of time is an interesting sidetrack in the Prosopopeia discussion, as

‘wasting’ outsiders’ time was seen as a bad thing. At the same time other discussants saw

priest’s professional time in terms of money and efficiency. Thus, a homeless hobo would be

commodified involuntarily by the game, while working for money is voluntary self­ commodification. Using the working time for the game can be seen as stealing that resource

from the employer. These interpretations are highly culture­specific: imposing oneself on

another and privacy issues in general are more highly regarded in Finland than, for example,

in Sweden.

In a detailed analysis of different categories of exploitation Feinberg (1988, 205) writes that

“A may simply utilize some traits or circumstances of B’s for his own purposes without

wrong or harm to B or anyone else. Sometimes this is called “exploiting” the other’s traits or

circumstances, but in this sense “exploits” is nonpejorative, and it’s just another way of

saying “puts to use”. Not all use is ill­use. In these cases, A blamelessly “exploits” B’s

characteristics or situation without exploiting B himself”. Although Feinberg understandably

does not analyze a case on pervasive gaming, many fabricated discussions with unaware

outsiders can be classified as harmless parasitism, where A gains advantage of B while B

suffers no harm from A’s actions. If such exploitation is harmless and not disrespectful, it’s

hardly condemnable.

One interesting thing in Prosopopeia is that the players never execute the most challenging

tasks involving outsiders (such as ones involving priest and the homeless person). Obviously

11 Article was written by Markus Montola and published in Roolipelaaja magazine (www.roolipelaaja.fi). He also

facilitated the discussion by providing further information as needed. Some parts of the discussion were dominated

by a misunderstanding as the participants assumed that the priest encounter had actually taken place, but it was later on clarified that the player had autonomously decided to not perform the task.

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such playing is intense and requires effort, but the player with the priest quest also

commented that he didn’t perform the task since he found it unethical.

In both the cases of Vem gråter and Prosopopeia there was a clear undercurrent condemning

the fabrication of reality for the purposes of gaming in particular. A potential explanation for

this could be that the informants’ implicitly assume that games are always played for

entertainment, ignoring the suitability of games for purposes of art, research, education and

political commentary.

3.2.1 Uncontrolled Environment

The Prosopopeia players had many interactions with complete outsiders during the game.

Many of these encounters, such as the one described above, were greatly appreciated by the

players, for the thrill of not knowing where the borders of the game lie. Combined with the

fact that in many pervasive games the players are observed constantly, or the players at least

believe so, there might be a false feeling of safety in these interactions. Even though the

protective frame of gameplay does not extend to people unaware of the game, this is

something that might be forgotten in the thrill of the game.12

The fundamental question is about accountability in uncontrolled environment. If a game tells

players to go at a bad area of town during night, is the game organizer responsible of placing

them in the risk of getting robbed or mugged? The answer is clearly dependent on where the

game is played; while in Stockholm the risk might be insignificant, elsewhere it might be very

considerable. If the risk is significant, the most important thing in the game design is to

clearly communicate that the game does not protect the player to prevent a false feeling of

safety. As a clear ethical benefit, games like Prosopopeia that encourage players to talk with

the homeless or to wander into poor areas of the town can be also seen as beneficial, as they

have the potential to bridge gaps between socio­economical classes.

One example of problematic design in uncontrollable environment is Wanderer

13

, which is a

parkour­inspired GPS game where player should travel in real world at set speed, while

receiving random orders on which direction he should be moving at a given time.14

During the tests the players where highly motivated to follow the commands given by

the game even when the environment was not allowing the player to perform the

instructed movements. For example, players crossed streets, even with cars

approaching that were forced to stop in order not to hit the player. During this

example the players made it clear that they were not unaware of the environment, but

were willing to force the environment in order to keep playing the game. (Hielscher &

Heitlager 2006).

In Wanderer, the commands are received aurally and the focus of the game is in the

environment. The (relatively rare) chases of Botfighters are unfortunately different, as the

players need to focus on their cellphone screens as well in order to maneuver properly. This is

one of the reasons why Can You See Me Now left the street runner position to game

organizers and allowed random players to only play the online side.

12 There is unfortunately no research data on this. 13 By Jonas Hielscher and Jiri Heitlager (2006). 14 While it was run in Sweden, the hard-core players of Botfighters expressed comparable behavior.

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3.3 Epidemic Menace 2

Epidemic Menace 215 was a 2­3 hour crossmedia game that was played with 2 teams of 4

players, four times in a research campus area. The player teams were anti­virus teams that

were supposed to track and catch escaped viruses, as well as try to figure out who had

released the viruses.

The gaming was divided in two modes, command centre and fieldwork. The players in the

command centre could track and instruct the field agents but they were not able to directly do

anything, only the filed agents could do that. In addition to this the competing team could see

(but not hear) what was going on in the command centre through a webcam. In fact, any

internetuser could tap into the stream from the command centres and two web cams placed in

the park where the field agents played.

3.3.1 Surveillance

The players were constantly under video surveillance while they were playing. They were

directly observed by the other players, by the tech team, the designer, and via the webcams by

evaluators, other players, game designers, anyone on the internet and all of their actions on

the devices were being logged. In addition to this there was at least one cameraman present in

all the games documenting the experience.

In the interview that was conducted as part of the evaluation after the game, most of the

players felt like they had been observed, but most also stated that it had not bothered them. The fact that they had also been able to watch the streams from the webcams was perceived as

fun or even integral to the game by some players. A few interviewees would have wanted

more cameras, specifically mounted cameras worn by the players who were hunting the

viruses outside. A few players commented that though the surveillance as such had not been a

problem, the fact that there was a cameraman running around did break the illusion of the

game world. Also, the actions of the cameraman were perceives as meta­information: if the

cameraman was interested in filming something then that must be pivotal to the game.

I was constantly analysing why he filmed this or that.

These statements are in a bit of a conflict with some of the observation data. As the players

started to play the game they were given t­shirts. In the fourth game the t­shirts were given in

the gaming area and the webcams were already active. The players closed the door to the

room and huddled bashfully in corners while they switched shirts, yet they seemed oblivious

to the webcam (even though they were informed about surveillance and had the option of

changing their clothes in a nearby bathroom). Also, some players were a bit surprised by the

surveillance; they did not feel that they had been properly informed about it beforehand. One

player was also visibly relieved, after finding out about the extent of the surveillance, he was

told that the discussions in the room had not been broadcasted on the internet.

15 Epidemic Menace 2 was organized in cooperation by Fraunhofer FIT, Sony NetServices and Blast Theory together with the support of a number of other IPerG partners. The test of the second prototype was conducted on July the 6

th & 7

th 2006 on the Campus Birlinghoven, near the city of Bonn in Germany. This report is entirely based on the

second iteration of the game, Epidemic Menace 2, but the findings are likely to apply to the first iteration of Epidemic

Menace (tested in 2005) as well.

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As long as the games stay a niche phenomenon, the surveillance doesn’t seem to be a

problem; provided that the players are properly informed beforehand. If the recordings are

broadcasted to a larger audience, then the attitudes may be very different:

It was a bit disturbing to run into people who were watching us on the monitor. How

they were pointing out stuff.

It seems that as long as the surveillance stays within the magic circle, then the players do not

object to it. In fact that might even want to have as much of it as possible as shown by the

desire to have mounted cameras in player head gear. Yet when people who are not

participating in the game observe the players, then the players may be uneasy as they have no

control or knowledge of those viewers. One way to remind the players of the presence of the

camera is to make it very prominent and visible (as with the moving human cameraman), but

this then disrupts the game. If the cameras are hidden, then the game flows better, but the

participants forget about the surveillance.

These observations clearly support the aforementioned problem with privacy that computer

technology brings: the lack of immediacy obscures the effects of information sharing. The

players may also forget that they are being observed and do things that they would not if they

remembered this. On argument for game surveillance is that it may be for the best that the

players learn the implications of surveillance ubiquitous in our society in a ludic context of

pervasive gaming. Most of us are fundamentally unaware of the camera density in urban

areas, insecurity of internet communications, log data created by cellphone usage et cetera.

Pervasive gaming offers a good opportunity to change our theoretical knowledge about

surveillance into practical hands­on feeling on what can be recorded and what can not. Educating people on surveillance can help them to protect their privacy outside and after the

game.

3.3.2 Use of Public Space

The game was partly played outside in a park in a campus area. The area was open to

bystanders and there were some people walking around who were not affiliated with the game

in any way. Yet, the area was clearly separate and in a way self­contained.

Most of the players said in the interview that they would not feel comfortable playing the

game in a crowded area. The campus location was seen as a good place as bystanders seemed

to be either aware of the game or were just not surprised about the game. In the questionnaire

50% of the participants said that they would not want to play in city centre and only 10% said

that the game would fit at an art or culture festival.

These findings were echoed in the interview:

You just can’t play it in a normal crowded are. You can play it if it is very crowded, or

if it is empty. If there are just a few people here and there then you are a weird person

on the street.

Someone might call the police if they saw you with all the equipment.

The central concern was ridicule. The fact that people might laugh at (or be confused by) the

players because they are carrying around weird equipment came up time after time in the

interviews. This is supported by the suggestion that if the game was moved to a city centre,

the equipment should be subtler.

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Playing in a crowded public area would also seem more acceptable, if the playing happened in

the context of a television series (if the game was part of a tv­series tie­in) as then bystanders

would know what was happening. Generally, the interviewees reacted negatively to

ambiguous social expansion and had not talked to bystanders at all.

If it in a framework of a TV show and the whole nation knows what I’m doing, then

maybe it’s ok. Running around if everybody thinks I’m crazy wouldn’t be fun.

An empty warehouse or a similar empty location was seen as the ideal location for the game

(92% would like to play in a warehouse and 89% preferred a separate location over a festival

setting). These numbers are probably slightly tainted by the fact that the game in question was

built around the concept of a killer virus and thus would require a location with as few people

as possible as they would, following diegetic logic, all be dead or infected.

The paraphernalia needed to play Epidemic Menace is quite extensive. This seems to be the

problem with playing the game in an open public space. It would not be possible to point out

the players of Prosopopeia on the street, but the players of Epidemic Menace would stick out

immediately. On the one hand Epidemic Menace would thus be easier to play in a city centre

as bystanders would be alerted to the carnevalistic nature of the game by the presence of the

elaborate equipment. On the other hand precisely that would break the illusion of the diegetic

world.

3.4 Beneficent Gaming, a Casuistic Exercise

The issues we have pointed out so far in the case studies have mostly demonstrated the

problems and challenges of pervasive gaming, and especially of unaware participation. As a

casuistic exercise to balance the aforementioned examples, we can construct a beneficent

example of a unaware participation, in order to prove the potential for utilitarian or altruistic

good inherent in pervasive games.

Casuistry is a method for analysing individual cases in relation to similar cases and

generalised ethical principles. The central notion is to identify the particular ethical features in

the case and try to find an analogous but clearer case to which virtually any rational person

would agree. These clear cases are called the paradigm cases.

Some games are already used for charity purposes (national lotteries for instance). As the

magic circle of gameplay is broken in pervasive games, the gameplay of these games can

create very tangible outsider benefits. Consider for example a role­playing game where the

players are put into the role of a charity organization, for example making a game about

Salvation Army, inspired by Aki Kaurismäki movie Mies vailla menneisyyttä (2002).

Although the obvious benefits of players providing homeless people with soup and soap are

obvious, some considerations need to be made to minimize risks of causing harm. Exploiting

or stealing the brand of Salvation Army would be maleficent, so the charity organization must

be designed and costumed to be similar but still different enough to avoid confusion. Raising

money from outsiders is improper if the organisation pretends to be a real charity

organization. Finally, Salvation Army is a religious organization, but as discussed in context

of Prosopopeia, it’s typically considered more ethical to design a profane variant of the

charity organization for the purposes of the game.

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Though it might, at first, be difficult to imagine why players would want to join such a game,

it becomes obvious in closer scrutiny. As long as the larps are well designed, larp players are

known to be willing to be subjected to mentally stressful conditions for long times (Europa),

to live in trash heaps (Amerika), to play pre­determined tragedies (Hamlet) and so forth.16

“Entertainment” is not the only intriguing reason to play games, but others exist as well –

including broadening one’s perspectives by joining the Salvation Army lookalike for a week.

If we consider who might be harmed by such a game, we can come up with two parties. First,

the players might be subjected to a reality harsher than they’d expect. This, however, would

be exactly the reason the players signed up. The players need to be informed well enough to

acquire an informed consent, and the harsh reality is actually the selling point of the game.

Secondly, if the game went on for months or more, it might create a group of people whose

welfare depends on continuation of the game.

Finally there’s the matter of exploitation discussed in the context of Prosopopeia. If this is

considered to be a problem, in our ideal example we can also provide announcements to the

possible visitors of the charity organization, explaining that it is all a game about charity. This

precaution should cancel any issues on commodification of the poor and exploiting their

plight.

The casuist method helps to remove ideological differences as long as the focus is kept on the

features of the case (Jonsen & Toulmin 1988, 18). Therefore casuistry should be very useful

in particularly pluralistic situations where there are a number of different religions and

ideologies in play. According to some critics, the major problem with the casuist method is

that it leads to the ethics of the masses by reflecting the currently dominant views of the

society thereby not concentrating on what is right, but what is acceptable by most. Secondly,

finding paradigm cases relies on the features that the reviewers decided to include in the case

description making casuistry a rather subjective method. This exercise is intended to speculate

some potentials of pervasive gaming.

4 Practical Considerations

In this chapter we try to discuss practical issues of pervasive game design, making

conclusions based on the ethical discussion and our case analyses.

4.1 Unaware Participation

The utilitarianist acceptability of a game with unaware participation depends on both the

features of the planned game and also the execution of the plan – both on the intentions and

on the results. A utilitarianist look at the ethics of Vem gråter obviously shows that the game

caused feelings of nervousness, uncertainty and stress in the unwilling participants. However,

as a failed experimental game it does not represent the whole of pervasive gaming or even the

whole of reality gaming.

In an upcoming pervasive game Cruel 2 B Kind17

the players have to kill other players with

acts of kindness. As the players do not know their victims or the other players, they have to

16 Examples mentioned here are larps from Norway and Sweden. Europa portrayed everyday life in a refugee center

where different ethnic groups were struggling for survival. Amerika was about consumerism and world literally

drowning in garbage. Hamlet told the pre-determined tragedy, where most of the players died and the idea of

‘winning’ the game was extremely irrelevant. 17 By Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, to be played in Come Out and Play festival in New York, September 2006. http://cruelgame.com/ (ref. 1

st of August 2006).

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perform their signature act of kindness to random bypassers until they manage to hit their

targets, the only people who know that the act of kindness is related to the game. In practice

this might mean players wandering around, giving flowers to everyone they meet in order to

give a flower to the target player, thus succeeding in the game.

On the drawing board, producing enjoyment and entertainment to unaware participants

motivates both Vem gråter and Cruel 2 B Kind. However, despite the best intentions Vem

gråter was read as a reckless prank or as scary acts of vandalism. We assume that the unaware

experience of Cruel 2 B Kind will be a spontaneous rush of carnivalistic benevolence.

The question of unaware participation requires discussion what can be done in public space.

Clearly, giving flowers to random bypassers in a park in order to succeed in a game is

acceptable to the most of us. Then again, scribbling on a wall might appear unacceptable,

even though it might be legal (provided the scribbler has the appropriate permissions), as the

observers are unable to perceive the legality of the act. Most of the time the nature of player­outsider interaction is impossible to exactly control by a

game organizer. The game content emerging due to the friction on the edge of the magic

circle is one important reason why the players have found socially expanded games like Go

Game and Prosopopeia exciting and appealing (McGonigal 2003b, Jonsson & al 2006,

Montola & Jonsson 2006).

4.1.1 Professionals

One thing that was perceived as particularly problematic in both Vem gråter and Prosopopeia

was that the games approached professionals in their work. Vem gråter was perceived as acts

of vandalism primarily because it became visible to maintenance staff at the university.

The primary motivation for this ethical standpoint is that professional time is money, and

when involving them into a game you are wasting their employer’s money. In Prosopopeia,

this was aggravated by the fact that the person to be approached was a priest participating in a

religious ceremony, as that was seen as a potential insult on the religious community present.

For the professional, the option to refuse involvement (see the discussion on invitation to

refuse from Montola & Waern 2006a) in the game becomes often unavailable. This was

clearly shown by a Swedish radio show Hassan, which made prank phone calls to unaware

people. On one occasion, Hassan called a woman who was working as the municipal contact

person for people with mental problems. Called upon in her professional role, she made every

attempt to answer Hassan’s questions in a composed and pedagogical manner, making for a

hilarious show

18

. Due to her role as a professional counsellor, she was literally forbidden to

hang up on the radio show.

The Vem gråter vandalism interpretation is an example of the practical problems caused by

not negotiating with the local staff for staging of a reality game. There are also strong reasons

to inform officials such as police and fire brigade prior to a game event that they may get

informed about. Even games that appear to have consent of all parties might end up involving

outsiders. One example of such safe­sounding but possibly risky game was Kidnap, where a

consenting participant was kidnapped for 24 hours by a group of artists.19

18 The show was aired in real time, and later on made available on CD. The woman did not consent to the latter. She was later forced to leave her job as she became flooded with prank calls. 19 By Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_kidnap.html (ref. 9th of June 2006).

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4.2 Public Space

One central ethical challenge of pervasive gaming is their use of public space as a part of

spatial (and social) expansion. Feinberg’s Standard of Reasonable Avoidability states that:

No one has a right to protection from the state against offensive experiences if he can

easily and effectively avoid those experiences with no unreasonable effort or

inconvenience. (ref. Vandeveer 1979)

Obviously the unavoidable games, such as Vem gråter or to some extent Prosopopeia are the

core of the problem. Volunteers participating in pervasive games should not be protected from

“harm” caused by them, at least as long as they know what they sign up for. Also, this

emphasizes that the participant should (almost) always have a right to quit her participation in

a pervasive game.

One question is whether people have a right to solitude in public spaces. As advertisements, bouncers, beggars and salesmen are generally considered as nuisances, there is something

offensive in intruding personal space without invitation. The seriousness of these nuisances

depends on the fashion of intruding and requires specific consideration. Excessive stalking of

outsiders (or other players) is one particular problem, not to even mention issues like sexual

harassment. On the other hand, public spaces are just that, public, and the desire for not being

interrupted is fulfilled in private spaces.

There are also strong arguments for bringing games to public space. As participants engage in

public play, they are also redefining the public space, turning streets from no man’s land to

every man’s land. The ideology of reclaiming the streets suggests that traffic is not the only

function of urban outdoor areas, but they should be used creatively as well. In this respect

pervasive gaming can have similar functions as invisible theatre 20

, flash mobs and street

parties have. The more radical street artists speaking for reclaiming the public space also

argue that all individuals should have the right to both use public spaces and also alter them –

the graffiti movement can be seen as a pervasive art movement taking visual arts outside the

contractual spaces typically reserved for art.

Staging games in public areas only is a double­edged solution in terms of providing the

unaware participants the possibility of refusing the game.21 As the game stays in public space,

it can be refused by leaving the public space – but pervasive game organizer can’t except

random people to stay in their homes while running the game. This solution is used by many

Killer troupes, which only allow assassinations to happen in public spaces and thus reducing

the pervasivity of the game.

4.3 Ludic Interpretation

Pervasive games should typically be designed to be ambiguously visible primarily to people

that can be assumed to make ludic interpretations of the experience. Achieving this can be

difficult; a janitor has a professional reason for taking game events seriously, while generally

women and men react differently to mysterious stalkers in the night. Other factors that may

inspire preferred interpretations include the choice of location (ambiguous clues of The A.I. Game were presented in the movie trailer), the choice of theme (I Love Bees had the flavour

20 Undercover theatre play in public spaces, where actors pretend to be ordinary individuals. 21 Invitation to refuse, see Montola & Waern (2006a).

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of honey farming), and the choice of aware players (Spiricom­Thomas was probably

perceived to be more scary than small children would have been).

The thematic choices are important. Whereas a scary, depressing or even violent theme is

often enjoyable in a contextualised game, the lack of contextualization makes the same theme

very problematic in the unaware or ambiguous game context. As the protective frame of game

or fiction is missing, a thrilling game inspires raw, unmediated fear in the participant. While it

is possible that some people might enjoy of such an extreme experience22

, establishing a

certainty on that before the beginning of the game is practically impossible.23 This is the key

difference between Vem gråter and Cruel 2 B Kind, where the latter is likely to create a

thoroughly agreeable atmosphere for non­players. Even selecting a non­scary theme will not

in itself guarantee that the game is not perceived as scary.

4.4 Story Spin

The most serious problem with Vem gråter was the amount of story spin that was generated

by the events. The major example is the interpretation of Spiricom­Thomas as a potential

lunatic. The other example is the interpretation of the game event as a prank staged by the

students to ‘get even’ with the school, and in general the organisational conflicts that the game

exposed.

It is all too easy to dismiss these stories as the result of ‘freak coincidences’ with reality – in

this case there really was a mentally ill person related to the university and the students had a

real reason to be disappointed with university management. But such coincidences are legion

in reality and alternate reality games and form an essential part of the game aesthetics. Even

though the Vem gråter case is extreme, any game that offers ambiguous game experiences

runs a risk of backfiring this way. The advantage of establishing Huizinga’s magic circle

around a game experience is that it also keeps many issues outside the game: In traditional

games a poor person can easily play a millionaire, and the nightly wanderer does not get

mixed with a known mentally ill person.

For accountability reasons, it is important that there is a person (or several) who is both able

to justify the game design decisions afterwards, and take the responsibility for the game in

case it backfires. In the case of Vem gråter, the lack of a clear responsible designer/producer

created a lot of harm in the aftermath of the events, where the university, the game

development education, and the students suffered.

The risk of a harmful story spin is practically ever­present with expanded games. One

example of a game where risk certainly existed but was tolerably small was Epidemic

Menace 2, in which the players portrayed members of “European Epidemic Prevention

Agency EEPA”, trying to catch deadly viruses in campus area. Dressed up in EEPA shirts and

wielding complicated technology, there theoretically was a risk of misunderstanding leading

to a weird story spin. In practice, however, in campus area the risk of someone

22 In pop culture, David Fincher’s movie The Game (1997) suggests that some people might enjoy such fear at least in

retrospect, after the game is over and the ambiguity is cleared. It is also relatively common in the Nordic larp culture

to consider negative character emotions and experiences as positive experiences for the player. 23 A hardcore community of pervasive gamers might create a website, where they could publicly declare their willingnes to play unaware parts in pervasive games with certain, defined conditions. Restrictions and permissions established in such way would help designers to plan their reality games and choose their participants, even though

the legal status of such one-sided contracts would be an important consideration.

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misinterpreting a PDA or a cellphone as real medical equipment was so small that the risk of a

story spin was probably acceptably small.

4.5 Reality Fabrication

In Vem gråter interviews we asked the informants if they found this type of gaming ethically

acceptable. The answers varied from clear ‘yes’ over “it is not acceptable to scare people” to

clear “no”. Some interviewees motivated their ‘yes’ from a post­modern perspective: As the

world consists of a web of fabricated realities, reality gaming could make people aware on

how they were fooled. This educational perspective of shaking people awake was seen as a

justification for pervasive gaming. This opinion was also voiced in the online discussion on

Prosopopeia.

I find the genre acceptable, the basic form that forced people to think again, when you

get to know that aha, this was not completely real and here I have been, believing it to

be real. (Student in the development team)

One of the interviewees in the Vem gråter study expressed an almost opposite opinion:

What I react against in this is that there is somebody who creates deliberate

deceptions, and then can stand at the side and think ‘ha, ha look’… (Observer aware of

the gameness of the events)

The crucial issue is that to deceive somebody, there must be somebody who is ‘in the know’

and for that reason has power over the people who are being deceived. The alternate reality

game genre introduces a systematic bias between the aware and the unaware participants

(irrespective of role). From this ethical standpoint, the whole genre of alternate reality games

is compromised.

4.6 Player Rights

Many pervasive games are based on the TING­paradigm of aesthetics (see McGonigal 2003a,

2003b), where it’s important that the game does not explicitly appear to be a game to the

player. In this type of game, it’s sometimes not desirable to exactly inform the players of the

ways they are observed during the game.

An unfortunately easy solution is a carte blanche approach, where the players allow the game

operators to gather information and fabricate reality in unclearly defined or countless ways. The rationale behind the approach is that if the game operator acquires the permission to do

anything, the players cannot guess what the operator will do – leading to a better game

experience (for people appreciating the TING­aesthetic). Ethically the carte blanche approach

is problematic: the players’ ability to make informed decisions is compromised, as they do not

understand the possibilities and limitations of surveillance and fabrication in pervasive

games.24 The player might not know who stores the information, who are the people having

an access to it and for what purposes it will be used.

24 Would the players sign a form where they consent to “any means of technical surveillance for the duration of the game”, if they knew that they were accepting the fact that they may be surveilled 24 hours per day by audio and video, the recordings may be stored for unlimited time and used for any imaginable purposes by a large number of

people without internal regulation? In extreme cases, the game operator might even claim that “technical surveillance” includes covertly reading their email messages, monitoring their web use, tracking their cellphone movements et cetera et cetera (even though such claim might not hold in court).

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The problems of a carte blanche approach are also relevant when obtaining information from

players, e.g. regarding special diets, health status et cetera. If the players are not appropriately

informed on the content and gameplay of the game, their ability of providing sufficient

information on their health status is difficult. Depending on the game, especially conditions

such as diabetes, epilepsy and heart diseases. Mental conditions may turn out to be relevant as

well, e.g. panic disorder and various phobias. In order to ensure player safety, a game asking

for carte blanche list of permissions in order to uphold secrecy, may also need to obtain a

relatively complete health information of all players and review it carefully.

All data stored on player activities should be deleted immediately when it is no longer needed

for operating and developing the game, and, in most games, the permission for the use of data

should be obtained in advance. It is far better to obfuscate the players by asking permissions

for types of sensory information not used in the game, than to use data without permission. In

addition, only needed data should be collected or stored, and after the game the players should

have a right to know what data was collected and how it was used. Data collected for the

game should not be used or stored for other purposes, except when an informed consent is

acquired. If medical data or other especially confidential information is collected, it’s access

and use may need special regulations and care.

4.6.1 Ridicule and Awkwardness

The players of Epidemic Menace 2 had concerns on ridicule on players. Although we do not

generally realize this, many societies place cultural restrictions on which games adults are

supposed to play in public. Games including e.g. elements of role­play (Epidemic Menace, Prosopopeia and Vem gråter) might cause such awkwardness in some players. This

awkwardness and the potential social repercussions are rather unpleasant nuisances than

tangible harms; it’s unlikely that an outsider comment on Epidemic Menace would be more

than a passing irritation. Communicating the nature of a pervasive game early on is usually

more of a practical recommendation than an ethical one: In order to facilitate playing and to

make sure the players entering the game are likely to enjoy it, it is good to ensure that players

know what they are about to do.

Placing this playfulness into public spaces not reserved for gaming can be seen as a beneficial

effect exactly because of the social norms that restrict playing: Loosening those norms allows

people to behave more freely in public, and can result in further pleasurable playfulness. The

openness and boldness required from theatre actors can be taught in stressful and awkward

(yet usually fun and rewarding) drama exercises, and pervasive gaming serves well in this

function.

4.7 Operator Power

As McGonigal (2006) notes, many pervasive games tend to shift the focus from free play

within the illusory constraints towards becoming actors playing their part in a vision dictated

by the game designer. According to her experiences on Go Game and I Love Bees the players

are often willing to go surprisingly far with obeying the commands issued by game

organizers, even when those orders are misunderstood. The players of I Love Bees managed to

overcome surprising challenges when they convinced a restaurant proprietor to open an hour

earlier in order to complete an assignment, as the organizers had accidentally designed the

game event for wrong time zone. In Go Game the players’ literal interpretation of a spiced­up

opening message became a surprising public show:

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Just before the game started, another Go Game writer decided to revise the opening

text message I had prepared. My text was a bit dry: “Welcome, superheroes! Press GO

when you’re ready to start the game.” We both agreed it would be better to set a more

playful mood, so she added a colorful interjection to the welcome message: “Howdy

superheroes – hold onto your hats, it’s time to drop your pants and dance! Press GO

when you’re ready to start the game.” I had already forgotten about this minor text

change when the teams assembled in Washington Square Park to receive their first set

of instructions. […] Instead, something completely unexpected happened. Half a dozen

players began unbuckling their belts, unzipping their jeans, and showing off their

underwear while waving their arms in the air. This caught the attention of other

players, who quickly realized – A ha! ‘Drop your pants and dance’ – this is our first

mission! So they, too, dropped their pants and started dancing. Before long, most of the

players were dancing merrily in their underwear. They took photos of each other to

‘prove’ their success in completing the mission. (McGonigal 2006)

In Vem gråter, Prosopopeia and Wanderer the game operator wields considerable power as

well. The responsibility of operator is heightened by the fact that the player’s ability to

voluntarily accept the gaming contract is reduced due to insufficient advance information.

In Prosopopeia the players were expected to sneak into an abandoned mental hospital at

night, which would have been illegal if the area wouldn’t have been rented for the game. They

were not expected to break and enter, as one of the doors was left open, but if they had broken

a window before finding the unlocked door, the game organizer would have faced interesting

problems of responsibility.

Still, the responsibility also falls on aware players of pervasive games, as they stand on the

thin line between game and non­game. Often the game­life interactions are emergent, chaotic,

surprising and uncontrollable – thus it’s not feasible to plan for all the scenarios in the game

design. As the Prosopopeia priest example demonstrates, the players are able and willing to

use their own judgement during the game. As decades of experience in Killer25 groups and

among urban role­players has taught, the players can be trusted to use common sense, and the

players must also be expected to take responsibility of their actions (see e.g. Talvitie).

5 Conclusion

In regular gaming, the magic circle of gameplay creates a special, contractual state where

ethical rules are changed. Limited forms of violence may be allowed (ice­hockey), stealing

can considered being a part of game (Everquest) and players’ privacy can be intruded on (Big

Brother). Pervasive games are different, as the magic circle is expanded in terms of space,

time and social relations, and as game actions are so ambiguous that they are often

inseparably mixed with ordinary life actions. Thus, only the players who willingly and

informedly accept the gaming contract can be subjected to the magic circle ethics. Outsiders

and unaware participants can’t be treated with magic circle ethics.

An event that provides an appealing game experience to one person can be deeply

problematic for another person. When exposed to the idea, some people will take a strong

ethical standpoint against it whereas others find it unproblematic and attractive. We hope that

the discussion above sheds light to different sides of the argument, and shows some

problematic and recommendable game structures.

25 Assassination games, such as Killer: The Game of Assassination written down by Steve Jackson in 1981, are played among outsiders. In Killer the outsiders are witnesses and obstacles, who are to be avoided while conducting real- world murders of other players with water pistols.

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Often the offences caused by pervasive games are rather nuisances than harms with lasting

effects, and usually the nuisances are caused by unlikely accidents rather than intentional

game designs. These nuisances might be compared with outdoor concerts and street festivals:

Disturbing the neighbourhood by playing loud music and causing traffic jam is better

addressed by politics than ethics. As public space is a shared environment, its use needs to be

governed contractually, and the political system exists for negotiating those contracts. As long

as pervasive gaming remains a niche activity, the nuisances it causes are likely to be too

trivial for the politics to address, so self­regulation is necessary within the field. To minimize

the risk of accidents, adapting the editor­in­chief model from media is probably a good idea in

major game projects. Appointing a person with extended responsibility and decisive power in

the project is a good way of minimizing the risk in the situations where the responsibility

would otherwise appear to disappear due to complexity of power structures. This would be a

natural role for the producer or lead designer of the game. In order for this system to really

work, the person must take a relatively public role transparent to players (and even outsiders

to some extent), and she needs to have the power to veto any elements of the game design. Many pervasive games and game­like activities should be perceived as art or political

commentary in addition to being seen as games, based on their motivation, purpose and

design. Especially the issues of public space and privacy have been commented in many

pervasive games. The artistic games perhaps transcend a need for clear, utilitarian valuation

and are subject to public artistic critique instead.

As we look at the fear caused by a nightly wanderer or the way student art is interpreted as

vandalism, this justification becomes more understandable: Perhaps we need, as a society, some boundary­breaking games allowing us to play in public spaces, meet the most unlikely

of people and perhaps give some candy to strangers. Unaware participation has a strong

potential to be a powerful solution instead of being a problem, even though we have mostly

featured problematic scenarios in this paper.

6 Acknowledgements

We want to thank the Prosopopeia discussants for commenting the paper, as well as the staff

of Gotland University and the organizers of Vem gråter for allowing us to study the game

afterwards. Of the many people providing good feedback to this report, we want to especially

thank Staffan Björk, Alison Harvey, Jussi Holopainen, Frank Lantz, Ari­Pekka Lappi and

Steffen P. Walz for comments.

7 References

Ackerman, M., Darell, T., and Weitzner, D. J.: Privacy in context. Human­Computer

Interaction, 16(2­4), 167­176 (2001). Allen, A.: Constitutional Law and Privacy. In A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal

Theory, ed. Patterson, D. Oxford, Blackwell (1996). Beauchamp, T.: Childress, F.: Principles of biomedical ethics. New York, Oxford University

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Ellis, A.: Offence and the Liberal Conception of the Law. In Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 13, No 1. (Winter, 1984). Feinberg, J.: Sua Culpa. In Ethical Issues in the Use of Computers, eds. D.G. Johnson and J. Snapper. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth (1985). Feinberg, J.: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law 4: Harmless Wrongdoing. New York, Oxford University Press (1988). Friedman, B.: Human Values and the design of Computer Technology.Center for the Study of

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Huizinga, J.: Homo Ludens. A Study of Play Element in Culture. Boston, Beacon Press,

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Community. Modern Drama 48:3 (2005). Milgram, S.: Behavioral study of obedience. In Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67(4), 371­378 (1963). Milgram, S.: Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind. In American

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Pervasive Gaming. Available in http://www.pervasive­gaming.org (2006). Palen, L., and Dourish, P.: Unpacking “Privacy” for a Networked World. In proceedings of

the Conference for Human Factors in Computing Systems (2003). Rawls, J.: A theory of justice. Oxford, Oxford University Press (1980). Talvitie, D.: A Manual for Urban Live­Action Roleplaying. 0.3 beta. In

http://users.utu.fi/aletal/roolipelaaja/citygamer (ref. 9th of June 2006). Vandeveer, D.: Coercive Restraint of Offensive Actions. In Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 8, No 2. (1979). Zevenbergen, J. European Privacy Law and its Effect on Location Information. Location

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Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

WorkPackage WP5: Design & Evaluation

Ethics of Pervasive Gaming

Deliverable D5.5:

Markus Montola (University of Tampere)

Annika Waern (SICS)

Jussi Kuittinen (University of Tampere)

Jaakko Stenros (University of Tampere)

Release date: October 13 2006

Status: public

Public IPerG Deliverable 13/10 2006

In this report we discuss ethical issues related to pervasive gaming. Due to their nature, the

pervasive games influence the ordinary life outside the game in many ways, some of which

are beneficent while others are problematic. In this report we focus on the latter issues, while

also demonstrating the power for beneficence and social commentary. The problematic issues

that we rise involve questions of involuntary participation, power use, privacy and deception.

Involuntary and unaware participation is relevant, as the nature of a typical game is

contractual, and in pervasive games outsiders are drawn to the game without their explicit

consent. Power use is relevant, as the game organizers and operators typically hold significant

power over player, who seek to complete tasks set by operators during the game. This power

division is typically very asymmetric and non­transparent. Privacy is a natural concern in

games that pervade everyday life bringing the required surveillance technology along.

Deception takes place in many ways from purposeful reality fabrication to players discussing

In discussing ethics the concept of harm is critical; differentiating lasting setbacks to one’s

interests or assets from momentary nuisances that are a natural part of being a part of a

society. While ethics can be applied to both categories, in practice the latter issues especially

are better solved by politics that ethics. When harm is caused by pervasive game, the question of accountability remains. Usually such

harm is caused accidentally by unforeseen circumstances. Obviously the accidents that

happen in pervasive games are typically not physical like the ones in sports, but psychological

and social. Responsibility of such accident is typically shared by players and game organizers:

While the game designers, orchestrators and operators strongly guide the player activities, the

only the players can react in real time to unforeseeable circumstances and incidents. We study the ethical issues by analyzing several cases of pervasive gaming. While the most of

our detailed studies focus on past games, one examines an upcoming one and one game is

constructed on concept­level only for the purposes of this report.

Even though this report focuses on problematic pervasive games, we want to emphasize that

only few pervasive games are offensive or harmful. The purpose of this report is to make that

2

Deliverable Identification Sheet

Full title Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

Project URL http://iperg.sics.se/

EU Project Officer Albert GAUTHIER

Deliverable D5.5 Ethics of Pervasive Gaming

Work package WP5 Design & Evaluation

Date of delivery Contractual M24 Actual M24

Status final ̨

Nature Prototype p Report ̨ Dissemination p

Public ̨ Consortium (CO) p

Authors (Partner) Markus Montola (UTA), Jussi Kuittinen (UTA), Jaakko Stenros (UTA),

Responsible Markus Montola Email markus.montola@uta.fi

Author Partner University of

Annika Waern (SICS)

Phone +358 44 544 2445

Tampere

This report discusses the ethics of

pervasive gaming, based on five case

examples as well as brief review of

central ethical standpoints related to

pervasive gaming. Keywords pervasive game, unaware participation, social expansion, temporal expansion, ambiguous gameplay, ethics

Issue Date Rev No. Author Change

th of Aug. 0.1 Montola First draft

th of Aug 0.2 Montola Added EM2 etc.

th of Aug 0.3 Montola Added ethics chapters from Jussi and Annika etc.

th of Aug 0.4 Montola Added autonomy and deception from Jussi etc.

th of Sept 0.5 Montola Reorganized, added stuff.

th of Oct 0.9 Montola Addressed reviewer comments, added text.

3

Executive Summary …………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………… 4

1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………. 5

2 Introduction to Ethics……………………………………………………………………. 6

2.1 Traditional Starting Points………………………………………………………………………….6

2.2 Applied Ethics………………………………………………………………………………………….7

2.3 The Ethics of Technology Usage …………………………………………………………………8

2.4 Artistic Motivation and Societal Commentary……………………………………………..14

3 Case Studies ……………………………………………………………………………….. 15

3.1 Vem Gråter ……………………………………………………………………………………………16

3.2 Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där Vi Föll………………………………………………………………19

3.3 Epidemic Menace 2…………………………………………………………………………………22

3.4 Beneficent Gaming, a Casuistic Exercise…………………………………………………….24

4 Practical Considerations ……………………………………………………………… 25

4.1 Unaware Participation ……………………………………………………………………………..25

4.2 Public Space…………………………………………………………………………………………..27

4.3 Ludic Interpretation…………………………………………………………………………………27

4.4 Story Spin ……………………………………………………………………………………………..28

4.5 Reality Fabrication………………………………………………………………………………….29

4.6 Player Rights………………………………………………………………………………………….29

4.7 Operator Power………………………………………………………………………………………30

5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….. 31

6 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………… 32

7 References………………………………………………………………………………….. 32

4

The salient feature of pervasive games is the way the borders of game and non­game are

blurred (see Montola 2005; Montola, Waern & Nieuwdorp 2006 for definitions and

discussion). As the interface of the pervasive game is ambiguous, the game actions conducted

by players and game orchestrators are both game actions and non­game actions.1 In addition

of wondering what is acceptable in the context of game, the pervasive game designer needs to

contemplate on what is acceptable in real life. Perhaps the two most important aspects are

Pervasive games are structures of make­believe fabrication overlapping with the ordinary life

of the players. This fabrication ranges for example from playing combat robots (Botfighters)

to vampires (Vampire: The Masquerade), medical scientists (Epidemic Menace 2), ghosts

(Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll) and assassins (Killer: The Game of Assassination). For the

gamer the context of game is accessible, but to a bystander the game might appear as a prank,

a weird event or everyday reality. This friction of ludic and ordinary is an important source of

ethical conflicts and opportunities, as a game can directly influence ordinary lives of the

participants. (See Montola & Waern 2006a for discussion on unaware game participation).

Surveillance is important for orchestration of most pervasive games. The sensory functions

vary greatly, but they might include video surveillance (Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll), player­based reporting (Isle of Saints), cell phone positioning (Botfighters), GPS (Epidemic

Menace 2) et cetera. The ethics of surveillance are relevant for the privacy of the player, but

also it’s important to avoid the surveillance of outsiders or bystanders.

The purpose of this report is to open ethical discussion on what makes a pervasive game

design feature acceptable or unacceptable from the ethical point of view. Thus, it can also be

read as a guideline document for reflecting individual game designs.

In the work leading to this report we have found out that many ethical issues described in here

easily spark controversy. Apparently the most challenging, risky and unique ways of creating

pervasive games also hold the potential for the most interesting artistic expression, the

sharpest political commentary and the most engaging gaming experiences. We try to cover

both permissive and restrictive arguments in this report without taking sides as such. Thus,

there are few clear answers in this report, but rather some ethical guidelines for the use of the

The concepts and most of the game examples used in this report have been earlier discussed

in an earlier IPerG report, D5.3B: The Domain of Pervasive Gaming (Montola, Waern &

Nieuwdorp 2005), which is publicly available in Internet.

Ethical issues have been touched earlier within IPerG at several occasions. D5.1 Initial

Design and Evaluation Guidelines provided a few considerations, and the work on social

adaptability and interaction design in D9.1 Guidelines for Socially Adaptable Games partially

touched a couple of related issues. Pervasive gaming business ethics have been briefly

discussed in D4.1 Business Guidelines.

1 This phenomenon, discussed earlier as interface ambiguity, stems from the fact that pervasive games are not played entirely inside the so-called ”magic circle of gameplay”. Walking into a shop with Botfighters on in one’s cellphone

constitutes a game action, as the player’s bot is moving in space – even though the player’s intent was not to perform

5

This document does not discuss legislation and should not be used as legal advice.

2 Introduction to Ethics

In this report, we discuss the ethics of the pervasive aspects of pervasive games in particular.

Our discussion does not include ethics of gaming or ethics of pervasive applications, but is

restricted to pervasive games only. As discussed in previous reports, games are needless and

voluntary activities2 (Huizinga 1938); this distinguishes games from other pervasive

applications and poses particular ethical requirements.

2.1 Traditional Starting Points

The basic starting point for all professional ethics is the question of the right action: what

action in a given situation might be considered the right one and on what grounds. This

underlying fundamental issue is reflected in approaches such as utilitarianism and deontology.

The theoretical approach most notably put forth by Mill (1987) and Bentham (1982), utilitarianism relies on evaluating the consequences of actions. Utilitarianists hold that all

ethical considerations should be based on calculating the utility of an act, which is the amount

of good it produces, so that when faced with a moral dilemma, one must consider the

consequences of each possible act and choose the one that produces the most good. This is the

crudest form of utilitarianism aptly called the act­utilitarianism.

There are quite many problems associated with act­utilitarianism. First off, predicting future

consequences is very hard. Secondly, the biggest moral problems are often those that require

instant decisions, but utilitarianism forces the agent to consider all the alternatives and

calculate their consequences as far into the future as possible. Thirdly, although act­ utilitarianism might maximize goodness on individual situations, it might produce worse

results if everyone were to act in certain act­utilitarian ways. For instance, stealing money

from a bank to help a family in need might maximize happiness in a single instance, but if

everyone started doing it, the macro­economical consequences would produce great amounts

Rule­utilitarianism tries to address the two latter problems by stating that it is not the utility of

an individual act that should be considered but the utility of a rule. If there is a rule that

maximizes goodness when followed constantly, then it should be chosen. Although this would

reduce the time needed to make decisions, this would still leave the utilitarian with one major

problem: how to make good rules that address the needs of individual situations. For instance, a rule stating that one should never lie would need an exception that would allow lying in

order save a life. This exception in turn might need an exception that would deny lying in

situations where saving a life by lying would risk more lives, e.g. when one would lie to save

a known murderer, and so on forth. This formulation of exceptions and sub­rules can in fact

reduce the rule­utilitarianism back to the act­utilitarianism as Lyons (1965, 137) has argued.

The other predominant traditional theory on right action is the deontology, a term and theory

created by Kant (1998) in the 18 th century. If utilitarianism is teleological, then deontologism

2 Needless does not mean useless or worthless. Pervasive gaming offers many opportunities for education (Regensburg

Explorer, Visby Under) and physical excercise (PacManhattan, Wanderer), for example.

6

might be considered as causal in its application: there are some a priori duties that always

oblige one to act in a certain way regardless of the situation. Instead of looking at the

consequences of the action, the agent should focus on the duties having relevance with the

So, how does one know one’s duties? For Kant, these were the product of the rational human

mind. If a rational human would think about it hard enough, he could have no other choice but

to come to a certain conclusion i.e. a rule Kant called the Categorical Imperative, which in

one form stated that one should only act according to a rule that one could at the same time

will to become a universal law. For Kant the Categorical Imperative imposed an

unconditional duty to all individuals and was the basis for all other moral duties.

The difference between deontology and utilitarianism is difference between the right and the

good as Rawls (1980, 30) puts it. While utilitarianists argue that an act is right when it

produces the most good, deontologists claim that an act may produce the most good even

though it is clearly wrong by violating another person’s universally acknowledged right or

some other generally agreed upon ethical principle. So, deontological thinking is not

dependent only on the considerations, but also on other issues.

The question now becomes, what are these rights and principles and how can they be agreed

upon by all the members of the society? Rawls’ answer is the hypothetical concept of original

position. He argues that if a group of rational people each acting as a representative for a

group of citizens, were stripped of, for example, such information as the wealth, race and

gender of the citizens they represent, they would choose a set of rights and principles that

would also benefit those citizens that have the least in terms of talent or wealth.

The problem of utilitarianism and deontology is that they are not concrete enough to be easily

applicable to everyday moral dilemmas, that is, they are more concerned with creating a

general theory of ethics instead of providing means to solve ethical problems. Applied ethics

is specifically aimed at creating methodology for solving practical ethical issues.

Before going further with the different approaches in applied ethics, it is necessary to go

through two central notions in contemporary ethical discussions: rights and principles.

Put simply, rights impose duties on other people or society to either act or refrain from acting

in a certain way. If a right imposes a restraint on acting, then it is a negative right and when a

right imposes a duty to act, it is a positive right. As an example, a right to life is a negative

right, since it imposes a duty to restrain from acting in manner that would kill someone, and

the right to social security is a positive right as it imposes a duty on society to provide social

services to those in need. Rights can also be absolute, in which case it is always inviolable

and should be respected regardless of any other considerations, or prima facie meaning that in

some cases other rights might outweigh the right.

In ethics a moral principle is a universal rule i.e. notion that defines a duty. Deontology and

utilitarianism are monistic theories in that they rely on one single moral principle. The

former’s principle is the Categorical Imperative and the latter’s the principle of utility. The

methods in applied ethics are usually pluralistic defining a set of principles, which in turn can

7

Beauchamp and Childress (2001) introduce four principles upon which the medical

professionals could base their reasoning in moral dilemmas. Each of these principles is

supposed to be prima facie, so that depending on the circumstances any principle could

outweigh the other. These principles are:

­ Respect for autonomy i.e. the duty to respect the right of every individual to make

decisions regarding their own life. ­ Beneficence i.e. the duty to try to do good to other people. ­ Non­maleficence i.e. the duty to not harm or offend other people. ­ Justice i.e. the duty to treat all individuals equally in similar situations.

The view purported by principlism is not an altogether unproblematic one. When a conflict

between the principles occurs, the method can actually produce several different outcomes

instead of a single correct one. Although not necessarily a bad thing, it can lead to confusion

The benefits of the four principles approach lie in the practicality and the usefulness of the

method. As almost a checklist, it helps medical professionals to both identify the possible

ethical conflicts and also provides a terminology to discuss them. One can argue whether the

selected principles actually constitute the most important ones in healthcare professions, but

as it often is in ethics, no single set can be selected with absolute certainty.

Principlism has been criticised for being overly individualistic by emphasizing autonomy as

the key factor in ethical considerations. Although the four principles are supposed to be

equally strong in preference, some critics have claimed that the other three principles are in

fact more or less defined by autonomy. In the case of casuistry 3

mostly from the fact that some western societies such as United States and Great Britain have

a long history of individualistic preference.

Communitarianism is a somewhat loose term for those philosophers and political scientists

who emphasize the importance of the community over that of an individual. Communitarianism itself is not as much a method than criticism over the prevalent principles

in both the casuistry and the principlism. For instance, Callahan (2003) notes that in case of

an ethical problem, the questions should focus on “its social meaning, implications, and

context, even in those cases which seem to affect individuals only”.

Although the criticism raised by communitarians is often valid and well justified, it can make

ethical problems more complex requiring even more professionalism from the reviewers and

thereby rendering ethics out of reach for the practical everyday problems.

2.3 The Ethics of Technology Usage

When technology is put to use, it affects individuals as well as the society as a whole. The

value of those changes are typically judged in other terms than purely economical; Friedman

(2004)) uses the term human values to represent ethical and moral values that people take into

account when describing such changes. As there are large individual and cultural differences

in how such values are described and judged, it can be debated (and has been debated) to what

this criticism has stemmed

8

extent they are universal. However, as we can see from the debates arising around computer

technology, it is still possible to provide terms and classifications that help us analyse the

values embodied in a particular application design and its usage. Although such

categorisations never become complete, they provide a common ground for analysis, standardisation, and debate.

Starting in the analysis provided by Friedman, we can classify values that commonly are

embodied by computer technology as privacy, accountability, (freedom of) bias, autonomy

and universal access. We can start by noting that as games are voluntary and needless, the last

one is less applicable to games than to most other computer applications. The impossibility to

access a particular type of game may be frustrating but does not cause any secondary harm

(e.g. limited access to central societal functions). Similarly, autonomy is de­emphasised by

the game rules; entering a game usually implies accepting to be bound by its rules. For games,

the autonomy is relevant for player’s ability to stop playing at any time; and even this is often

compromised e.g. in team­based games where the common good of the team may be

dependent on players not quitting. As we will see in our case analysis, accountability, bias and

privacy are central values in the ethics of pervasive games.

As noted by Friedman, the actual technology used in an application will sometimes directly

impact these values. More commonly however, the way the technology is distributed and its

usage regulated is much more critical. In our analysis, we will not primarily analyse the

technology as such, but the whole game setting, including the rules, the selection of players,

and in particular the relationship between players and bystanders. 4

Privacy is a critical and delicate consideration for designing pervasive games, as the games

may considerably intrude on both players and bystanders. As noted by many authors, privacy

is primarily a socially regulated contract, where people regulate their openness about private

issues depending on the social context.

According to Allen (1996), there are three typically used dimensions as to how the concept of

­ physical privacy, meaning that people have the right to private physical space from

where other people may be excluded (e.g. private toilets), ­ informational privacy, meaning that a person has the right to control access to

information about oneself (e.g. privacy of information on one’s health), and ­ decisional privacy, meaning that people have the right to exclude other people from

the decisions concerning oneself (e.g. the decision to make an abortion).

These dimensions of privacy are intertwined and overlapping on some situations. For

instance, placing a hidden camera without her consent in a person’s toilet would clearly

violate her right to physical privacy, but also the right to informational privacy by violating

her right to control access to sensitive information about herself. In the same way, physical

and decisional privacies would be overlapping in a situation where a group of religious

missionaries are forcefully trying to convert an atheist.

4 This is due to the claim (Montola, Waern & Nieuwdorp 2005) that pervasive games are not explicitly defined by the

technology used, because pervasive experiences can be constructed without any computer equipment.

9

Informational privacy is regulated by the most legal systems in Europe (as in other parts of

the world), in terms of unsolicited information solicitation and use. These laws typically rely

on the informed consent for information sharing (Zevenbergen 2004). However, Grudin

(2001) has argued that the major privacy problem with modern information technology is a

lack of immediacy. The effects of information sharing are not obvious at the time of

disclosure, and this harms the individual’s ability to adapt their openness according to context. Bearing this in mind, supporting explicit privacy agreements (Ackerman et al 2001) is not a

sufficient solution, as the immediacy may be compromised both by the explicit representation

and lack of timing. Palen and Dourish (2003) provide a more useful basis for privacy

negotiations by deconstructing the potential negotiation into three aspects: negotiation of

content, negotiation of identity, and negotiation of time (past, present, and future solicitation

Palen and Dourish’s analysis makes it possible to restrict privacy negotiations to contexts that

are naturally graspable. For ordinary, non­pervasive games, the magic circle of gameplay and

the decision to enter into or leave a game forms a natural and easily graspable boundary to

which such contextual negotiations can be associated (Montola 2005). Both the solicitation

and usage of information can be restricted to the game context. It is common for players to

adopt a game identity, which exists solely within the gaming context. Finally, due to the

voluntary and needless properties of a game, players will typically only accept that the game

gathers such information that is needed to run the game. For example, players may agree to

solicit personal data about their past, but only under the conditions that the data is shared only

in the present (during the game) and under a temporal identity. For pervasive games however,

the lack of a clearly defined boundary between the game and ordinary life compromises the

ability to negotiate information disclosure both for players and non­players.

Physical privacy is probably the most problematic dimension in pervasive games. The

structure of games as systems of rules where players are constantly required to make

decisions in an artificial context will rarely create situations where one’s decisional privacy

Although fundamental, right to privacy is not absolute. In western legal tradition it is common

to make an exception if the person in question could be seen to have given implicit consent,

like in the case of active publicity seekers. A person’s right to privacy can also be limited if

she has no reason to expect privacy, for example in public places. Thirdly, privacy can be

outweighed by other rights that are considered more important, such as the right to security. As mentioned previously, most privacy regulating laws also provide the option of signing

Looking at the different groups of people whose privacy can be violated in a pervasive game,

there are at least players, aware spectators, unaware participants, and unaware spectators. There are some differences between these groups as to the types of ethical problems arise.

The key distinguishing factor between these groups is clearly the awareness of the game. Both

the players and the aware spectators have some understanding about the game i.e. its name,

concept and so on forth, so that they have some idea what to expect. Players will also have to

know at least part of the rules so that they should have even more reasonable expectations and

also consent regarding the rules they have information of.

Although seemingly unproblematic, the issue of consent can be rather complex in some

pervasive games. Once participants have given their consent to the game by opting to play it,

10

their privacy protection could be considered void from the game in question. But this assumes

that players have reasonable expectations on the nature and the content of the game. But in

order to be able to give full and informed consent, the participant would have to know all the

events and rules in the game before consenting. This of course is impossible with some

games. One potential solution would be to allow players to quit the game once they run into a

situation where they feel that their privacy has been or will be violated: This may happen for

example in some alternate reality games based on “this is not a game” aesthetic, when the

players may realize their participation in a game well after the game has started. In any case,

the game designers and operators should never infringe privacy without sufficient and

The right to privacy of the aware spectators is higher than for players. Again, physical and

informational privacy are primarily considered: the aware spectator will for example expect to

be able to escape from the game to carry out private activities. Unaware participation and

unaware spectatorship pose even higher challenges for game design. They cannot be seen to

give any other consent than the possible implicit consent maybe given by entering a public

Following Friedman, we will use the term accountability to refer to an individual’s

responsibility for a given harm. In juridical systems, the ability to identify such individuals

(or juridical persons including organisations and companies) forms the basis of providing

retribution for harm (e.g. indemnity). Within the context of a game, such retributions are often

part of the rules governing the game (e.g. the yellow and red cards used in soccer).

In this report we mostly discuss psychological harm, as has been earlier done by e.g.

Feinberg, Vandeveer and Ellis: Harms include lasting setbacks to one’s assets, including

physical and psychological setbacks. Offences include harms, but also minor, ‘harmless’ nuisances. Ellis (1984) works on Feinberg’s listing of offensive, but not necessarily harmful, nuisances, classifying them as: 1) Irritants to senses, 2) Excessively bad manners, 3) Flaunting

one’s contempt for people’s values as an insult as well as pointless flaunting of one’s

contempt for people’s values and 4) Indecency. Vandeveer (1979) points out that many

offensive actions are offensive only to certain group, as dictated by traditions, beliefs or

cultural identity. Thus, it’s important to consider the needs of an average person (“almost

anyone chosen at random”) as well as the needs of the minorities. Weighing the good of all

versus the good of minority remains a question of reasonability, where no clear answers can

According to Feinberg, an individual is morally blameworthy for a harm if his or her actions

caused the harm, and his or her actions were ‘faulty’; that is, that the responsible person had

either intended the harm, neglected the risk of causing harm, or failed to realise a risk for

harm that he or she should have been able to realise.

For computer applications as well as games, the individual’s moral responsibility for a harm is

lessened by the fact that there are a host of people involved in each activity; a game

development project involves people in roles such as distributors and producers, sales

representatives, managers, designers, and developers, and many people partake in a game

event in a multitude of roles such as spectators, organisers, referees and players. In such

complex and long­term projects, where decisions are taken collectively in obscure processes,

it will often be difficult to find individuals who fulfil the requirements above to be held

11

accountable. A specific problem for complex systems of software and hardware is the

omnipresence of bugs; when a system becomes sufficiently complex it always contains bugs, no matter how conscientious and clever the programming staff has been. Who then can be

held accountable for the effects of those bugs?

When individuals cannot be held accountable, organisations (and sometimes non­organised

collectives) will often be informally (or even legally) blamed. This is in general not desirable,

as it leads to ‘guilt by association’; the blame rubs off to individuals of the organisation that

were completely innocent in the matter at hand. For some organisations, the solution has been

to appoint a single person who is officially responsible for the organisation; examples of this

include ship captains and newspaper editors­in­chief. This practice is useful in fields where

accidents are statistically bound to happen, and minimization requires strong concentration of

power and responsibility. In a context of game, the responsible producer can only take

responsibility of choices of designers and operators, but in games such as Prosopopeia Bardo

1: Där vi föll, the high unpredictability of player means that the responsible producer can’t

take the responsibility of every potential problem scenario.

A distinct difference between game and non­game activities is that within games, accountability is partly regulated within the rule set of the game. This is closely related to the

fact that games occur in a magic circle, within which the rules are different from those of the

social world outside of the game. What is considered an offence may be a vastly different

thing within a game setting; ice­hockey players and boxers execute harmful violence within

the game that would lead straight to court if used outside the game. Secondly, even for actions

that are considered offensive, the sanctions are regulated within the game context rather than

by external authorities (legal or otherwise). If a soccer player intentionally trips another

player, the accountable player will be punished within the game – he will not be (typically)

charged in a court. As we will see from our analysis of case examples, similar approaches can

In pervasive games the players’ perception of the game rules may clash with what is

considered legal or appropriate behaviour within the real world social context, and as the

magic circle is blurred in many fashions, this becomes a very relevant concern. Speeding on

the highway to catch up with another player is just as unlawful as speeding for any other

reason (and, as games are voluntary and needless, may be considered even less morally

acceptable). But from the player perspective, he or she may consider the accountability to lie

with the game designer or game organiser, as they developed a rule set that rewarded

speeding. Again, as with privacy clear player and participant agreements only partly alleviate

the problem as they lack immediacy. In the heat of the game, it may be difficult to remember

what responsibilities you have accepted as a player.

In addition to harm and offence, a third important concept for thinking about accountability is

risk. Even though drunk driving is harmless most of the time, it’s considered unacceptable

and punishable because it involves a small risk of significant harm to outsiders. Drunk driving

is especially condemnable because it’s harmful to individuals in the scale of the whole

society: the harsh punishments are legitimate due to statistically large number of accidents

caused by recklessness, even though the risk in a particular case (driving slowly in desolate

area) might be very small. Understanding the risks of pervasive gaming is only possible after

more large­scale games are organized, as currently most of the occurring problems are

12

Again following Friedman, we use the term ‘bias’ to refer to activities that systematically and

unfairly discriminate against certain individuals or groups, in favour of others.

For traditional games, it is hard to claim that they ever are biased in favour of one player to

another. The player whose children beat him in Counter Strike may get aggravated and

frustrated, but will probably not blame the game for bias. The ‘bias’ is in this case an

emergent effect of the rule set, and when volunteering to enter the game you thereby agree

with those effects ­ the discrimination is systematic but it is not unfair. Computer games may

however introduce bias based on their dependence on technology. For example, real­time

games such as Counter Strike will often systematically discriminate against players with

lower bandwidth or less optimal computer hardware. Some games have also been accused of

bias when they contain hidden rules that affect game play in ways that players were not able

to foresee. More serious bias is sometimes introduced between different categories of participants. Online games will often provide game operators with abilities that are not necessarily

perceived as ‘fair’ by the players. Many pervasive games give considerable power to game

masters over the participants, as the orchestrators keep secrets, issue assignments, and

technologically observe the players. Often the organizers also operate in secrecy, not

revealing their identity to the players during the game, and the transparency of the game

orchestration is kept to minimum. Personal relationships of players and game orchestrators

might become especially problematic as due to this asymmetry; maybe the jealous game

orchestrator can use the exact position information to track his girlfriend who signed a broad

disclaimer to participate in the game, or maybe he gives her a privileged status in the game.

For pervasive games, there can be a serious bias between aware and unaware participants in

several roles. This is further discussed below.

2.3.4 Autonomy and Deception

In addition to privacy, the right to autonomy is often regarded as one of the fundamental

human rights enjoying strong protection. In ethics autonomy is essentially the individual’s

right to self­determination i.e. the right to make one’s own decisions, and as a concept it is

close to the right of decisional privacy. The difference between these two rights is that

whereas decisional privacy entails more the right to withhold one’s decisions from other

people, autonomy refers both to the right to make decisions but also to the capacity to make

them. If a person’s capacity to make an informed, ethical decision is harmed, then one’s right

The need for consent is also a question of autonomy: the ability to give an informed consent

on a matter concerning oneself is dependent on the autonomy of the subject (Patry 2001). Therefore this question is particularly evident with the case of unaware participation, since

there is a possibility that using unaware participants requires some sort of deceiving, as was

the case in Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll.

Psychology and social sciences in general use deception in research experiments where there

would be a possibility that being truthful would somehow affect the results of the test. This

used to be more widespread and less controlled in the 1960’s, but ever since Milgram’s

13

, deception has become a criticised practice and its use is quite

commonly controlled by ethical boards. Nowadays it is common to distinguish unnecessary

and justified deception, where the latter is deemed to hold more benefits than harm.

The discussion and criticism on the Milgram experiment offers good insight into ethics of

deception. In his assessment of the criticism, Herrera (2001) notes that the Milgram’s test and

the use of deception in research has been mainly criticised for causing harm and involving

significant risks for the participants, generally invading the autonomy of the participants. However, Herrera continues, there have been numerous studies on the effects of deception on

test subjects and the contention of them is that deception causes little or no harm at all. Similarly, a survey conducted among the Milgram test subjects showed that the majority of

the subjects thought of the experiment as a positive thing (Milgram 1964).

As Herrera points out, the test subjects in Milgram’s experiment were not tricked to doing

anything that they would not have done without the deception (Herrera 2001). The invasion

on the right of autonomy is questionable on the same grounds: the choice to administer the

electric shocks was always the subjects’ alone. The teacher­learner –setting could not have

given them to believe that the shocks were in any way more acceptable that in their normal

life. So, if their freedom to make a choice and the capacity to make ethical decisions were not

diminished, it cannot be said that their autonomy was in any way compromised.

Even so, Milgram’s experiments have been heavily criticized. We will have reason to come

back to this in our analysis of the Vem gråter example, where one informant explicitly

mentioned the deception as problematic in itself; independent of the harm it might have

caused. Deception introduces a bias between the people ‘in the know’, typically game masters

and some players, and the people who are unaware. There are situations where deception can

cause real harm on the game’s participants and spectators.

2.4 Artistic Motivation and Societal Commentary

Discussing offenses not causing bodily harm, Vandeveer (1979) points out that in political

conflicts, it’s in the interests of the third parties to have both sides of the conflict brought to

public, and offensive provocation is often the only or the best way to do so. From the

perspective of this third party interest, he formulates what he calls the Standard of

Permissiveness toward Conscientious Offence:

Individuals engaged in conscientiously motivated dissent aimed at securing what

dissenters judge to be more desirable social arrangements have a claim to restraint

from coercive interference even if their dissent is seriously offensive.

Applied to pervasive gaming, Vandeveer’s argument is that if a pervasive game is aimed at

improving the social system, it should be tolerated even if it might offend someone, as long as

it’s motivated by the organizers’ conscience. In the spirit of free speech, the benefit of the

society demands tolerance for such expressions.

5 Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiment on obedience was a series of controversial tests conducted in 1960’s, on which the participants were deceived to be participating on a test on the effectiveness of punishment in

education. In the experiment, the participants were ordered to give electric shocks for every wrong answer to

“another test subject”, who was in fact an actor faking the shocks. The results of the test were staggering with 65 %

(26 out of 40) of the people willing to give the final shock of 450 volts to the student. (Milgram 1963)

14

Deciding what counts as such “conscientiously motivated dissent” is a complicated question;

Vandeveer discusses the examples of anti­abortion activism and Neo­Nazism, concluding that

“We must, as the standard insists, tolerate the conscientiously offensive; it is not obvious that

we must exercise similar permissiveness toward the unconscientiously offensive, or, as some

have put it, tolerate (to the same degree) the intolerant”. Thus, the acceptability depends on

the conscientious motivation or lack of it. Whether a game can be “conscientiously motivated

dissent” as well as a commercial product depends on the case; it’s certainly possible, as many

profitable yet also conscientiously motivated books and documentaries demonstrate. As a

principle, the freedom of expression includes playful expression as well.

This argumentation is valid when discussing Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll, as – for

example – one of the points consciously planned into the game was that all reality is

construction, we should open people’s eyes to see the fabrication – be it done by mainstream

media, the Pentagon, or pervasive gamers. Seeing this fabrication and acting against societal

norms empowers people to better criticize the constructed society.6 Many gamelike flash mob

events, such as Whirling Dervishes (McGonigal 2005), also fall under this definition, demanding the society to engage in more public playfulness and claiming the streets back to

In this chapter we analyze some relevant case examples that have attracted our interested

during IPerG. Some of the examples have been created within the project, while some of them

come from external games. In some examples we have focused on some detail in game design

or execution, while in other cases we have evaluated complete game designs. In addition to

the case examples presented here, we have sought to integrate our other experiences in

pervasive gaming in this report as well. Most of the ethical issues are related to social expansion, or, expanding the game beyond the

people who start to play the game. Several game designs offer ambiguous roles for players

and spectators through a deliberately ambiguous game context. When a person first makes

contact with the game, it does not make itself fully known. It will be noticeable that

something is taking place, but not exactly what is happening. The typical pattern is that people

become aware of the game through passing through three broad stages of awareness.

­ Unaware state: The game experiences go unnoticed or are interpreted as ‘everyday’ phenomena.

­ Ambiguous state: The experiences produced by the game are too obvious or too

closely related to each other to be ignored; still there is no frame of reference that

would reveal and confirm the fact that it is a game, which we will refer to as the

­ Conscious state: The game context is accessible to the person.

The critical stage is that of ambiguity, as this is when it is possible to misinterpret the

experience as reality. The game experience in this state is that of a reality game, a piece of

6 Based on email discussions with lead designer Martin Ericsson (in 2005 and 2006).

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fabricated reality that is a game but does not reveal itself as such.7 A particular problem is that

the audience will form their own interpretation of the context. Unless the ambiguous

experience is carefully designed, these interpretations can very well be much more dangerous

and worrying than the true explanation (that it was a game).

It should be noted that the ambiguous state can still support a playful, ludic, interpretation

both for the people in ambiguous state and the people in conscious state.

Vem gråter was planned to be a weeklong sequence of mysterious poltergeist­events staged

within the Gotland University premises, in winter 2005 – a project work on a course on

pervasive gaming. We got the opportunity to study Vem gråter after the game had concluded,

by interviewing players, organizers and university staff.

Vem gråter created a series of events with hidden clues allowing the participants to dig deeper

into the mystery, a ghost story based on historic events concerning the role of Sweden and

Gotland in the Second World War. The game comprised of the following elements:

­ A set of staged paranormal events, carried out at the university, including a tape

recorder hidden in a ventilation shaft, sending out sounds of a crying child, a tower of

furniture built overnight, and coal scribbles on a wall. The installations were staged

late in the evenings when the premises were relatively empty. ­ An actor pretending to be ‘Spiricom­Thomas’, an occult investigator. He appeared

at a couple of occasions in the university and in some cafés. ­ Two web sites, ‘created by’ Spiricom­Thomas and a local ghost hunter society. ­ Announcements at university bulletin boards. Two of these were from Spiricom­ Thomas and the third announced a fake seminar on parapsychology. ­ A set of hidden clues around the town intended for the people solving the riddle.

All events and clues were supposed to point towards a final scene concluding the game. For

numerous reasons this final event was never staged. These game elements were also the only

possible way of learning that there was a mystery puzzle; there were no invitations or

possibilities to sign up. Rules of the game were not explained anywhere.

The game did not work out as intended. Instead of students or teachers, the maintenance staff

of the university turned out to be the main audience. In their frame of interpretation, the

historical and ethical perspectives of the ghost story were lost, and the game elements were

interpreted in the frame of vandalism instead of the frame of playfulness or mystery. Thus, the

police and local newspapers became also interested.

In our research it soon became clear that the vast majority of bystanders had never noticed

anything at all, or interpreted their experiences as ordinary life. Thus, we only interviewed six

people, and only one of these people was actually a student trying to solve the puzzle as

The game managed to keep many participants in the ambiguous state for the most of the time.

The ambiguous state is a labile, transitional state, which most people try to resolve by making

7 Candid camera, scambaiting and invisible theater are practices deceiving outsiders in a similar fashion.

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assumptions regarding truth behind the events faced. Summarizing our interviews, we ended

up in four prototypical interpretations for Vem gråter:

1. Ghosts are real. This was the interpretation implied in the game design, although the

organizers did not intend this interpretation to be made. This interpretation did not

show up in our interviews. 2. The ghost investigator is dangerous and mentally unstable. This interpretation

accepts that Spiricom­Thomas exists, but he is crazy and potentially dangerous

intruder instead of any kind of an investigator. This interpretation was not intended by

the organizers but became widespread among the university staff. 3. Students are making pranks. This interpretation indicates that the students are

making trouble at the school. This interpretation prevailed among the staff, even after

the true nature of the events was uncovered.

4. Someone has created a cool adventure. This ludic interpretation is the driving force

of alternate reality gaming. It requires an understanding of the fact that the events are

fabricated, even though they become more engaging through ambiguity. The player is

thrilled by the fact that he does not know what is going on or what could happen next.

Obviously the professional role and personal history strongly influence the interpretation

made. In the case of Vem gråter a younger, game­oriented audience would probably have

been more inclined towards an adventurous interpretation, while in the eyes of a janitor

already frustrated with students, the same events appear as vandalism. In order to enjoy Vem

gråter the observer had to make the cool adventure interpretation. However, the second and

3.1.2 Spiricom­Thomas Story Spin

The university administration quite quickly figured out that a student group must have put up

by students, but rather by the external person Spiricom­Thomas, who had been visible in the

This suspicion was interpreted as potentially dangerous, and measures were taken to protect

the university staff from the potentially dangerous person lurking in the corridors. We thought that he was not well, and there is an uncertainty when a person is

psychically ill how they act, and since we have personnel here in the evenings we had

to take action immediately. (Head of the janitor staff)

They had not made the connection between the parapsychology investigator and the

game, so they thought that he was a schizophrenic psychopath who had been attracted

by the game… they thought that they had to deal with a real psychopath. (Teacher at

According to one of our informants, some women had got in contact with Kvinnojouren, a

phone service for harassed women, expressing fear for the person playing Spiricom­Thomas.

It was this amateur researcher, the actor, who went around and made contact with the

students, that was perceived as scaring in particular by women… one woman at

. However, the other game elements were not immediately thought to be planted

8 The posters contained a web address to a server with an IP address from within the university.

17

Kvinnojouren at Gotland has received a lot of phone calls from scared women, she told

me about this… (Woman aware of the gameness of the events)

The student group was however highly sceptical towards the idea that Spiricom­Thomas was

actually able to scare anybody. The following cite is from the interview with the developer

R4: These rumours that were spread that this Thomas would be a threat against

people, I found that almost shocking. R2: And it was strange. R4: He was acting, and I don’t know if it was due to bad planning or something like

R1: and some of it might be rumours spreading… R4: A tad eccentric, but not to the extent so that he actually acted as ‘off’ as people

It is quite possible that the students are right in this. After all, a simpler explanation would

have been to immediately suspect the students (which the university staff already knew were

behind some of the posters) to be responsible for the whole set of events. But as we will see

from the following quote, the university staff had an independent incitement to end up in a

‘lunatic’ explanation. The head of the janitor staff described his thoughts at the first encounter

with the events – a tower of chairs in one of the classrooms – the following way. We have a student here, who used to be a student, who hangs around here and is not

entirely well, but we have still let him hang around here because he wants to be here

and we have some staff that have some contact with him. But then we thought that it

was him who was fooling around, because he likes this particular room. He is often

there and just stands in the dark, so our first thought was that it must be him. But it

turned out that he had nothing at all to do with this. (Head of janitor staff)

There was thus an incidental connection between one of the very first observations made by

the janitors, and a person who was mentally ill. When the university staff started to connect

the events to the appearance of Spiricom­Thomas, they were already mentally prepared for

the ‘lunatic’ interpretation of the events.

A largely unforeseen problem was that the game was, to a very large extent, perceived as

vandalism by the university staff. Installations such as scribbles and piled chairs were

considered messy, unpleasant and potentially dangerous to clean up. Also, they were seen as

purposefully scary. To some extent, the staff continued to look on the events as vandalism

even after the game had been outed as a reality game.

This is about our profession and our job, it is not acceptable to create this kind of

situations for us, not from the perspective that this is our working environment. (Head

This reaction should have been foreseeable, but the student group was only semi­aware of the

problem even at the time of the interview. The problem was recognized in conjunction with

the wall scribbles, as these were reported to the police.

In a sense the vandalism interpretation is related to the issue of bias. The janitors guessed

quite correctly that the Vem gråter installations were created by students, but their previous

18

experience of some students lead to the assumption that the students might have done the

installations in order to intentionally cause harm – differentiating a “prank” from an “act of

vandalism”. Apparently, in addition to requiring game designers and operators to be free of

bias, it is important to convince the players and unaware participants of the lack of bias and

good­willed nature of the game. Otherwise the perceived or assumed bias may destroy the

3.2 Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där Vi Föll

Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll9 was a pervasive larp 10 about players being possessed. In a

nutshell, the players were expected to role­play themselves in Stockholm mostly identical to

ours, where they were possessed by ghosts of deceased people. For 52 hours, the players

mixed role­playing themselves and the possessing ghosts, going on with their everyday lives

while simultaneously role­playing ghosts walking in the world of living (see Jonsson & al

In a sense, every player took the role similar to that of Spiricom­Thomas, engaging in

pretence play with unsuspecting people. As Prosopopeia was a role­playing game, the players

could have long, intricate and credible discussions with outsiders as part of the game. As they

could never know where the game ended and began, they had to often interact with outsiders

in order to progress in the game. Prosopopeia was an alternate reality game in the sense that it

was contextualized in the everyday lives of the players, and this feeling was heightened by the

fact that it was also contextualized in the everyday lives of the outsiders unaware of the game.

According to the players, perceiving the routines of the ordinary world, with the heightened

perspective of the game fiction, created an intense feeling of Prosopopeia being more than a

The following citation from player feedback illustrates a typical encounter in the game. The

players met a complete outsider whom they thought to be a part of the game, even after the

game when writing their research debriefs.

First, there was a meeting on the cemetery, when a man came strolling by who

obviously had something to do with the game. I appreciate the way it was handled. He

introduced himself as passing­by, and waited for us to make a move, which we didn’t.

So he left. As I understand it, he had knowledge about the EVP­recorder, which we had

problems with. Even if this was not a roleplaying­encounter, it worked fine. And it

made me feel like it wasn’t hopeless; someone was looking out for us. In this particular

game it worked fine, as everything already made me feel part of a big conspiracy, and

he fit in there too. Many players were asked to conduct interactions of ghosts and unaware outsiders. For

example, one ghost (and thus the player) was to shelter a real, homeless person, having been

an activist working for the shelters for homeless in Stockholm. Another ghost had a message

to deliver to the local Catholic monsignor. These outsiders were not chosen by the game

organizers in any way, they had no connection to any homeless people or Catholics before the

game, but it was assumed that the players could find the unaware participants on their own. These were some the most serious, intense and engaging tasks in the game, in a sense a ‘price’ ghosts had to pay for returning to life.

9 A collaboration of IPerG project and volunteers, June 2005. By Martin Ericsson, Adriana Skarped, Staffan Jonsson

and others. 10 A live-action roleplaying game staged in a pervasive fashion.

19

After the game, an ethical debate emerged on the message board of a Finnish role­playing

magazine where the game was presented, to discuss the dilemmas of unaware participation.11

Especially attempt to involve a priest in the game heated up discussion. The discussants of

Roolipelaaja forum used the following restrictive argumentation styles against Prosopopeia:

­ People should not play pranks on others without their consent. ­ Unaware participants are unwillingly commodified by the players. ­ Wasting person’s professional working time with a game is not right. ­ Helping an unfortunate person in a fashion that secretly is a game actually exploits his

plight. ­ Games should not toy with events and things that are considered holy. Many discussants argued on behalf of the game with following permissive arguments:

­ Art, including Prosopopeia, is supposed to break borders, and thus games classifying

as such should be allowed unaware participation. ­ If the unaware participant has a positive experience or benefits from the game, the

game is acceptable. ­ As all reality is constructed, fabrication motivated by gaming is just as right or wrong

as the construction made by e.g. media and governments. ­ Most of the people – professionals especially – play some kind of fabricated roles

anyway in their interactions with unknown people. Gaming is no worse.

Commodification of time is an interesting sidetrack in the Prosopopeia discussion, as

‘wasting’ outsiders’ time was seen as a bad thing. At the same time other discussants saw

priest’s professional time in terms of money and efficiency. Thus, a homeless hobo would be

commodified involuntarily by the game, while working for money is voluntary self­ commodification. Using the working time for the game can be seen as stealing that resource

from the employer. These interpretations are highly culture­specific: imposing oneself on

another and privacy issues in general are more highly regarded in Finland than, for example,

In a detailed analysis of different categories of exploitation Feinberg (1988, 205) writes that

“A may simply utilize some traits or circumstances of B’s for his own purposes without

wrong or harm to B or anyone else. Sometimes this is called “exploiting” the other’s traits or

circumstances, but in this sense “exploits” is nonpejorative, and it’s just another way of

saying “puts to use”. Not all use is ill­use. In these cases, A blamelessly “exploits” B’s

characteristics or situation without exploiting B himself”. Although Feinberg understandably

does not analyze a case on pervasive gaming, many fabricated discussions with unaware

outsiders can be classified as harmless parasitism, where A gains advantage of B while B

suffers no harm from A’s actions. If such exploitation is harmless and not disrespectful, it’s

One interesting thing in Prosopopeia is that the players never execute the most challenging

tasks involving outsiders (such as ones involving priest and the homeless person). Obviously

11 Article was written by Markus Montola and published in Roolipelaaja magazine (www.roolipelaaja.fi). He also

facilitated the discussion by providing further information as needed. Some parts of the discussion were dominated

by a misunderstanding as the participants assumed that the priest encounter had actually taken place, but it was later on clarified that the player had autonomously decided to not perform the task.

20

such playing is intense and requires effort, but the player with the priest quest also

commented that he didn’t perform the task since he found it unethical.

In both the cases of Vem gråter and Prosopopeia there was a clear undercurrent condemning

the fabrication of reality for the purposes of gaming in particular. A potential explanation for

this could be that the informants’ implicitly assume that games are always played for

entertainment, ignoring the suitability of games for purposes of art, research, education and

3.2.1 Uncontrolled Environment

The Prosopopeia players had many interactions with complete outsiders during the game.

Many of these encounters, such as the one described above, were greatly appreciated by the

players, for the thrill of not knowing where the borders of the game lie. Combined with the

fact that in many pervasive games the players are observed constantly, or the players at least

believe so, there might be a false feeling of safety in these interactions. Even though the

protective frame of gameplay does not extend to people unaware of the game, this is

something that might be forgotten in the thrill of the game.12

The fundamental question is about accountability in uncontrolled environment. If a game tells

players to go at a bad area of town during night, is the game organizer responsible of placing

them in the risk of getting robbed or mugged? The answer is clearly dependent on where the

game is played; while in Stockholm the risk might be insignificant, elsewhere it might be very

considerable. If the risk is significant, the most important thing in the game design is to

clearly communicate that the game does not protect the player to prevent a false feeling of

safety. As a clear ethical benefit, games like Prosopopeia that encourage players to talk with

the homeless or to wander into poor areas of the town can be also seen as beneficial, as they

have the potential to bridge gaps between socio­economical classes.

One example of problematic design in uncontrollable environment is Wanderer

parkour­inspired GPS game where player should travel in real world at set speed, while

receiving random orders on which direction he should be moving at a given time.14

During the tests the players where highly motivated to follow the commands given by

the game even when the environment was not allowing the player to perform the

instructed movements. For example, players crossed streets, even with cars

approaching that were forced to stop in order not to hit the player. During this

example the players made it clear that they were not unaware of the environment, but

were willing to force the environment in order to keep playing the game. (Hielscher &

In Wanderer, the commands are received aurally and the focus of the game is in the

environment. The (relatively rare) chases of Botfighters are unfortunately different, as the

players need to focus on their cellphone screens as well in order to maneuver properly. This is

one of the reasons why Can You See Me Now left the street runner position to game

organizers and allowed random players to only play the online side.

12 There is unfortunately no research data on this. 13 By Jonas Hielscher and Jiri Heitlager (2006). 14 While it was run in Sweden, the hard-core players of Botfighters expressed comparable behavior.

21

Epidemic Menace 215 was a 2­3 hour crossmedia game that was played with 2 teams of 4

players, four times in a research campus area. The player teams were anti­virus teams that

were supposed to track and catch escaped viruses, as well as try to figure out who had

The gaming was divided in two modes, command centre and fieldwork. The players in the

command centre could track and instruct the field agents but they were not able to directly do

anything, only the filed agents could do that. In addition to this the competing team could see

(but not hear) what was going on in the command centre through a webcam. In fact, any

internetuser could tap into the stream from the command centres and two web cams placed in

the park where the field agents played.

The players were constantly under video surveillance while they were playing. They were

directly observed by the other players, by the tech team, the designer, and via the webcams by

evaluators, other players, game designers, anyone on the internet and all of their actions on

the devices were being logged. In addition to this there was at least one cameraman present in

all the games documenting the experience.

In the interview that was conducted as part of the evaluation after the game, most of the

players felt like they had been observed, but most also stated that it had not bothered them. The fact that they had also been able to watch the streams from the webcams was perceived as

fun or even integral to the game by some players. A few interviewees would have wanted

more cameras, specifically mounted cameras worn by the players who were hunting the

viruses outside. A few players commented that though the surveillance as such had not been a

problem, the fact that there was a cameraman running around did break the illusion of the

game world. Also, the actions of the cameraman were perceives as meta­information: if the

cameraman was interested in filming something then that must be pivotal to the game.

I was constantly analysing why he filmed this or that.

These statements are in a bit of a conflict with some of the observation data. As the players

started to play the game they were given t­shirts. In the fourth game the t­shirts were given in

the gaming area and the webcams were already active. The players closed the door to the

room and huddled bashfully in corners while they switched shirts, yet they seemed oblivious

to the webcam (even though they were informed about surveillance and had the option of

changing their clothes in a nearby bathroom). Also, some players were a bit surprised by the

surveillance; they did not feel that they had been properly informed about it beforehand. One

player was also visibly relieved, after finding out about the extent of the surveillance, he was

told that the discussions in the room had not been broadcasted on the internet.

15 Epidemic Menace 2 was organized in cooperation by Fraunhofer FIT, Sony NetServices and Blast Theory together with the support of a number of other IPerG partners. The test of the second prototype was conducted on July the 6

th 2006 on the Campus Birlinghoven, near the city of Bonn in Germany. This report is entirely based on the

second iteration of the game, Epidemic Menace 2, but the findings are likely to apply to the first iteration of Epidemic

22

As long as the games stay a niche phenomenon, the surveillance doesn’t seem to be a

problem; provided that the players are properly informed beforehand. If the recordings are

broadcasted to a larger audience, then the attitudes may be very different:

It was a bit disturbing to run into people who were watching us on the monitor. How

It seems that as long as the surveillance stays within the magic circle, then the players do not

object to it. In fact that might even want to have as much of it as possible as shown by the

desire to have mounted cameras in player head gear. Yet when people who are not

participating in the game observe the players, then the players may be uneasy as they have no

control or knowledge of those viewers. One way to remind the players of the presence of the

camera is to make it very prominent and visible (as with the moving human cameraman), but

this then disrupts the game. If the cameras are hidden, then the game flows better, but the

participants forget about the surveillance.

These observations clearly support the aforementioned problem with privacy that computer

technology brings: the lack of immediacy obscures the effects of information sharing. The

players may also forget that they are being observed and do things that they would not if they

remembered this. On argument for game surveillance is that it may be for the best that the

players learn the implications of surveillance ubiquitous in our society in a ludic context of

pervasive gaming. Most of us are fundamentally unaware of the camera density in urban

areas, insecurity of internet communications, log data created by cellphone usage et cetera.

Pervasive gaming offers a good opportunity to change our theoretical knowledge about

surveillance into practical hands­on feeling on what can be recorded and what can not. Educating people on surveillance can help them to protect their privacy outside and after the

The game was partly played outside in a park in a campus area. The area was open to

bystanders and there were some people walking around who were not affiliated with the game

in any way. Yet, the area was clearly separate and in a way self­contained.

Most of the players said in the interview that they would not feel comfortable playing the

game in a crowded area. The campus location was seen as a good place as bystanders seemed

to be either aware of the game or were just not surprised about the game. In the questionnaire

50% of the participants said that they would not want to play in city centre and only 10% said

that the game would fit at an art or culture festival.

These findings were echoed in the interview:

You just can’t play it in a normal crowded are. You can play it if it is very crowded, or

if it is empty. If there are just a few people here and there then you are a weird person

Someone might call the police if they saw you with all the equipment.

The central concern was ridicule. The fact that people might laugh at (or be confused by) the

players because they are carrying around weird equipment came up time after time in the

interviews. This is supported by the suggestion that if the game was moved to a city centre,

23

Playing in a crowded public area would also seem more acceptable, if the playing happened in

the context of a television series (if the game was part of a tv­series tie­in) as then bystanders

would know what was happening. Generally, the interviewees reacted negatively to

ambiguous social expansion and had not talked to bystanders at all.

If it in a framework of a TV show and the whole nation knows what I’m doing, then

maybe it’s ok. Running around if everybody thinks I’m crazy wouldn’t be fun.

An empty warehouse or a similar empty location was seen as the ideal location for the game

(92% would like to play in a warehouse and 89% preferred a separate location over a festival

setting). These numbers are probably slightly tainted by the fact that the game in question was

built around the concept of a killer virus and thus would require a location with as few people

as possible as they would, following diegetic logic, all be dead or infected.

The paraphernalia needed to play Epidemic Menace is quite extensive. This seems to be the

problem with playing the game in an open public space. It would not be possible to point out

the players of Prosopopeia on the street, but the players of Epidemic Menace would stick out

immediately. On the one hand Epidemic Menace would thus be easier to play in a city centre

as bystanders would be alerted to the carnevalistic nature of the game by the presence of the

elaborate equipment. On the other hand precisely that would break the illusion of the diegetic

3.4 Beneficent Gaming, a Casuistic Exercise

The issues we have pointed out so far in the case studies have mostly demonstrated the

problems and challenges of pervasive gaming, and especially of unaware participation. As a

casuistic exercise to balance the aforementioned examples, we can construct a beneficent

example of a unaware participation, in order to prove the potential for utilitarian or altruistic

Casuistry is a method for analysing individual cases in relation to similar cases and

generalised ethical principles. The central notion is to identify the particular ethical features in

the case and try to find an analogous but clearer case to which virtually any rational person

would agree. These clear cases are called the paradigm cases.

Some games are already used for charity purposes (national lotteries for instance). As the

magic circle of gameplay is broken in pervasive games, the gameplay of these games can

create very tangible outsider benefits. Consider for example a role­playing game where the

players are put into the role of a charity organization, for example making a game about

Salvation Army, inspired by Aki Kaurismäki movie Mies vailla menneisyyttä (2002).

Although the obvious benefits of players providing homeless people with soup and soap are

obvious, some considerations need to be made to minimize risks of causing harm. Exploiting

or stealing the brand of Salvation Army would be maleficent, so the charity organization must

be designed and costumed to be similar but still different enough to avoid confusion. Raising

money from outsiders is improper if the organisation pretends to be a real charity

organization. Finally, Salvation Army is a religious organization, but as discussed in context

of Prosopopeia, it’s typically considered more ethical to design a profane variant of the

charity organization for the purposes of the game.

24

Though it might, at first, be difficult to imagine why players would want to join such a game,

it becomes obvious in closer scrutiny. As long as the larps are well designed, larp players are

known to be willing to be subjected to mentally stressful conditions for long times (Europa),

to live in trash heaps (Amerika), to play pre­determined tragedies (Hamlet) and so forth.16

“Entertainment” is not the only intriguing reason to play games, but others exist as well –

including broadening one’s perspectives by joining the Salvation Army lookalike for a week.

If we consider who might be harmed by such a game, we can come up with two parties. First,

the players might be subjected to a reality harsher than they’d expect. This, however, would

be exactly the reason the players signed up. The players need to be informed well enough to

acquire an informed consent, and the harsh reality is actually the selling point of the game.

Secondly, if the game went on for months or more, it might create a group of people whose

welfare depends on continuation of the game.

Finally there’s the matter of exploitation discussed in the context of Prosopopeia. If this is

considered to be a problem, in our ideal example we can also provide announcements to the

possible visitors of the charity organization, explaining that it is all a game about charity. This

precaution should cancel any issues on commodification of the poor and exploiting their

The casuist method helps to remove ideological differences as long as the focus is kept on the

features of the case (Jonsen & Toulmin 1988, 18). Therefore casuistry should be very useful

in particularly pluralistic situations where there are a number of different religions and

ideologies in play. According to some critics, the major problem with the casuist method is

that it leads to the ethics of the masses by reflecting the currently dominant views of the

society thereby not concentrating on what is right, but what is acceptable by most. Secondly,

finding paradigm cases relies on the features that the reviewers decided to include in the case

description making casuistry a rather subjective method. This exercise is intended to speculate

some potentials of pervasive gaming.

4 Practical Considerations

In this chapter we try to discuss practical issues of pervasive game design, making

conclusions based on the ethical discussion and our case analyses.

4.1 Unaware Participation

The utilitarianist acceptability of a game with unaware participation depends on both the

features of the planned game and also the execution of the plan – both on the intentions and

on the results. A utilitarianist look at the ethics of Vem gråter obviously shows that the game

caused feelings of nervousness, uncertainty and stress in the unwilling participants. However,

as a failed experimental game it does not represent the whole of pervasive gaming or even the

In an upcoming pervasive game Cruel 2 B Kind17

acts of kindness. As the players do not know their victims or the other players, they have to

16 Examples mentioned here are larps from Norway and Sweden. Europa portrayed everyday life in a refugee center

where different ethnic groups were struggling for survival. Amerika was about consumerism and world literally

drowning in garbage. Hamlet told the pre-determined tragedy, where most of the players died and the idea of

‘winning’ the game was extremely irrelevant. 17 By Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, to be played in Come Out and Play festival in New York, September 2006. http://cruelgame.com/ (ref. 1

the players have to kill other players with

st of August 2006).

25

perform their signature act of kindness to random bypassers until they manage to hit their

targets, the only people who know that the act of kindness is related to the game. In practice

this might mean players wandering around, giving flowers to everyone they meet in order to

give a flower to the target player, thus succeeding in the game.

On the drawing board, producing enjoyment and entertainment to unaware participants

motivates both Vem gråter and Cruel 2 B Kind. However, despite the best intentions Vem

gråter was read as a reckless prank or as scary acts of vandalism. We assume that the unaware

experience of Cruel 2 B Kind will be a spontaneous rush of carnivalistic benevolence.

The question of unaware participation requires discussion what can be done in public space.

Clearly, giving flowers to random bypassers in a park in order to succeed in a game is

acceptable to the most of us. Then again, scribbling on a wall might appear unacceptable,

even though it might be legal (provided the scribbler has the appropriate permissions), as the

observers are unable to perceive the legality of the act. Most of the time the nature of player­outsider interaction is impossible to exactly control by a

game organizer. The game content emerging due to the friction on the edge of the magic

circle is one important reason why the players have found socially expanded games like Go

Game and Prosopopeia exciting and appealing (McGonigal 2003b, Jonsson & al 2006,

One thing that was perceived as particularly problematic in both Vem gråter and Prosopopeia

was that the games approached professionals in their work. Vem gråter was perceived as acts

of vandalism primarily because it became visible to maintenance staff at the university.

The primary motivation for this ethical standpoint is that professional time is money, and

when involving them into a game you are wasting their employer’s money. In Prosopopeia,

this was aggravated by the fact that the person to be approached was a priest participating in a

religious ceremony, as that was seen as a potential insult on the religious community present.

For the professional, the option to refuse involvement (see the discussion on invitation to

refuse from Montola & Waern 2006a) in the game becomes often unavailable. This was

clearly shown by a Swedish radio show Hassan, which made prank phone calls to unaware

people. On one occasion, Hassan called a woman who was working as the municipal contact

person for people with mental problems. Called upon in her professional role, she made every

attempt to answer Hassan’s questions in a composed and pedagogical manner, making for a

. Due to her role as a professional counsellor, she was literally forbidden to

The Vem gråter vandalism interpretation is an example of the practical problems caused by

not negotiating with the local staff for staging of a reality game. There are also strong reasons

to inform officials such as police and fire brigade prior to a game event that they may get

informed about. Even games that appear to have consent of all parties might end up involving

outsiders. One example of such safe­sounding but possibly risky game was Kidnap, where a

consenting participant was kidnapped for 24 hours by a group of artists.19

18 The show was aired in real time, and later on made available on CD. The woman did not consent to the latter. She was later forced to leave her job as she became flooded with prank calls. 19 By Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_kidnap.html (ref. 9th of June 2006).

26

One central ethical challenge of pervasive gaming is their use of public space as a part of

spatial (and social) expansion. Feinberg’s Standard of Reasonable Avoidability states that:

No one has a right to protection from the state against offensive experiences if he can

easily and effectively avoid those experiences with no unreasonable effort or

inconvenience. (ref. Vandeveer 1979)

Obviously the unavoidable games, such as Vem gråter or to some extent Prosopopeia are the

core of the problem. Volunteers participating in pervasive games should not be protected from

“harm” caused by them, at least as long as they know what they sign up for. Also, this

emphasizes that the participant should (almost) always have a right to quit her participation in

One question is whether people have a right to solitude in public spaces. As advertisements, bouncers, beggars and salesmen are generally considered as nuisances, there is something

offensive in intruding personal space without invitation. The seriousness of these nuisances

depends on the fashion of intruding and requires specific consideration. Excessive stalking of

outsiders (or other players) is one particular problem, not to even mention issues like sexual

harassment. On the other hand, public spaces are just that, public, and the desire for not being

interrupted is fulfilled in private spaces.

There are also strong arguments for bringing games to public space. As participants engage in

public play, they are also redefining the public space, turning streets from no man’s land to

every man’s land. The ideology of reclaiming the streets suggests that traffic is not the only

function of urban outdoor areas, but they should be used creatively as well. In this respect

pervasive gaming can have similar functions as invisible theatre 20

parties have. The more radical street artists speaking for reclaiming the public space also

argue that all individuals should have the right to both use public spaces and also alter them –

the graffiti movement can be seen as a pervasive art movement taking visual arts outside the

contractual spaces typically reserved for art.

Staging games in public areas only is a double­edged solution in terms of providing the

unaware participants the possibility of refusing the game.21 As the game stays in public space,

it can be refused by leaving the public space – but pervasive game organizer can’t except

random people to stay in their homes while running the game. This solution is used by many

Killer troupes, which only allow assassinations to happen in public spaces and thus reducing

, flash mobs and street

Pervasive games should typically be designed to be ambiguously visible primarily to people

that can be assumed to make ludic interpretations of the experience. Achieving this can be

difficult; a janitor has a professional reason for taking game events seriously, while generally

women and men react differently to mysterious stalkers in the night. Other factors that may

inspire preferred interpretations include the choice of location (ambiguous clues of The A.I. Game were presented in the movie trailer), the choice of theme (I Love Bees had the flavour

20 Undercover theatre play in public spaces, where actors pretend to be ordinary individuals. 21 Invitation to refuse, see Montola & Waern (2006a).

27

of honey farming), and the choice of aware players (Spiricom­Thomas was probably

perceived to be more scary than small children would have been).

The thematic choices are important. Whereas a scary, depressing or even violent theme is

often enjoyable in a contextualised game, the lack of contextualization makes the same theme

very problematic in the unaware or ambiguous game context. As the protective frame of game

or fiction is missing, a thrilling game inspires raw, unmediated fear in the participant. While it

is possible that some people might enjoy of such an extreme experience22

certainty on that before the beginning of the game is practically impossible.23 This is the key

difference between Vem gråter and Cruel 2 B Kind, where the latter is likely to create a

thoroughly agreeable atmosphere for non­players. Even selecting a non­scary theme will not

in itself guarantee that the game is not perceived as scary.

The most serious problem with Vem gråter was the amount of story spin that was generated

by the events. The major example is the interpretation of Spiricom­Thomas as a potential

lunatic. The other example is the interpretation of the game event as a prank staged by the

students to ‘get even’ with the school, and in general the organisational conflicts that the game

It is all too easy to dismiss these stories as the result of ‘freak coincidences’ with reality – in

this case there really was a mentally ill person related to the university and the students had a

real reason to be disappointed with university management. But such coincidences are legion

in reality and alternate reality games and form an essential part of the game aesthetics. Even

though the Vem gråter case is extreme, any game that offers ambiguous game experiences

runs a risk of backfiring this way. The advantage of establishing Huizinga’s magic circle

around a game experience is that it also keeps many issues outside the game: In traditional

games a poor person can easily play a millionaire, and the nightly wanderer does not get

mixed with a known mentally ill person.

For accountability reasons, it is important that there is a person (or several) who is both able

to justify the game design decisions afterwards, and take the responsibility for the game in

case it backfires. In the case of Vem gråter, the lack of a clear responsible designer/producer

created a lot of harm in the aftermath of the events, where the university, the game

development education, and the students suffered.

The risk of a harmful story spin is practically ever­present with expanded games. One

example of a game where risk certainly existed but was tolerably small was Epidemic

Menace 2, in which the players portrayed members of “European Epidemic Prevention

Agency EEPA”, trying to catch deadly viruses in campus area. Dressed up in EEPA shirts and

wielding complicated technology, there theoretically was a risk of misunderstanding leading

to a weird story spin. In practice, however, in campus area the risk of someone

22 In pop culture, David Fincher’s movie The Game (1997) suggests that some people might enjoy such fear at least in

retrospect, after the game is over and the ambiguity is cleared. It is also relatively common in the Nordic larp culture

to consider negative character emotions and experiences as positive experiences for the player. 23 A hardcore community of pervasive gamers might create a website, where they could publicly declare their willingnes to play unaware parts in pervasive games with certain, defined conditions. Restrictions and permissions established in such way would help designers to plan their reality games and choose their participants, even though

the legal status of such one-sided contracts would be an important consideration.

28

misinterpreting a PDA or a cellphone as real medical equipment was so small that the risk of a

story spin was probably acceptably small.

In Vem gråter interviews we asked the informants if they found this type of gaming ethically

acceptable. The answers varied from clear ‘yes’ over “it is not acceptable to scare people” to

clear “no”. Some interviewees motivated their ‘yes’ from a post­modern perspective: As the

world consists of a web of fabricated realities, reality gaming could make people aware on

how they were fooled. This educational perspective of shaking people awake was seen as a

justification for pervasive gaming. This opinion was also voiced in the online discussion on

I find the genre acceptable, the basic form that forced people to think again, when you

get to know that aha, this was not completely real and here I have been, believing it to

be real. (Student in the development team)

One of the interviewees in the Vem gråter study expressed an almost opposite opinion:

What I react against in this is that there is somebody who creates deliberate

deceptions, and then can stand at the side and think ‘ha, ha look’… (Observer aware of

The crucial issue is that to deceive somebody, there must be somebody who is ‘in the know’

and for that reason has power over the people who are being deceived. The alternate reality

game genre introduces a systematic bias between the aware and the unaware participants

(irrespective of role). From this ethical standpoint, the whole genre of alternate reality games

Many pervasive games are based on the TING­paradigm of aesthetics (see McGonigal 2003a,

2003b), where it’s important that the game does not explicitly appear to be a game to the

player. In this type of game, it’s sometimes not desirable to exactly inform the players of the

ways they are observed during the game.

An unfortunately easy solution is a carte blanche approach, where the players allow the game

operators to gather information and fabricate reality in unclearly defined or countless ways. The rationale behind the approach is that if the game operator acquires the permission to do

anything, the players cannot guess what the operator will do – leading to a better game

experience (for people appreciating the TING­aesthetic). Ethically the carte blanche approach

is problematic: the players’ ability to make informed decisions is compromised, as they do not

understand the possibilities and limitations of surveillance and fabrication in pervasive

games.24 The player might not know who stores the information, who are the people having

an access to it and for what purposes it will be used.

24 Would the players sign a form where they consent to “any means of technical surveillance for the duration of the game”, if they knew that they were accepting the fact that they may be surveilled 24 hours per day by audio and video, the recordings may be stored for unlimited time and used for any imaginable purposes by a large number of

people without internal regulation? In extreme cases, the game operator might even claim that “technical surveillance” includes covertly reading their email messages, monitoring their web use, tracking their cellphone movements et cetera et cetera (even though such claim might not hold in court).

29

The problems of a carte blanche approach are also relevant when obtaining information from

players, e.g. regarding special diets, health status et cetera. If the players are not appropriately

informed on the content and gameplay of the game, their ability of providing sufficient

information on their health status is difficult. Depending on the game, especially conditions

such as diabetes, epilepsy and heart diseases. Mental conditions may turn out to be relevant as

well, e.g. panic disorder and various phobias. In order to ensure player safety, a game asking

for carte blanche list of permissions in order to uphold secrecy, may also need to obtain a

relatively complete health information of all players and review it carefully.

All data stored on player activities should be deleted immediately when it is no longer needed

for operating and developing the game, and, in most games, the permission for the use of data

should be obtained in advance. It is far better to obfuscate the players by asking permissions

for types of sensory information not used in the game, than to use data without permission. In

addition, only needed data should be collected or stored, and after the game the players should

have a right to know what data was collected and how it was used. Data collected for the

game should not be used or stored for other purposes, except when an informed consent is

acquired. If medical data or other especially confidential information is collected, it’s access

and use may need special regulations and care.

4.6.1 Ridicule and Awkwardness

The players of Epidemic Menace 2 had concerns on ridicule on players. Although we do not

generally realize this, many societies place cultural restrictions on which games adults are

supposed to play in public. Games including e.g. elements of role­play (Epidemic Menace, Prosopopeia and Vem gråter) might cause such awkwardness in some players. This

awkwardness and the potential social repercussions are rather unpleasant nuisances than

tangible harms; it’s unlikely that an outsider comment on Epidemic Menace would be more

than a passing irritation. Communicating the nature of a pervasive game early on is usually

more of a practical recommendation than an ethical one: In order to facilitate playing and to

make sure the players entering the game are likely to enjoy it, it is good to ensure that players

Placing this playfulness into public spaces not reserved for gaming can be seen as a beneficial

effect exactly because of the social norms that restrict playing: Loosening those norms allows

people to behave more freely in public, and can result in further pleasurable playfulness. The

openness and boldness required from theatre actors can be taught in stressful and awkward

(yet usually fun and rewarding) drama exercises, and pervasive gaming serves well in this

As McGonigal (2006) notes, many pervasive games tend to shift the focus from free play

within the illusory constraints towards becoming actors playing their part in a vision dictated

by the game designer. According to her experiences on Go Game and I Love Bees the players

are often willing to go surprisingly far with obeying the commands issued by game

organizers, even when those orders are misunderstood. The players of I Love Bees managed to

overcome surprising challenges when they convinced a restaurant proprietor to open an hour

earlier in order to complete an assignment, as the organizers had accidentally designed the

game event for wrong time zone. In Go Game the players’ literal interpretation of a spiced­up

opening message became a surprising public show:

30

Just before the game started, another Go Game writer decided to revise the opening

text message I had prepared. My text was a bit dry: “Welcome, superheroes! Press GO

when you’re ready to start the game.” We both agreed it would be better to set a more

playful mood, so she added a colorful interjection to the welcome message: “Howdy

superheroes – hold onto your hats, it’s time to drop your pants and dance! Press GO

when you’re ready to start the game.” I had already forgotten about this minor text

change when the teams assembled in Washington Square Park to receive their first set

of instructions. […] Instead, something completely unexpected happened. Half a dozen

players began unbuckling their belts, unzipping their jeans, and showing off their

underwear while waving their arms in the air. This caught the attention of other

players, who quickly realized – A ha! ‘Drop your pants and dance’ – this is our first

mission! So they, too, dropped their pants and started dancing. Before long, most of the

players were dancing merrily in their underwear. They took photos of each other to

‘prove’ their success in completing the mission. (McGonigal 2006)

In Vem gråter, Prosopopeia and Wanderer the game operator wields considerable power as

well. The responsibility of operator is heightened by the fact that the player’s ability to

voluntarily accept the gaming contract is reduced due to insufficient advance information.

In Prosopopeia the players were expected to sneak into an abandoned mental hospital at

night, which would have been illegal if the area wouldn’t have been rented for the game. They

were not expected to break and enter, as one of the doors was left open, but if they had broken

a window before finding the unlocked door, the game organizer would have faced interesting

Still, the responsibility also falls on aware players of pervasive games, as they stand on the

thin line between game and non­game. Often the game­life interactions are emergent, chaotic,

surprising and uncontrollable – thus it’s not feasible to plan for all the scenarios in the game

design. As the Prosopopeia priest example demonstrates, the players are able and willing to

use their own judgement during the game. As decades of experience in Killer25 groups and

among urban role­players has taught, the players can be trusted to use common sense, and the

players must also be expected to take responsibility of their actions (see e.g. Talvitie).

In regular gaming, the magic circle of gameplay creates a special, contractual state where

ethical rules are changed. Limited forms of violence may be allowed (ice­hockey), stealing

can considered being a part of game (Everquest) and players’ privacy can be intruded on (Big

Brother). Pervasive games are different, as the magic circle is expanded in terms of space,

time and social relations, and as game actions are so ambiguous that they are often

inseparably mixed with ordinary life actions. Thus, only the players who willingly and

informedly accept the gaming contract can be subjected to the magic circle ethics. Outsiders

and unaware participants can’t be treated with magic circle ethics.

An event that provides an appealing game experience to one person can be deeply

problematic for another person. When exposed to the idea, some people will take a strong

ethical standpoint against it whereas others find it unproblematic and attractive. We hope that

the discussion above sheds light to different sides of the argument, and shows some

problematic and recommendable game structures.

25 Assassination games, such as Killer: The Game of Assassination written down by Steve Jackson in 1981, are played among outsiders. In Killer the outsiders are witnesses and obstacles, who are to be avoided while conducting real- world murders of other players with water pistols.

31

Often the offences caused by pervasive games are rather nuisances than harms with lasting

effects, and usually the nuisances are caused by unlikely accidents rather than intentional

game designs. These nuisances might be compared with outdoor concerts and street festivals:

Disturbing the neighbourhood by playing loud music and causing traffic jam is better

addressed by politics than ethics. As public space is a shared environment, its use needs to be

governed contractually, and the political system exists for negotiating those contracts. As long

as pervasive gaming remains a niche activity, the nuisances it causes are likely to be too

trivial for the politics to address, so self­regulation is necessary within the field. To minimize

the risk of accidents, adapting the editor­in­chief model from media is probably a good idea in

major game projects. Appointing a person with extended responsibility and decisive power in

the project is a good way of minimizing the risk in the situations where the responsibility

would otherwise appear to disappear due to complexity of power structures. This would be a

natural role for the producer or lead designer of the game. In order for this system to really

work, the person must take a relatively public role transparent to players (and even outsiders

to some extent), and she needs to have the power to veto any elements of the game design. Many pervasive games and game­like activities should be perceived as art or political

commentary in addition to being seen as games, based on their motivation, purpose and

design. Especially the issues of public space and privacy have been commented in many

pervasive games. The artistic games perhaps transcend a need for clear, utilitarian valuation

and are subject to public artistic critique instead.

As we look at the fear caused by a nightly wanderer or the way student art is interpreted as

vandalism, this justification becomes more understandable: Perhaps we need, as a society, some boundary­breaking games allowing us to play in public spaces, meet the most unlikely

of people and perhaps give some candy to strangers. Unaware participation has a strong

potential to be a powerful solution instead of being a problem, even though we have mostly

featured problematic scenarios in this paper.

We want to thank the Prosopopeia discussants for commenting the paper, as well as the staff

of Gotland University and the organizers of Vem gråter for allowing us to study the game

afterwards. Of the many people providing good feedback to this report, we want to especially

thank Staffan Björk, Alison Harvey, Jussi Holopainen, Frank Lantz, Ari­Pekka Lappi and

Ackerman, M., Darell, T., and Weitzner, D. J.: Privacy in context. Human­Computer

Interaction, 16(2­4), 167­176 (2001). Allen, A.: Constitutional Law and Privacy. In A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal

Theory, ed. Patterson, D. Oxford, Blackwell (1996). Beauchamp, T.: Childress, F.: Principles of biomedical ethics. New York, Oxford University

Press (2001). Bentham, J.: An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. London, Methuen

(1982). Callahan, D.: Principlism and Communitarianism. In Journal of Medical Ethics, 29 (5), 287­

32

Ellis, A.: Offence and the Liberal Conception of the Law. In Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 13, No 1. (Winter, 1984). Feinberg, J.: Sua Culpa. In Ethical Issues in the Use of Computers, eds. D.G. Johnson and J. Snapper. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth (1985). Feinberg, J.: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law 4: Harmless Wrongdoing. New York, Oxford University Press (1988). Friedman, B.: Human Values and the design of Computer Technology.Center for the Study of

Language and Information (2004). Grudin J.: Desituating Action: Digital Representation of Context. Human­Computer

Interaction, 16(2­4), 269­286 (2001). Herrera, C.: Ethics, Deception and “Those Milgram Experiments”. In Journal of Applied

Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2001). Hielscher, J. & Heitlager, J.: Wanderer – Location Independent GPS Game. PerGames

http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/pergames2006/final/PG_Hielscher_Wanderer.pdf

Huizinga, J.: Homo Ludens. A Study of Play Element in Culture. Boston, Beacon Press,

(1938/1955). Jonsen, A., Toulmin S.: The abuse of casuistry : a history of moral reasoning. Berkeley, University of California Press (1988). Jonsson, S., Montola, M., Waern, A. & Ericsson, M.: Prosopopeia: Experiences from a

Pervasive Larp. Proceedings DVD of ACM SIGCHI ACE 2006 conference, June 14.­ 16. West Hollywood, ACM (2006). Kant, I.: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, Cambridgre University Press

(1998). Lyons, D.: Forms and Limits of Utilitarism. Oxford, Clarendon (1965). McGonigal, J.: ‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play. DAC 2003

Conference Proceedings. (2003a).

McGonigal, J.: A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play. Level Up.

Proceedings of DiGRA conference. (2003b). McGonigal, J.: The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real­World Mission Based Gaming.

Forthcoming in Harrigan, P. & Wardrip­Fruin, N.: Second Person. MIT Press (2006). McGonigal, J.: Supergaming: Ubiquitous Play and Performance for Massively Scaled

Community. Modern Drama 48:3 (2005). Milgram, S.: Behavioral study of obedience. In Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67(4), 371­378 (1963). Milgram, S.: Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind. In American

Psychologist, Vol. 19, 848­852 (1964). Mill, J. S.: Utilitarianism. Buffalo, N.Y., Prometheus Books (1987). Montola, M.: Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle: Defining Pervasive Games. In

proceedings of DAC 2005 conference, December 1.­3, IT University of Copenhagen.

(2005). Montola, M. & Jonsson, S.: Prosopopeia. Playing on the Edge of Reality. In: Frizon, T. &

Wrigstad, T. (eds.): Role, Play, Art. Collected Experiences of Role­Playing 85­99.

Stockholm, Föreningen Knutpunkt (2006). Montola, M., Jäppinen, A., Lahti, J., Lankoski, P., Waern, A. & Holopainen, J. Deliverable

D5.4: Pervasive Games Design and Evaluation Guidelines for IPerG Phase Two. (2006). Montola, M. & Waern, A.: Participant Roles in Socially Expanded Games. In: Strang, T., Cahill, V. & Quigley, A. (eds.): Pervasive 2006 Workshop Proceedings 165­173.

PerGames 2006, May 7.­10., University College Dublin (2006a).

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Montola, M. & Waern, A.: Ethical and Practical Look at Unaware Game Participation. In

Santorineos, Manthos (ed.) (2006): Gaming Realities. A Challenge for Digital Culture

185­193. Mediaterra 2006 Festival, October 6.­8, Athens. Fournos Centre for the Digital

Culture (2006b). Montola, M., Waern, A. & Nieuwdorp, E.: IPerG deliverable D5.3B: The Domain of

Pervasive Gaming. Available in http://www.pervasive­gaming.org (2006). Palen, L., and Dourish, P.: Unpacking “Privacy” for a Networked World. In proceedings of

the Conference for Human Factors in Computing Systems (2003). Rawls, J.: A theory of justice. Oxford, Oxford University Press (1980). Talvitie, D.: A Manual for Urban Live­Action Roleplaying. 0.3 beta. In

http://users.utu.fi/aletal/roolipelaaja/citygamer (ref. 9th of June 2006). Vandeveer, D.: Coercive Restraint of Offensive Actions. In Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 8, No 2. (1979). Zevenbergen, J. European Privacy Law and its Effect on Location Information. Location

Privacy Workshop, Individual Autonomy as a Driver of Design, Schoodic Peninsula,

Acadia National Park, Maine. August 5­7 (2004).

Page 1 of 34

Public IPerG Deliverable 13/10 2006

Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

WorkPackage WP5: Design & Evaluation

Deliverable D5.5:

Ethics of Pervasive Gaming

Markus Montola (University of Tampere)

Annika Waern (SICS)

Jussi Kuittinen (University of Tampere)

Jaakko Stenros (University of Tampere)

Release date: October 13 2006

Status: public

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Executive Summary

In this report we discuss ethical issues related to pervasive gaming. Due to their nature, the

pervasive games influence the ordinary life outside the game in many ways, some of which

are beneficent while others are problematic. In this report we focus on the latter issues, while

also demonstrating the power for beneficence and social commentary. The problematic issues

that we rise involve questions of involuntary participation, power use, privacy and deception.

Involuntary and unaware participation is relevant, as the nature of a typical game is

contractual, and in pervasive games outsiders are drawn to the game without their explicit

consent. Power use is relevant, as the game organizers and operators typically hold significant

power over player, who seek to complete tasks set by operators during the game. This power

division is typically very asymmetric and non­transparent. Privacy is a natural concern in

games that pervade everyday life bringing the required surveillance technology along.

Deception takes place in many ways from purposeful reality fabrication to players discussing

game issues casually with outsiders.

In discussing ethics the concept of harm is critical; differentiating lasting setbacks to one’s

interests or assets from momentary nuisances that are a natural part of being a part of a

society. While ethics can be applied to both categories, in practice the latter issues especially

are better solved by politics that ethics. When harm is caused by pervasive game, the question of accountability remains. Usually such

harm is caused accidentally by unforeseen circumstances. Obviously the accidents that

happen in pervasive games are typically not physical like the ones in sports, but psychological

and social. Responsibility of such accident is typically shared by players and game organizers:

While the game designers, orchestrators and operators strongly guide the player activities, the

only the players can react in real time to unforeseeable circumstances and incidents. We study the ethical issues by analyzing several cases of pervasive gaming. While the most of

our detailed studies focus on past games, one examines an upcoming one and one game is

constructed on concept­level only for the purposes of this report.

Even though this report focuses on problematic pervasive games, we want to emphasize that

only few pervasive games are offensive or harmful. The purpose of this report is to make that

portion even smaller in future.

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Deliverable Identification Sheet

IST Project No. FP6 – 004457

Acronym IPerG

Full title Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming

Project URL http://iperg.sics.se/

EU Project Officer Albert GAUTHIER

Deliverable D5.5 Ethics of Pervasive Gaming

Work package WP5 Design & Evaluation

Date of delivery Contractual M24 Actual M24

Status final ̨

Nature Prototype p Report ̨ Dissemination p

Dissemination

Level

Public ̨ Consortium (CO) p

Authors (Partner) Markus Montola (UTA), Jussi Kuittinen (UTA), Jaakko Stenros (UTA),

Annika Waern (SICS)

Responsible Markus Montola Email markus.montola@uta.fi

Author Partner University of

Tampere

Phone +358 44 544 2445

Abstract

(for

dissemination)

This report discusses the ethics of

pervasive gaming, based on five case

examples as well as brief review of

central ethical standpoints related to

pervasive gaming. Keywords pervasive game, unaware participation, social expansion, temporal expansion, ambiguous gameplay, ethics

Version Log

Issue Date Rev No. Author Change

9

th of Aug. 0.1 Montola First draft

14

th of Aug 0.2 Montola Added EM2 etc.

18

th of Aug 0.3 Montola Added ethics chapters from Jussi and Annika etc.

24

th of Aug 0.4 Montola Added autonomy and deception from Jussi etc.

4

th of Sept 0.5 Montola Reorganized, added stuff.

10

th of Oct 0.9 Montola Addressed reviewer comments, added text.

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary …………………………………………………………………………….. 2

Table of Contents ………………………………………………………………………………… 4

1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………. 5

2 Introduction to Ethics……………………………………………………………………. 6

2.1 Traditional Starting Points………………………………………………………………………….6

2.2 Applied Ethics………………………………………………………………………………………….7

2.3 The Ethics of Technology Usage …………………………………………………………………8

2.4 Artistic Motivation and Societal Commentary……………………………………………..14

3 Case Studies ……………………………………………………………………………….. 15

3.1 Vem Gråter ……………………………………………………………………………………………16

3.2 Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där Vi Föll………………………………………………………………19

3.3 Epidemic Menace 2…………………………………………………………………………………22

3.4 Beneficent Gaming, a Casuistic Exercise…………………………………………………….24

4 Practical Considerations ……………………………………………………………… 25

4.1 Unaware Participation ……………………………………………………………………………..25

4.2 Public Space…………………………………………………………………………………………..27

4.3 Ludic Interpretation…………………………………………………………………………………27

4.4 Story Spin ……………………………………………………………………………………………..28

4.5 Reality Fabrication………………………………………………………………………………….29

4.6 Player Rights………………………………………………………………………………………….29

4.7 Operator Power………………………………………………………………………………………30

5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….. 31

6 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………… 32

7 References………………………………………………………………………………….. 32

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1 Introduction

The salient feature of pervasive games is the way the borders of game and non­game are

blurred (see Montola 2005; Montola, Waern & Nieuwdorp 2006 for definitions and

discussion). As the interface of the pervasive game is ambiguous, the game actions conducted

by players and game orchestrators are both game actions and non­game actions.1 In addition

of wondering what is acceptable in the context of game, the pervasive game designer needs to

contemplate on what is acceptable in real life. Perhaps the two most important aspects are

fabrication and surveillance.

Pervasive games are structures of make­believe fabrication overlapping with the ordinary life

of the players. This fabrication ranges for example from playing combat robots (Botfighters)

to vampires (Vampire: The Masquerade), medical scientists (Epidemic Menace 2), ghosts

(Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll) and assassins (Killer: The Game of Assassination). For the

gamer the context of game is accessible, but to a bystander the game might appear as a prank,

a weird event or everyday reality. This friction of ludic and ordinary is an important source of

ethical conflicts and opportunities, as a game can directly influence ordinary lives of the

participants. (See Montola & Waern 2006a for discussion on unaware game participation).

Surveillance is important for orchestration of most pervasive games. The sensory functions

vary greatly, but they might include video surveillance (Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll), player­based reporting (Isle of Saints), cell phone positioning (Botfighters), GPS (Epidemic

Menace 2) et cetera. The ethics of surveillance are relevant for the privacy of the player, but

also it’s important to avoid the surveillance of outsiders or bystanders.

The purpose of this report is to open ethical discussion on what makes a pervasive game

design feature acceptable or unacceptable from the ethical point of view. Thus, it can also be

read as a guideline document for reflecting individual game designs.

In the work leading to this report we have found out that many ethical issues described in here

easily spark controversy. Apparently the most challenging, risky and unique ways of creating

pervasive games also hold the potential for the most interesting artistic expression, the

sharpest political commentary and the most engaging gaming experiences. We try to cover

both permissive and restrictive arguments in this report without taking sides as such. Thus,

there are few clear answers in this report, but rather some ethical guidelines for the use of the

reader’s own moral compass.

The concepts and most of the game examples used in this report have been earlier discussed

in an earlier IPerG report, D5.3B: The Domain of Pervasive Gaming (Montola, Waern &

Nieuwdorp 2005), which is publicly available in Internet.

Ethical issues have been touched earlier within IPerG at several occasions. D5.1 Initial

Design and Evaluation Guidelines provided a few considerations, and the work on social

adaptability and interaction design in D9.1 Guidelines for Socially Adaptable Games partially

touched a couple of related issues. Pervasive gaming business ethics have been briefly

discussed in D4.1 Business Guidelines.

1 This phenomenon, discussed earlier as interface ambiguity, stems from the fact that pervasive games are not played entirely inside the so-called ”magic circle of gameplay”. Walking into a shop with Botfighters on in one’s cellphone

constitutes a game action, as the player’s bot is moving in space – even though the player’s intent was not to perform

game action but to go get some groceries.

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This document does not discuss legislation and should not be used as legal advice.

2 Introduction to Ethics

In this report, we discuss the ethics of the pervasive aspects of pervasive games in particular.

Our discussion does not include ethics of gaming or ethics of pervasive applications, but is

restricted to pervasive games only. As discussed in previous reports, games are needless and

voluntary activities2 (Huizinga 1938); this distinguishes games from other pervasive

applications and poses particular ethical requirements.

2.1 Traditional Starting Points

The basic starting point for all professional ethics is the question of the right action: what

action in a given situation might be considered the right one and on what grounds. This

underlying fundamental issue is reflected in approaches such as utilitarianism and deontology.

2.1.1 Utilitarianism

The theoretical approach most notably put forth by Mill (1987) and Bentham (1982), utilitarianism relies on evaluating the consequences of actions. Utilitarianists hold that all

ethical considerations should be based on calculating the utility of an act, which is the amount

of good it produces, so that when faced with a moral dilemma, one must consider the

consequences of each possible act and choose the one that produces the most good. This is the

crudest form of utilitarianism aptly called the act­utilitarianism.

There are quite many problems associated with act­utilitarianism. First off, predicting future

consequences is very hard. Secondly, the biggest moral problems are often those that require

instant decisions, but utilitarianism forces the agent to consider all the alternatives and

calculate their consequences as far into the future as possible. Thirdly, although act­ utilitarianism might maximize goodness on individual situations, it might produce worse

results if everyone were to act in certain act­utilitarian ways. For instance, stealing money

from a bank to help a family in need might maximize happiness in a single instance, but if

everyone started doing it, the macro­economical consequences would produce great amounts

of unhappiness.

Rule­utilitarianism tries to address the two latter problems by stating that it is not the utility of

an individual act that should be considered but the utility of a rule. If there is a rule that

maximizes goodness when followed constantly, then it should be chosen. Although this would

reduce the time needed to make decisions, this would still leave the utilitarian with one major

problem: how to make good rules that address the needs of individual situations. For instance, a rule stating that one should never lie would need an exception that would allow lying in

order save a life. This exception in turn might need an exception that would deny lying in

situations where saving a life by lying would risk more lives, e.g. when one would lie to save

a known murderer, and so on forth. This formulation of exceptions and sub­rules can in fact

reduce the rule­utilitarianism back to the act­utilitarianism as Lyons (1965, 137) has argued.

2.1.2 Deontology

The other predominant traditional theory on right action is the deontology, a term and theory

created by Kant (1998) in the 18 th century. If utilitarianism is teleological, then deontologism

2 Needless does not mean useless or worthless. Pervasive gaming offers many opportunities for education (Regensburg

Explorer, Visby Under) and physical excercise (PacManhattan, Wanderer), for example.

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might be considered as causal in its application: there are some a priori duties that always

oblige one to act in a certain way regardless of the situation. Instead of looking at the

consequences of the action, the agent should focus on the duties having relevance with the

particular act.

So, how does one know one’s duties? For Kant, these were the product of the rational human

mind. If a rational human would think about it hard enough, he could have no other choice but

to come to a certain conclusion i.e. a rule Kant called the Categorical Imperative, which in

one form stated that one should only act according to a rule that one could at the same time

will to become a universal law. For Kant the Categorical Imperative imposed an

unconditional duty to all individuals and was the basis for all other moral duties.

The difference between deontology and utilitarianism is difference between the right and the

good as Rawls (1980, 30) puts it. While utilitarianists argue that an act is right when it

produces the most good, deontologists claim that an act may produce the most good even

though it is clearly wrong by violating another person’s universally acknowledged right or

some other generally agreed upon ethical principle. So, deontological thinking is not

dependent only on the considerations, but also on other issues.

The question now becomes, what are these rights and principles and how can they be agreed

upon by all the members of the society? Rawls’ answer is the hypothetical concept of original

position. He argues that if a group of rational people each acting as a representative for a

group of citizens, were stripped of, for example, such information as the wealth, race and

gender of the citizens they represent, they would choose a set of rights and principles that

would also benefit those citizens that have the least in terms of talent or wealth.

2.2 Applied Ethics

The problem of utilitarianism and deontology is that they are not concrete enough to be easily

applicable to everyday moral dilemmas, that is, they are more concerned with creating a

general theory of ethics instead of providing means to solve ethical problems. Applied ethics

is specifically aimed at creating methodology for solving practical ethical issues.

Before going further with the different approaches in applied ethics, it is necessary to go

through two central notions in contemporary ethical discussions: rights and principles.

2.2.1 Rights and Principles

Put simply, rights impose duties on other people or society to either act or refrain from acting

in a certain way. If a right imposes a restraint on acting, then it is a negative right and when a

right imposes a duty to act, it is a positive right. As an example, a right to life is a negative

right, since it imposes a duty to restrain from acting in manner that would kill someone, and

the right to social security is a positive right as it imposes a duty on society to provide social

services to those in need. Rights can also be absolute, in which case it is always inviolable

and should be respected regardless of any other considerations, or prima facie meaning that in

some cases other rights might outweigh the right.

In ethics a moral principle is a universal rule i.e. notion that defines a duty. Deontology and

utilitarianism are monistic theories in that they rely on one single moral principle. The

former’s principle is the Categorical Imperative and the latter’s the principle of utility. The

methods in applied ethics are usually pluralistic defining a set of principles, which in turn can

be either prima facie or absolute.

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2.2.2 Principlism

Beauchamp and Childress (2001) introduce four principles upon which the medical

professionals could base their reasoning in moral dilemmas. Each of these principles is

supposed to be prima facie, so that depending on the circumstances any principle could

outweigh the other. These principles are:

­ Respect for autonomy i.e. the duty to respect the right of every individual to make

decisions regarding their own life. ­ Beneficence i.e. the duty to try to do good to other people. ­ Non­maleficence i.e. the duty to not harm or offend other people. ­ Justice i.e. the duty to treat all individuals equally in similar situations.

The view purported by principlism is not an altogether unproblematic one. When a conflict

between the principles occurs, the method can actually produce several different outcomes

instead of a single correct one. Although not necessarily a bad thing, it can lead to confusion

and dispute over the decision.

The benefits of the four principles approach lie in the practicality and the usefulness of the

method. As almost a checklist, it helps medical professionals to both identify the possible

ethical conflicts and also provides a terminology to discuss them. One can argue whether the

selected principles actually constitute the most important ones in healthcare professions, but

as it often is in ethics, no single set can be selected with absolute certainty.

2.2.3 Communitarianism

Principlism has been criticised for being overly individualistic by emphasizing autonomy as

the key factor in ethical considerations. Although the four principles are supposed to be

equally strong in preference, some critics have claimed that the other three principles are in

fact more or less defined by autonomy. In the case of casuistry 3

this criticism has stemmed

mostly from the fact that some western societies such as United States and Great Britain have

a long history of individualistic preference.

Communitarianism is a somewhat loose term for those philosophers and political scientists

who emphasize the importance of the community over that of an individual. Communitarianism itself is not as much a method than criticism over the prevalent principles

in both the casuistry and the principlism. For instance, Callahan (2003) notes that in case of

an ethical problem, the questions should focus on “its social meaning, implications, and

context, even in those cases which seem to affect individuals only”.

Although the criticism raised by communitarians is often valid and well justified, it can make

ethical problems more complex requiring even more professionalism from the reviewers and

thereby rendering ethics out of reach for the practical everyday problems.

2.3 The Ethics of Technology Usage

When technology is put to use, it affects individuals as well as the society as a whole. The

value of those changes are typically judged in other terms than purely economical; Friedman

(2004)) uses the term human values to represent ethical and moral values that people take into

account when describing such changes. As there are large individual and cultural differences

in how such values are described and judged, it can be debated (and has been debated) to what

3 See chapter 3.5.

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extent they are universal. However, as we can see from the debates arising around computer

technology, it is still possible to provide terms and classifications that help us analyse the

values embodied in a particular application design and its usage. Although such

categorisations never become complete, they provide a common ground for analysis, standardisation, and debate.

Starting in the analysis provided by Friedman, we can classify values that commonly are

embodied by computer technology as privacy, accountability, (freedom of) bias, autonomy

and universal access. We can start by noting that as games are voluntary and needless, the last

one is less applicable to games than to most other computer applications. The impossibility to

access a particular type of game may be frustrating but does not cause any secondary harm

(e.g. limited access to central societal functions). Similarly, autonomy is de­emphasised by

the game rules; entering a game usually implies accepting to be bound by its rules. For games,

the autonomy is relevant for player’s ability to stop playing at any time; and even this is often

compromised e.g. in team­based games where the common good of the team may be

dependent on players not quitting. As we will see in our case analysis, accountability, bias and

privacy are central values in the ethics of pervasive games.

As noted by Friedman, the actual technology used in an application will sometimes directly

impact these values. More commonly however, the way the technology is distributed and its

usage regulated is much more critical. In our analysis, we will not primarily analyse the

technology as such, but the whole game setting, including the rules, the selection of players,

and in particular the relationship between players and bystanders. 4

2.3.1 Privacy

Privacy is a critical and delicate consideration for designing pervasive games, as the games

may considerably intrude on both players and bystanders. As noted by many authors, privacy

is primarily a socially regulated contract, where people regulate their openness about private

issues depending on the social context.

According to Allen (1996), there are three typically used dimensions as to how the concept of

privacy is defined:

­ physical privacy, meaning that people have the right to private physical space from

where other people may be excluded (e.g. private toilets), ­ informational privacy, meaning that a person has the right to control access to

information about oneself (e.g. privacy of information on one’s health), and ­ decisional privacy, meaning that people have the right to exclude other people from

the decisions concerning oneself (e.g. the decision to make an abortion).

These dimensions of privacy are intertwined and overlapping on some situations. For

instance, placing a hidden camera without her consent in a person’s toilet would clearly

violate her right to physical privacy, but also the right to informational privacy by violating

her right to control access to sensitive information about herself. In the same way, physical

and decisional privacies would be overlapping in a situation where a group of religious

missionaries are forcefully trying to convert an atheist.

4 This is due to the claim (Montola, Waern & Nieuwdorp 2005) that pervasive games are not explicitly defined by the

technology used, because pervasive experiences can be constructed without any computer equipment.

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Informational privacy is regulated by the most legal systems in Europe (as in other parts of

the world), in terms of unsolicited information solicitation and use. These laws typically rely

on the informed consent for information sharing (Zevenbergen 2004). However, Grudin

(2001) has argued that the major privacy problem with modern information technology is a

lack of immediacy. The effects of information sharing are not obvious at the time of

disclosure, and this harms the individual’s ability to adapt their openness according to context. Bearing this in mind, supporting explicit privacy agreements (Ackerman et al 2001) is not a

sufficient solution, as the immediacy may be compromised both by the explicit representation

and lack of timing. Palen and Dourish (2003) provide a more useful basis for privacy

negotiations by deconstructing the potential negotiation into three aspects: negotiation of

content, negotiation of identity, and negotiation of time (past, present, and future solicitation

and usage of information).

Palen and Dourish’s analysis makes it possible to restrict privacy negotiations to contexts that

are naturally graspable. For ordinary, non­pervasive games, the magic circle of gameplay and

the decision to enter into or leave a game forms a natural and easily graspable boundary to

which such contextual negotiations can be associated (Montola 2005). Both the solicitation

and usage of information can be restricted to the game context. It is common for players to

adopt a game identity, which exists solely within the gaming context. Finally, due to the

voluntary and needless properties of a game, players will typically only accept that the game

gathers such information that is needed to run the game. For example, players may agree to

solicit personal data about their past, but only under the conditions that the data is shared only

in the present (during the game) and under a temporal identity. For pervasive games however,

the lack of a clearly defined boundary between the game and ordinary life compromises the

ability to negotiate information disclosure both for players and non­players.

Physical privacy is probably the most problematic dimension in pervasive games. The

structure of games as systems of rules where players are constantly required to make

decisions in an artificial context will rarely create situations where one’s decisional privacy

could be intruded upon.

Although fundamental, right to privacy is not absolute. In western legal tradition it is common

to make an exception if the person in question could be seen to have given implicit consent,

like in the case of active publicity seekers. A person’s right to privacy can also be limited if

she has no reason to expect privacy, for example in public places. Thirdly, privacy can be

outweighed by other rights that are considered more important, such as the right to security. As mentioned previously, most privacy regulating laws also provide the option of signing

privacy away.

Looking at the different groups of people whose privacy can be violated in a pervasive game,

there are at least players, aware spectators, unaware participants, and unaware spectators. There are some differences between these groups as to the types of ethical problems arise.

The key distinguishing factor between these groups is clearly the awareness of the game. Both

the players and the aware spectators have some understanding about the game i.e. its name,

concept and so on forth, so that they have some idea what to expect. Players will also have to

know at least part of the rules so that they should have even more reasonable expectations and

also consent regarding the rules they have information of.

Although seemingly unproblematic, the issue of consent can be rather complex in some

pervasive games. Once participants have given their consent to the game by opting to play it,

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their privacy protection could be considered void from the game in question. But this assumes

that players have reasonable expectations on the nature and the content of the game. But in

order to be able to give full and informed consent, the participant would have to know all the

events and rules in the game before consenting. This of course is impossible with some

games. One potential solution would be to allow players to quit the game once they run into a

situation where they feel that their privacy has been or will be violated: This may happen for

example in some alternate reality games based on “this is not a game” aesthetic, when the

players may realize their participation in a game well after the game has started. In any case,

the game designers and operators should never infringe privacy without sufficient and

justifiable reason.

The right to privacy of the aware spectators is higher than for players. Again, physical and

informational privacy are primarily considered: the aware spectator will for example expect to

be able to escape from the game to carry out private activities. Unaware participation and

unaware spectatorship pose even higher challenges for game design. They cannot be seen to

give any other consent than the possible implicit consent maybe given by entering a public

space.

2.3.2 Accountability

Following Friedman, we will use the term accountability to refer to an individual’s

responsibility for a given harm. In juridical systems, the ability to identify such individuals

(or juridical persons including organisations and companies) forms the basis of providing

retribution for harm (e.g. indemnity). Within the context of a game, such retributions are often

part of the rules governing the game (e.g. the yellow and red cards used in soccer).

In this report we mostly discuss psychological harm, as has been earlier done by e.g.

Feinberg, Vandeveer and Ellis: Harms include lasting setbacks to one’s assets, including

physical and psychological setbacks. Offences include harms, but also minor, ‘harmless’ nuisances. Ellis (1984) works on Feinberg’s listing of offensive, but not necessarily harmful, nuisances, classifying them as: 1) Irritants to senses, 2) Excessively bad manners, 3) Flaunting

one’s contempt for people’s values as an insult as well as pointless flaunting of one’s

contempt for people’s values and 4) Indecency. Vandeveer (1979) points out that many

offensive actions are offensive only to certain group, as dictated by traditions, beliefs or

cultural identity. Thus, it’s important to consider the needs of an average person (“almost

anyone chosen at random”) as well as the needs of the minorities. Weighing the good of all

versus the good of minority remains a question of reasonability, where no clear answers can

be given.

According to Feinberg, an individual is morally blameworthy for a harm if his or her actions

caused the harm, and his or her actions were ‘faulty’; that is, that the responsible person had

either intended the harm, neglected the risk of causing harm, or failed to realise a risk for

harm that he or she should have been able to realise.

For computer applications as well as games, the individual’s moral responsibility for a harm is

lessened by the fact that there are a host of people involved in each activity; a game

development project involves people in roles such as distributors and producers, sales

representatives, managers, designers, and developers, and many people partake in a game

event in a multitude of roles such as spectators, organisers, referees and players. In such

complex and long­term projects, where decisions are taken collectively in obscure processes,

it will often be difficult to find individuals who fulfil the requirements above to be held

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accountable. A specific problem for complex systems of software and hardware is the

omnipresence of bugs; when a system becomes sufficiently complex it always contains bugs, no matter how conscientious and clever the programming staff has been. Who then can be

held accountable for the effects of those bugs?

When individuals cannot be held accountable, organisations (and sometimes non­organised

collectives) will often be informally (or even legally) blamed. This is in general not desirable,

as it leads to ‘guilt by association’; the blame rubs off to individuals of the organisation that

were completely innocent in the matter at hand. For some organisations, the solution has been

to appoint a single person who is officially responsible for the organisation; examples of this

include ship captains and newspaper editors­in­chief. This practice is useful in fields where

accidents are statistically bound to happen, and minimization requires strong concentration of

power and responsibility. In a context of game, the responsible producer can only take

responsibility of choices of designers and operators, but in games such as Prosopopeia Bardo

1: Där vi föll, the high unpredictability of player means that the responsible producer can’t

take the responsibility of every potential problem scenario.

A distinct difference between game and non­game activities is that within games, accountability is partly regulated within the rule set of the game. This is closely related to the

fact that games occur in a magic circle, within which the rules are different from those of the

social world outside of the game. What is considered an offence may be a vastly different

thing within a game setting; ice­hockey players and boxers execute harmful violence within

the game that would lead straight to court if used outside the game. Secondly, even for actions

that are considered offensive, the sanctions are regulated within the game context rather than

by external authorities (legal or otherwise). If a soccer player intentionally trips another

player, the accountable player will be punished within the game – he will not be (typically)

charged in a court. As we will see from our analysis of case examples, similar approaches can

be used also in pervasive games.

In pervasive games the players’ perception of the game rules may clash with what is

considered legal or appropriate behaviour within the real world social context, and as the

magic circle is blurred in many fashions, this becomes a very relevant concern. Speeding on

the highway to catch up with another player is just as unlawful as speeding for any other

reason (and, as games are voluntary and needless, may be considered even less morally

acceptable). But from the player perspective, he or she may consider the accountability to lie

with the game designer or game organiser, as they developed a rule set that rewarded

speeding. Again, as with privacy clear player and participant agreements only partly alleviate

the problem as they lack immediacy. In the heat of the game, it may be difficult to remember

what responsibilities you have accepted as a player.

In addition to harm and offence, a third important concept for thinking about accountability is

risk. Even though drunk driving is harmless most of the time, it’s considered unacceptable

and punishable because it involves a small risk of significant harm to outsiders. Drunk driving

is especially condemnable because it’s harmful to individuals in the scale of the whole

society: the harsh punishments are legitimate due to statistically large number of accidents

caused by recklessness, even though the risk in a particular case (driving slowly in desolate

area) might be very small. Understanding the risks of pervasive gaming is only possible after

more large­scale games are organized, as currently most of the occurring problems are

“isolated incidents”.

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2.3.3 Freedom of Bias

Again following Friedman, we use the term ‘bias’ to refer to activities that systematically and

unfairly discriminate against certain individuals or groups, in favour of others.

For traditional games, it is hard to claim that they ever are biased in favour of one player to

another. The player whose children beat him in Counter Strike may get aggravated and

frustrated, but will probably not blame the game for bias. The ‘bias’ is in this case an

emergent effect of the rule set, and when volunteering to enter the game you thereby agree

with those effects ­ the discrimination is systematic but it is not unfair. Computer games may

however introduce bias based on their dependence on technology. For example, real­time

games such as Counter Strike will often systematically discriminate against players with

lower bandwidth or less optimal computer hardware. Some games have also been accused of

bias when they contain hidden rules that affect game play in ways that players were not able

to foresee. More serious bias is sometimes introduced between different categories of participants. Online games will often provide game operators with abilities that are not necessarily

perceived as ‘fair’ by the players. Many pervasive games give considerable power to game

masters over the participants, as the orchestrators keep secrets, issue assignments, and

technologically observe the players. Often the organizers also operate in secrecy, not

revealing their identity to the players during the game, and the transparency of the game

orchestration is kept to minimum. Personal relationships of players and game orchestrators

might become especially problematic as due to this asymmetry; maybe the jealous game

orchestrator can use the exact position information to track his girlfriend who signed a broad

disclaimer to participate in the game, or maybe he gives her a privileged status in the game.

For pervasive games, there can be a serious bias between aware and unaware participants in

several roles. This is further discussed below.

2.3.4 Autonomy and Deception

In addition to privacy, the right to autonomy is often regarded as one of the fundamental

human rights enjoying strong protection. In ethics autonomy is essentially the individual’s

right to self­determination i.e. the right to make one’s own decisions, and as a concept it is

close to the right of decisional privacy. The difference between these two rights is that

whereas decisional privacy entails more the right to withhold one’s decisions from other

people, autonomy refers both to the right to make decisions but also to the capacity to make

them. If a person’s capacity to make an informed, ethical decision is harmed, then one’s right

to autonomy is violated.

The need for consent is also a question of autonomy: the ability to give an informed consent

on a matter concerning oneself is dependent on the autonomy of the subject (Patry 2001). Therefore this question is particularly evident with the case of unaware participation, since

there is a possibility that using unaware participants requires some sort of deceiving, as was

the case in Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll.

Psychology and social sciences in general use deception in research experiments where there

would be a possibility that being truthful would somehow affect the results of the test. This

used to be more widespread and less controlled in the 1960’s, but ever since Milgram’s

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obedience­experiment 5

, deception has become a criticised practice and its use is quite

commonly controlled by ethical boards. Nowadays it is common to distinguish unnecessary

and justified deception, where the latter is deemed to hold more benefits than harm.

The discussion and criticism on the Milgram experiment offers good insight into ethics of

deception. In his assessment of the criticism, Herrera (2001) notes that the Milgram’s test and

the use of deception in research has been mainly criticised for causing harm and involving

significant risks for the participants, generally invading the autonomy of the participants. However, Herrera continues, there have been numerous studies on the effects of deception on

test subjects and the contention of them is that deception causes little or no harm at all. Similarly, a survey conducted among the Milgram test subjects showed that the majority of

the subjects thought of the experiment as a positive thing (Milgram 1964).

As Herrera points out, the test subjects in Milgram’s experiment were not tricked to doing

anything that they would not have done without the deception (Herrera 2001). The invasion

on the right of autonomy is questionable on the same grounds: the choice to administer the

electric shocks was always the subjects’ alone. The teacher­learner –setting could not have

given them to believe that the shocks were in any way more acceptable that in their normal

life. So, if their freedom to make a choice and the capacity to make ethical decisions were not

diminished, it cannot be said that their autonomy was in any way compromised.

Even so, Milgram’s experiments have been heavily criticized. We will have reason to come

back to this in our analysis of the Vem gråter example, where one informant explicitly

mentioned the deception as problematic in itself; independent of the harm it might have

caused. Deception introduces a bias between the people ‘in the know’, typically game masters

and some players, and the people who are unaware. There are situations where deception can

cause real harm on the game’s participants and spectators.

2.4 Artistic Motivation and Societal Commentary

Discussing offenses not causing bodily harm, Vandeveer (1979) points out that in political

conflicts, it’s in the interests of the third parties to have both sides of the conflict brought to

public, and offensive provocation is often the only or the best way to do so. From the

perspective of this third party interest, he formulates what he calls the Standard of

Permissiveness toward Conscientious Offence:

Individuals engaged in conscientiously motivated dissent aimed at securing what

dissenters judge to be more desirable social arrangements have a claim to restraint

from coercive interference even if their dissent is seriously offensive.

Applied to pervasive gaming, Vandeveer’s argument is that if a pervasive game is aimed at

improving the social system, it should be tolerated even if it might offend someone, as long as

it’s motivated by the organizers’ conscience. In the spirit of free speech, the benefit of the

society demands tolerance for such expressions.

5 Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiment on obedience was a series of controversial tests conducted in 1960’s, on which the participants were deceived to be participating on a test on the effectiveness of punishment in

education. In the experiment, the participants were ordered to give electric shocks for every wrong answer to

“another test subject”, who was in fact an actor faking the shocks. The results of the test were staggering with 65 %

(26 out of 40) of the people willing to give the final shock of 450 volts to the student. (Milgram 1963)

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Deciding what counts as such “conscientiously motivated dissent” is a complicated question;

Vandeveer discusses the examples of anti­abortion activism and Neo­Nazism, concluding that

“We must, as the standard insists, tolerate the conscientiously offensive; it is not obvious that

we must exercise similar permissiveness toward the unconscientiously offensive, or, as some

have put it, tolerate (to the same degree) the intolerant”. Thus, the acceptability depends on

the conscientious motivation or lack of it. Whether a game can be “conscientiously motivated

dissent” as well as a commercial product depends on the case; it’s certainly possible, as many

profitable yet also conscientiously motivated books and documentaries demonstrate. As a

principle, the freedom of expression includes playful expression as well.

This argumentation is valid when discussing Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll, as – for

example – one of the points consciously planned into the game was that all reality is

construction, we should open people’s eyes to see the fabrication – be it done by mainstream

media, the Pentagon, or pervasive gamers. Seeing this fabrication and acting against societal

norms empowers people to better criticize the constructed society.6 Many gamelike flash mob

events, such as Whirling Dervishes (McGonigal 2005), also fall under this definition, demanding the society to engage in more public playfulness and claiming the streets back to

people (from car traffic).

3 Case Studies

In this chapter we analyze some relevant case examples that have attracted our interested

during IPerG. Some of the examples have been created within the project, while some of them

come from external games. In some examples we have focused on some detail in game design

or execution, while in other cases we have evaluated complete game designs. In addition to

the case examples presented here, we have sought to integrate our other experiences in

pervasive gaming in this report as well. Most of the ethical issues are related to social expansion, or, expanding the game beyond the

people who start to play the game. Several game designs offer ambiguous roles for players

and spectators through a deliberately ambiguous game context. When a person first makes

contact with the game, it does not make itself fully known. It will be noticeable that

something is taking place, but not exactly what is happening. The typical pattern is that people

become aware of the game through passing through three broad stages of awareness.

(Montola & Waern 2006a.)

­ Unaware state: The game experiences go unnoticed or are interpreted as ‘everyday’ phenomena.

­ Ambiguous state: The experiences produced by the game are too obvious or too

closely related to each other to be ignored; still there is no frame of reference that

would reveal and confirm the fact that it is a game, which we will refer to as the

gameness of the experience.

­ Conscious state: The game context is accessible to the person.

The critical stage is that of ambiguity, as this is when it is possible to misinterpret the

experience as reality. The game experience in this state is that of a reality game, a piece of

6 Based on email discussions with lead designer Martin Ericsson (in 2005 and 2006).

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fabricated reality that is a game but does not reveal itself as such.7 A particular problem is that

the audience will form their own interpretation of the context. Unless the ambiguous

experience is carefully designed, these interpretations can very well be much more dangerous

and worrying than the true explanation (that it was a game).

It should be noted that the ambiguous state can still support a playful, ludic, interpretation

both for the people in ambiguous state and the people in conscious state.

3.1 Vem Gråter

Vem gråter was planned to be a weeklong sequence of mysterious poltergeist­events staged

within the Gotland University premises, in winter 2005 – a project work on a course on

pervasive gaming. We got the opportunity to study Vem gråter after the game had concluded,

by interviewing players, organizers and university staff.

Vem gråter created a series of events with hidden clues allowing the participants to dig deeper

into the mystery, a ghost story based on historic events concerning the role of Sweden and

Gotland in the Second World War. The game comprised of the following elements:

­ A set of staged paranormal events, carried out at the university, including a tape

recorder hidden in a ventilation shaft, sending out sounds of a crying child, a tower of

furniture built overnight, and coal scribbles on a wall. The installations were staged

late in the evenings when the premises were relatively empty. ­ An actor pretending to be ‘Spiricom­Thomas’, an occult investigator. He appeared

at a couple of occasions in the university and in some cafés. ­ Two web sites, ‘created by’ Spiricom­Thomas and a local ghost hunter society. ­ Announcements at university bulletin boards. Two of these were from Spiricom­ Thomas and the third announced a fake seminar on parapsychology. ­ A set of hidden clues around the town intended for the people solving the riddle.

All events and clues were supposed to point towards a final scene concluding the game. For

numerous reasons this final event was never staged. These game elements were also the only

possible way of learning that there was a mystery puzzle; there were no invitations or

possibilities to sign up. Rules of the game were not explained anywhere.

The game did not work out as intended. Instead of students or teachers, the maintenance staff

of the university turned out to be the main audience. In their frame of interpretation, the

historical and ethical perspectives of the ghost story were lost, and the game elements were

interpreted in the frame of vandalism instead of the frame of playfulness or mystery. Thus, the

police and local newspapers became also interested.

3.1.1 Contextual States

In our research it soon became clear that the vast majority of bystanders had never noticed

anything at all, or interpreted their experiences as ordinary life. Thus, we only interviewed six

people, and only one of these people was actually a student trying to solve the puzzle as

intended by the organizers.

The game managed to keep many participants in the ambiguous state for the most of the time.

The ambiguous state is a labile, transitional state, which most people try to resolve by making

7 Candid camera, scambaiting and invisible theater are practices deceiving outsiders in a similar fashion.

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assumptions regarding truth behind the events faced. Summarizing our interviews, we ended

up in four prototypical interpretations for Vem gråter:

1. Ghosts are real. This was the interpretation implied in the game design, although the

organizers did not intend this interpretation to be made. This interpretation did not

show up in our interviews. 2. The ghost investigator is dangerous and mentally unstable. This interpretation

accepts that Spiricom­Thomas exists, but he is crazy and potentially dangerous

intruder instead of any kind of an investigator. This interpretation was not intended by

the organizers but became widespread among the university staff. 3. Students are making pranks. This interpretation indicates that the students are

making trouble at the school. This interpretation prevailed among the staff, even after

the true nature of the events was uncovered.

4. Someone has created a cool adventure. This ludic interpretation is the driving force

of alternate reality gaming. It requires an understanding of the fact that the events are

fabricated, even though they become more engaging through ambiguity. The player is

thrilled by the fact that he does not know what is going on or what could happen next.

Obviously the professional role and personal history strongly influence the interpretation

made. In the case of Vem gråter a younger, game­oriented audience would probably have

been more inclined towards an adventurous interpretation, while in the eyes of a janitor

already frustrated with students, the same events appear as vandalism. In order to enjoy Vem

gråter the observer had to make the cool adventure interpretation. However, the second and

third interpretations were dominant.

3.1.2 Spiricom­Thomas Story Spin

The university administration quite quickly figured out that a student group must have put up

the posters8

. However, the other game elements were not immediately thought to be planted

by students, but rather by the external person Spiricom­Thomas, who had been visible in the

student cafeteria a couple of times.

This suspicion was interpreted as potentially dangerous, and measures were taken to protect

the university staff from the potentially dangerous person lurking in the corridors. We thought that he was not well, and there is an uncertainty when a person is

psychically ill how they act, and since we have personnel here in the evenings we had

to take action immediately. (Head of the janitor staff)

They had not made the connection between the parapsychology investigator and the

game, so they thought that he was a schizophrenic psychopath who had been attracted

by the game… they thought that they had to deal with a real psychopath. (Teacher at

the game design education)

According to one of our informants, some women had got in contact with Kvinnojouren, a

phone service for harassed women, expressing fear for the person playing Spiricom­Thomas.

It was this amateur researcher, the actor, who went around and made contact with the

students, that was perceived as scaring in particular by women… one woman at

8 The posters contained a web address to a server with an IP address from within the university.

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Kvinnojouren at Gotland has received a lot of phone calls from scared women, she told

me about this… (Woman aware of the gameness of the events)

The student group was however highly sceptical towards the idea that Spiricom­Thomas was

actually able to scare anybody. The following cite is from the interview with the developer

team:

R4: These rumours that were spread that this Thomas would be a threat against

people, I found that almost shocking. R2: And it was strange. R4: He was acting, and I don’t know if it was due to bad planning or something like

that but…

R1: and some of it might be rumours spreading… R4: A tad eccentric, but not to the extent so that he actually acted as ‘off’ as people

claimed towards the end.

It is quite possible that the students are right in this. After all, a simpler explanation would

have been to immediately suspect the students (which the university staff already knew were

behind some of the posters) to be responsible for the whole set of events. But as we will see

from the following quote, the university staff had an independent incitement to end up in a

‘lunatic’ explanation. The head of the janitor staff described his thoughts at the first encounter

with the events – a tower of chairs in one of the classrooms – the following way. We have a student here, who used to be a student, who hangs around here and is not

entirely well, but we have still let him hang around here because he wants to be here

and we have some staff that have some contact with him. But then we thought that it

was him who was fooling around, because he likes this particular room. He is often

there and just stands in the dark, so our first thought was that it must be him. But it

turned out that he had nothing at all to do with this. (Head of janitor staff)

There was thus an incidental connection between one of the very first observations made by

the janitors, and a person who was mentally ill. When the university staff started to connect

the events to the appearance of Spiricom­Thomas, they were already mentally prepared for

the ‘lunatic’ interpretation of the events.

3.1.3 Vandalism

A largely unforeseen problem was that the game was, to a very large extent, perceived as

vandalism by the university staff. Installations such as scribbles and piled chairs were

considered messy, unpleasant and potentially dangerous to clean up. Also, they were seen as

purposefully scary. To some extent, the staff continued to look on the events as vandalism

even after the game had been outed as a reality game.

This is about our profession and our job, it is not acceptable to create this kind of

situations for us, not from the perspective that this is our working environment. (Head

of janitor staff)

This reaction should have been foreseeable, but the student group was only semi­aware of the

problem even at the time of the interview. The problem was recognized in conjunction with

the wall scribbles, as these were reported to the police.

In a sense the vandalism interpretation is related to the issue of bias. The janitors guessed

quite correctly that the Vem gråter installations were created by students, but their previous

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experience of some students lead to the assumption that the students might have done the

installations in order to intentionally cause harm – differentiating a “prank” from an “act of

vandalism”. Apparently, in addition to requiring game designers and operators to be free of

bias, it is important to convince the players and unaware participants of the lack of bias and

good­willed nature of the game. Otherwise the perceived or assumed bias may destroy the

experience.

3.2 Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där Vi Föll

Prosopopeia Bardo 1: Där vi föll9 was a pervasive larp 10 about players being possessed. In a

nutshell, the players were expected to role­play themselves in Stockholm mostly identical to

ours, where they were possessed by ghosts of deceased people. For 52 hours, the players

mixed role­playing themselves and the possessing ghosts, going on with their everyday lives

while simultaneously role­playing ghosts walking in the world of living (see Jonsson & al

2006, Montola & Jonsson 2006).

In a sense, every player took the role similar to that of Spiricom­Thomas, engaging in

pretence play with unsuspecting people. As Prosopopeia was a role­playing game, the players

could have long, intricate and credible discussions with outsiders as part of the game. As they

could never know where the game ended and began, they had to often interact with outsiders

in order to progress in the game. Prosopopeia was an alternate reality game in the sense that it

was contextualized in the everyday lives of the players, and this feeling was heightened by the

fact that it was also contextualized in the everyday lives of the outsiders unaware of the game.

According to the players, perceiving the routines of the ordinary world, with the heightened

perspective of the game fiction, created an intense feeling of Prosopopeia being more than a

game.

The following citation from player feedback illustrates a typical encounter in the game. The

players met a complete outsider whom they thought to be a part of the game, even after the

game when writing their research debriefs.

First, there was a meeting on the cemetery, when a man came strolling by who

obviously had something to do with the game. I appreciate the way it was handled. He

introduced himself as passing­by, and waited for us to make a move, which we didn’t.

So he left. As I understand it, he had knowledge about the EVP­recorder, which we had

problems with. Even if this was not a roleplaying­encounter, it worked fine. And it

made me feel like it wasn’t hopeless; someone was looking out for us. In this particular

game it worked fine, as everything already made me feel part of a big conspiracy, and

he fit in there too. Many players were asked to conduct interactions of ghosts and unaware outsiders. For

example, one ghost (and thus the player) was to shelter a real, homeless person, having been

an activist working for the shelters for homeless in Stockholm. Another ghost had a message

to deliver to the local Catholic monsignor. These outsiders were not chosen by the game

organizers in any way, they had no connection to any homeless people or Catholics before the

game, but it was assumed that the players could find the unaware participants on their own. These were some the most serious, intense and engaging tasks in the game, in a sense a ‘price’ ghosts had to pay for returning to life.

9 A collaboration of IPerG project and volunteers, June 2005. By Martin Ericsson, Adriana Skarped, Staffan Jonsson

and others. 10 A live-action roleplaying game staged in a pervasive fashion.

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After the game, an ethical debate emerged on the message board of a Finnish role­playing

magazine where the game was presented, to discuss the dilemmas of unaware participation.11

Especially attempt to involve a priest in the game heated up discussion. The discussants of

Roolipelaaja forum used the following restrictive argumentation styles against Prosopopeia:

­ People should not play pranks on others without their consent. ­ Unaware participants are unwillingly commodified by the players. ­ Wasting person’s professional working time with a game is not right. ­ Helping an unfortunate person in a fashion that secretly is a game actually exploits his

plight. ­ Games should not toy with events and things that are considered holy. Many discussants argued on behalf of the game with following permissive arguments:

­ Art, including Prosopopeia, is supposed to break borders, and thus games classifying

as such should be allowed unaware participation. ­ If the unaware participant has a positive experience or benefits from the game, the

game is acceptable. ­ As all reality is constructed, fabrication motivated by gaming is just as right or wrong

as the construction made by e.g. media and governments. ­ Most of the people – professionals especially – play some kind of fabricated roles

anyway in their interactions with unknown people. Gaming is no worse.

Commodification of time is an interesting sidetrack in the Prosopopeia discussion, as

‘wasting’ outsiders’ time was seen as a bad thing. At the same time other discussants saw

priest’s professional time in terms of money and efficiency. Thus, a homeless hobo would be

commodified involuntarily by the game, while working for money is voluntary self­ commodification. Using the working time for the game can be seen as stealing that resource

from the employer. These interpretations are highly culture­specific: imposing oneself on

another and privacy issues in general are more highly regarded in Finland than, for example,

in Sweden.

In a detailed analysis of different categories of exploitation Feinberg (1988, 205) writes that

“A may simply utilize some traits or circumstances of B’s for his own purposes without

wrong or harm to B or anyone else. Sometimes this is called “exploiting” the other’s traits or

circumstances, but in this sense “exploits” is nonpejorative, and it’s just another way of

saying “puts to use”. Not all use is ill­use. In these cases, A blamelessly “exploits” B’s

characteristics or situation without exploiting B himself”. Although Feinberg understandably

does not analyze a case on pervasive gaming, many fabricated discussions with unaware

outsiders can be classified as harmless parasitism, where A gains advantage of B while B

suffers no harm from A’s actions. If such exploitation is harmless and not disrespectful, it’s

hardly condemnable.

One interesting thing in Prosopopeia is that the players never execute the most challenging

tasks involving outsiders (such as ones involving priest and the homeless person). Obviously

11 Article was written by Markus Montola and published in Roolipelaaja magazine (www.roolipelaaja.fi). He also

facilitated the discussion by providing further information as needed. Some parts of the discussion were dominated

by a misunderstanding as the participants assumed that the priest encounter had actually taken place, but it was later on clarified that the player had autonomously decided to not perform the task.

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such playing is intense and requires effort, but the player with the priest quest also

commented that he didn’t perform the task since he found it unethical.

In both the cases of Vem gråter and Prosopopeia there was a clear undercurrent condemning

the fabrication of reality for the purposes of gaming in particular. A potential explanation for

this could be that the informants’ implicitly assume that games are always played for

entertainment, ignoring the suitability of games for purposes of art, research, education and

political commentary.

3.2.1 Uncontrolled Environment

The Prosopopeia players had many interactions with complete outsiders during the game.

Many of these encounters, such as the one described above, were greatly appreciated by the

players, for the thrill of not knowing where the borders of the game lie. Combined with the

fact that in many pervasive games the players are observed constantly, or the players at least

believe so, there might be a false feeling of safety in these interactions. Even though the

protective frame of gameplay does not extend to people unaware of the game, this is

something that might be forgotten in the thrill of the game.12

The fundamental question is about accountability in uncontrolled environment. If a game tells

players to go at a bad area of town during night, is the game organizer responsible of placing

them in the risk of getting robbed or mugged? The answer is clearly dependent on where the

game is played; while in Stockholm the risk might be insignificant, elsewhere it might be very

considerable. If the risk is significant, the most important thing in the game design is to

clearly communicate that the game does not protect the player to prevent a false feeling of

safety. As a clear ethical benefit, games like Prosopopeia that encourage players to talk with

the homeless or to wander into poor areas of the town can be also seen as beneficial, as they

have the potential to bridge gaps between socio­economical classes.

One example of problematic design in uncontrollable environment is Wanderer

13

, which is a

parkour­inspired GPS game where player should travel in real world at set speed, while

receiving random orders on which direction he should be moving at a given time.14

During the tests the players where highly motivated to follow the commands given by

the game even when the environment was not allowing the player to perform the

instructed movements. For example, players crossed streets, even with cars

approaching that were forced to stop in order not to hit the player. During this

example the players made it clear that they were not unaware of the environment, but

were willing to force the environment in order to keep playing the game. (Hielscher &

Heitlager 2006).

In Wanderer, the commands are received aurally and the focus of the game is in the

environment. The (relatively rare) chases of Botfighters are unfortunately different, as the

players need to focus on their cellphone screens as well in order to maneuver properly. This is

one of the reasons why Can You See Me Now left the street runner position to game

organizers and allowed random players to only play the online side.

12 There is unfortunately no research data on this. 13 By Jonas Hielscher and Jiri Heitlager (2006). 14 While it was run in Sweden, the hard-core players of Botfighters expressed comparable behavior.

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3.3 Epidemic Menace 2

Epidemic Menace 215 was a 2­3 hour crossmedia game that was played with 2 teams of 4

players, four times in a research campus area. The player teams were anti­virus teams that

were supposed to track and catch escaped viruses, as well as try to figure out who had

released the viruses.

The gaming was divided in two modes, command centre and fieldwork. The players in the

command centre could track and instruct the field agents but they were not able to directly do

anything, only the filed agents could do that. In addition to this the competing team could see

(but not hear) what was going on in the command centre through a webcam. In fact, any

internetuser could tap into the stream from the command centres and two web cams placed in

the park where the field agents played.

3.3.1 Surveillance

The players were constantly under video surveillance while they were playing. They were

directly observed by the other players, by the tech team, the designer, and via the webcams by

evaluators, other players, game designers, anyone on the internet and all of their actions on

the devices were being logged. In addition to this there was at least one cameraman present in

all the games documenting the experience.

In the interview that was conducted as part of the evaluation after the game, most of the

players felt like they had been observed, but most also stated that it had not bothered them. The fact that they had also been able to watch the streams from the webcams was perceived as

fun or even integral to the game by some players. A few interviewees would have wanted

more cameras, specifically mounted cameras worn by the players who were hunting the

viruses outside. A few players commented that though the surveillance as such had not been a

problem, the fact that there was a cameraman running around did break the illusion of the

game world. Also, the actions of the cameraman were perceives as meta­information: if the

cameraman was interested in filming something then that must be pivotal to the game.

I was constantly analysing why he filmed this or that.

These statements are in a bit of a conflict with some of the observation data. As the players

started to play the game they were given t­shirts. In the fourth game the t­shirts were given in

the gaming area and the webcams were already active. The players closed the door to the

room and huddled bashfully in corners while they switched shirts, yet they seemed oblivious

to the webcam (even though they were informed about surveillance and had the option of

changing their clothes in a nearby bathroom). Also, some players were a bit surprised by the

surveillance; they did not feel that they had been properly informed about it beforehand. One

player was also visibly relieved, after finding out about the extent of the surveillance, he was

told that the discussions in the room had not been broadcasted on the internet.

15 Epidemic Menace 2 was organized in cooperation by Fraunhofer FIT, Sony NetServices and Blast Theory together with the support of a number of other IPerG partners. The test of the second prototype was conducted on July the 6

th & 7

th 2006 on the Campus Birlinghoven, near the city of Bonn in Germany. This report is entirely based on the

second iteration of the game, Epidemic Menace 2, but the findings are likely to apply to the first iteration of Epidemic

Menace (tested in 2005) as well.

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As long as the games stay a niche phenomenon, the surveillance doesn’t seem to be a

problem; provided that the players are properly informed beforehand. If the recordings are

broadcasted to a larger audience, then the attitudes may be very different:

It was a bit disturbing to run into people who were watching us on the monitor. How

they were pointing out stuff.

It seems that as long as the surveillance stays within the magic circle, then the players do not

object to it. In fact that might even want to have as much of it as possible as shown by the

desire to have mounted cameras in player head gear. Yet when people who are not

participating in the game observe the players, then the players may be uneasy as they have no

control or knowledge of those viewers. One way to remind the players of the presence of the

camera is to make it very prominent and visible (as with the moving human cameraman), but

this then disrupts the game. If the cameras are hidden, then the game flows better, but the

participants forget about the surveillance.

These observations clearly support the aforementioned problem with privacy that computer

technology brings: the lack of immediacy obscures the effects of information sharing. The

players may also forget that they are being observed and do things that they would not if they

remembered this. On argument for game surveillance is that it may be for the best that the

players learn the implications of surveillance ubiquitous in our society in a ludic context of

pervasive gaming. Most of us are fundamentally unaware of the camera density in urban

areas, insecurity of internet communications, log data created by cellphone usage et cetera.

Pervasive gaming offers a good opportunity to change our theoretical knowledge about

surveillance into practical hands­on feeling on what can be recorded and what can not. Educating people on surveillance can help them to protect their privacy outside and after the

game.

3.3.2 Use of Public Space

The game was partly played outside in a park in a campus area. The area was open to

bystanders and there were some people walking around who were not affiliated with the game

in any way. Yet, the area was clearly separate and in a way self­contained.

Most of the players said in the interview that they would not feel comfortable playing the

game in a crowded area. The campus location was seen as a good place as bystanders seemed

to be either aware of the game or were just not surprised about the game. In the questionnaire

50% of the participants said that they would not want to play in city centre and only 10% said

that the game would fit at an art or culture festival.

These findings were echoed in the interview:

You just can’t play it in a normal crowded are. You can play it if it is very crowded, or

if it is empty. If there are just a few people here and there then you are a weird person

on the street.

Someone might call the police if they saw you with all the equipment.

The central concern was ridicule. The fact that people might laugh at (or be confused by) the

players because they are carrying around weird equipment came up time after time in the

interviews. This is supported by the suggestion that if the game was moved to a city centre,

the equipment should be subtler.

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Playing in a crowded public area would also seem more acceptable, if the playing happened in

the context of a television series (if the game was part of a tv­series tie­in) as then bystanders

would know what was happening. Generally, the interviewees reacted negatively to

ambiguous social expansion and had not talked to bystanders at all.

If it in a framework of a TV show and the whole nation knows what I’m doing, then

maybe it’s ok. Running around if everybody thinks I’m crazy wouldn’t be fun.

An empty warehouse or a similar empty location was seen as the ideal location for the game

(92% would like to play in a warehouse and 89% preferred a separate location over a festival

setting). These numbers are probably slightly tainted by the fact that the game in question was

built around the concept of a killer virus and thus would require a location with as few people

as possible as they would, following diegetic logic, all be dead or infected.

The paraphernalia needed to play Epidemic Menace is quite extensive. This seems to be the

problem with playing the game in an open public space. It would not be possible to point out

the players of Prosopopeia on the street, but the players of Epidemic Menace would stick out

immediately. On the one hand Epidemic Menace would thus be easier to play in a city centre

as bystanders would be alerted to the carnevalistic nature of the game by the presence of the

elaborate equipment. On the other hand precisely that would break the illusion of the diegetic

world.

3.4 Beneficent Gaming, a Casuistic Exercise

The issues we have pointed out so far in the case studies have mostly demonstrated the

problems and challenges of pervasive gaming, and especially of unaware participation. As a

casuistic exercise to balance the aforementioned examples, we can construct a beneficent

example of a unaware participation, in order to prove the potential for utilitarian or altruistic

good inherent in pervasive games.

Casuistry is a method for analysing individual cases in relation to similar cases and

generalised ethical principles. The central notion is to identify the particular ethical features in

the case and try to find an analogous but clearer case to which virtually any rational person

would agree. These clear cases are called the paradigm cases.

Some games are already used for charity purposes (national lotteries for instance). As the

magic circle of gameplay is broken in pervasive games, the gameplay of these games can

create very tangible outsider benefits. Consider for example a role­playing game where the

players are put into the role of a charity organization, for example making a game about

Salvation Army, inspired by Aki Kaurismäki movie Mies vailla menneisyyttä (2002).

Although the obvious benefits of players providing homeless people with soup and soap are

obvious, some considerations need to be made to minimize risks of causing harm. Exploiting

or stealing the brand of Salvation Army would be maleficent, so the charity organization must

be designed and costumed to be similar but still different enough to avoid confusion. Raising

money from outsiders is improper if the organisation pretends to be a real charity

organization. Finally, Salvation Army is a religious organization, but as discussed in context

of Prosopopeia, it’s typically considered more ethical to design a profane variant of the

charity organization for the purposes of the game.

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Though it might, at first, be difficult to imagine why players would want to join such a game,

it becomes obvious in closer scrutiny. As long as the larps are well designed, larp players are

known to be willing to be subjected to mentally stressful conditions for long times (Europa),

to live in trash heaps (Amerika), to play pre­determined tragedies (Hamlet) and so forth.16

“Entertainment” is not the only intriguing reason to play games, but others exist as well –

including broadening one’s perspectives by joining the Salvation Army lookalike for a week.

If we consider who might be harmed by such a game, we can come up with two parties. First,

the players might be subjected to a reality harsher than they’d expect. This, however, would

be exactly the reason the players signed up. The players need to be informed well enough to

acquire an informed consent, and the harsh reality is actually the selling point of the game.

Secondly, if the game went on for months or more, it might create a group of people whose

welfare depends on continuation of the game.

Finally there’s the matter of exploitation discussed in the context of Prosopopeia. If this is

considered to be a problem, in our ideal example we can also provide announcements to the

possible visitors of the charity organization, explaining that it is all a game about charity. This

precaution should cancel any issues on commodification of the poor and exploiting their

plight.

The casuist method helps to remove ideological differences as long as the focus is kept on the

features of the case (Jonsen & Toulmin 1988, 18). Therefore casuistry should be very useful

in particularly pluralistic situations where there are a number of different religions and

ideologies in play. According to some critics, the major problem with the casuist method is

that it leads to the ethics of the masses by reflecting the currently dominant views of the

society thereby not concentrating on what is right, but what is acceptable by most. Secondly,

finding paradigm cases relies on the features that the reviewers decided to include in the case

description making casuistry a rather subjective method. This exercise is intended to speculate

some potentials of pervasive gaming.

4 Practical Considerations

In this chapter we try to discuss practical issues of pervasive game design, making

conclusions based on the ethical discussion and our case analyses.

4.1 Unaware Participation

The utilitarianist acceptability of a game with unaware participation depends on both the

features of the planned game and also the execution of the plan – both on the intentions and

on the results. A utilitarianist look at the ethics of Vem gråter obviously shows that the game

caused feelings of nervousness, uncertainty and stress in the unwilling participants. However,

as a failed experimental game it does not represent the whole of pervasive gaming or even the

whole of reality gaming.

In an upcoming pervasive game Cruel 2 B Kind17

the players have to kill other players with

acts of kindness. As the players do not know their victims or the other players, they have to

16 Examples mentioned here are larps from Norway and Sweden. Europa portrayed everyday life in a refugee center

where different ethnic groups were struggling for survival. Amerika was about consumerism and world literally

drowning in garbage. Hamlet told the pre-determined tragedy, where most of the players died and the idea of

‘winning’ the game was extremely irrelevant. 17 By Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, to be played in Come Out and Play festival in New York, September 2006. http://cruelgame.com/ (ref. 1

st of August 2006).

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perform their signature act of kindness to random bypassers until they manage to hit their

targets, the only people who know that the act of kindness is related to the game. In practice

this might mean players wandering around, giving flowers to everyone they meet in order to

give a flower to the target player, thus succeeding in the game.

On the drawing board, producing enjoyment and entertainment to unaware participants

motivates both Vem gråter and Cruel 2 B Kind. However, despite the best intentions Vem

gråter was read as a reckless prank or as scary acts of vandalism. We assume that the unaware

experience of Cruel 2 B Kind will be a spontaneous rush of carnivalistic benevolence.

The question of unaware participation requires discussion what can be done in public space.

Clearly, giving flowers to random bypassers in a park in order to succeed in a game is

acceptable to the most of us. Then again, scribbling on a wall might appear unacceptable,

even though it might be legal (provided the scribbler has the appropriate permissions), as the

observers are unable to perceive the legality of the act. Most of the time the nature of player­outsider interaction is impossible to exactly control by a

game organizer. The game content emerging due to the friction on the edge of the magic

circle is one important reason why the players have found socially expanded games like Go

Game and Prosopopeia exciting and appealing (McGonigal 2003b, Jonsson & al 2006,

Montola & Jonsson 2006).

4.1.1 Professionals

One thing that was perceived as particularly problematic in both Vem gråter and Prosopopeia

was that the games approached professionals in their work. Vem gråter was perceived as acts

of vandalism primarily because it became visible to maintenance staff at the university.

The primary motivation for this ethical standpoint is that professional time is money, and

when involving them into a game you are wasting their employer’s money. In Prosopopeia,

this was aggravated by the fact that the person to be approached was a priest participating in a

religious ceremony, as that was seen as a potential insult on the religious community present.

For the professional, the option to refuse involvement (see the discussion on invitation to

refuse from Montola & Waern 2006a) in the game becomes often unavailable. This was

clearly shown by a Swedish radio show Hassan, which made prank phone calls to unaware

people. On one occasion, Hassan called a woman who was working as the municipal contact

person for people with mental problems. Called upon in her professional role, she made every

attempt to answer Hassan’s questions in a composed and pedagogical manner, making for a

hilarious show

18

. Due to her role as a professional counsellor, she was literally forbidden to

hang up on the radio show.

The Vem gråter vandalism interpretation is an example of the practical problems caused by

not negotiating with the local staff for staging of a reality game. There are also strong reasons

to inform officials such as police and fire brigade prior to a game event that they may get

informed about. Even games that appear to have consent of all parties might end up involving

outsiders. One example of such safe­sounding but possibly risky game was Kidnap, where a

consenting participant was kidnapped for 24 hours by a group of artists.19

18 The show was aired in real time, and later on made available on CD. The woman did not consent to the latter. She was later forced to leave her job as she became flooded with prank calls. 19 By Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_kidnap.html (ref. 9th of June 2006).

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4.2 Public Space

One central ethical challenge of pervasive gaming is their use of public space as a part of

spatial (and social) expansion. Feinberg’s Standard of Reasonable Avoidability states that:

No one has a right to protection from the state against offensive experiences if he can

easily and effectively avoid those experiences with no unreasonable effort or

inconvenience. (ref. Vandeveer 1979)

Obviously the unavoidable games, such as Vem gråter or to some extent Prosopopeia are the

core of the problem. Volunteers participating in pervasive games should not be protected from

“harm” caused by them, at least as long as they know what they sign up for. Also, this

emphasizes that the participant should (almost) always have a right to quit her participation in

a pervasive game.

One question is whether people have a right to solitude in public spaces. As advertisements, bouncers, beggars and salesmen are generally considered as nuisances, there is something

offensive in intruding personal space without invitation. The seriousness of these nuisances

depends on the fashion of intruding and requires specific consideration. Excessive stalking of

outsiders (or other players) is one particular problem, not to even mention issues like sexual

harassment. On the other hand, public spaces are just that, public, and the desire for not being

interrupted is fulfilled in private spaces.

There are also strong arguments for bringing games to public space. As participants engage in

public play, they are also redefining the public space, turning streets from no man’s land to

every man’s land. The ideology of reclaiming the streets suggests that traffic is not the only

function of urban outdoor areas, but they should be used creatively as well. In this respect

pervasive gaming can have similar functions as invisible theatre 20

, flash mobs and street

parties have. The more radical street artists speaking for reclaiming the public space also

argue that all individuals should have the right to both use public spaces and also alter them –

the graffiti movement can be seen as a pervasive art movement taking visual arts outside the

contractual spaces typically reserved for art.

Staging games in public areas only is a double­edged solution in terms of providing the

unaware participants the possibility of refusing the game.21 As the game stays in public space,

it can be refused by leaving the public space – but pervasive game organizer can’t except

random people to stay in their homes while running the game. This solution is used by many

Killer troupes, which only allow assassinations to happen in public spaces and thus reducing

the pervasivity of the game.

4.3 Ludic Interpretation

Pervasive games should typically be designed to be ambiguously visible primarily to people

that can be assumed to make ludic interpretations of the experience. Achieving this can be

difficult; a janitor has a professional reason for taking game events seriously, while generally

women and men react differently to mysterious stalkers in the night. Other factors that may

inspire preferred interpretations include the choice of location (ambiguous clues of The A.I. Game were presented in the movie trailer), the choice of theme (I Love Bees had the flavour

20 Undercover theatre play in public spaces, where actors pretend to be ordinary individuals. 21 Invitation to refuse, see Montola & Waern (2006a).

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of honey farming), and the choice of aware players (Spiricom­Thomas was probably

perceived to be more scary than small children would have been).

The thematic choices are important. Whereas a scary, depressing or even violent theme is

often enjoyable in a contextualised game, the lack of contextualization makes the same theme

very problematic in the unaware or ambiguous game context. As the protective frame of game

or fiction is missing, a thrilling game inspires raw, unmediated fear in the participant. While it

is possible that some people might enjoy of such an extreme experience22

, establishing a

certainty on that before the beginning of the game is practically impossible.23 This is the key

difference between Vem gråter and Cruel 2 B Kind, where the latter is likely to create a

thoroughly agreeable atmosphere for non­players. Even selecting a non­scary theme will not

in itself guarantee that the game is not perceived as scary.

4.4 Story Spin

The most serious problem with Vem gråter was the amount of story spin that was generated

by the events. The major example is the interpretation of Spiricom­Thomas as a potential

lunatic. The other example is the interpretation of the game event as a prank staged by the

students to ‘get even’ with the school, and in general the organisational conflicts that the game

exposed.

It is all too easy to dismiss these stories as the result of ‘freak coincidences’ with reality – in

this case there really was a mentally ill person related to the university and the students had a

real reason to be disappointed with university management. But such coincidences are legion

in reality and alternate reality games and form an essential part of the game aesthetics. Even

though the Vem gråter case is extreme, any game that offers ambiguous game experiences

runs a risk of backfiring this way. The advantage of establishing Huizinga’s magic circle

around a game experience is that it also keeps many issues outside the game: In traditional

games a poor person can easily play a millionaire, and the nightly wanderer does not get

mixed with a known mentally ill person.

For accountability reasons, it is important that there is a person (or several) who is both able

to justify the game design decisions afterwards, and take the responsibility for the game in

case it backfires. In the case of Vem gråter, the lack of a clear responsible designer/producer

created a lot of harm in the aftermath of the events, where the university, the game

development education, and the students suffered.

The risk of a harmful story spin is practically ever­present with expanded games. One

example of a game where risk certainly existed but was tolerably small was Epidemic

Menace 2, in which the players portrayed members of “European Epidemic Prevention

Agency EEPA”, trying to catch deadly viruses in campus area. Dressed up in EEPA shirts and

wielding complicated technology, there theoretically was a risk of misunderstanding leading

to a weird story spin. In practice, however, in campus area the risk of someone

22 In pop culture, David Fincher’s movie The Game (1997) suggests that some people might enjoy such fear at least in

retrospect, after the game is over and the ambiguity is cleared. It is also relatively common in the Nordic larp culture

to consider negative character emotions and experiences as positive experiences for the player. 23 A hardcore community of pervasive gamers might create a website, where they could publicly declare their willingnes to play unaware parts in pervasive games with certain, defined conditions. Restrictions and permissions established in such way would help designers to plan their reality games and choose their participants, even though

the legal status of such one-sided contracts would be an important consideration.

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misinterpreting a PDA or a cellphone as real medical equipment was so small that the risk of a

story spin was probably acceptably small.

4.5 Reality Fabrication

In Vem gråter interviews we asked the informants if they found this type of gaming ethically

acceptable. The answers varied from clear ‘yes’ over “it is not acceptable to scare people” to

clear “no”. Some interviewees motivated their ‘yes’ from a post­modern perspective: As the

world consists of a web of fabricated realities, reality gaming could make people aware on

how they were fooled. This educational perspective of shaking people awake was seen as a

justification for pervasive gaming. This opinion was also voiced in the online discussion on

Prosopopeia.

I find the genre acceptable, the basic form that forced people to think again, when you

get to know that aha, this was not completely real and here I have been, believing it to

be real. (Student in the development team)

One of the interviewees in the Vem gråter study expressed an almost opposite opinion:

What I react against in this is that there is somebody who creates deliberate

deceptions, and then can stand at the side and think ‘ha, ha look’… (Observer aware of

the gameness of the events)

The crucial issue is that to deceive somebody, there must be somebody who is ‘in the know’

and for that reason has power over the people who are being deceived. The alternate reality

game genre introduces a systematic bias between the aware and the unaware participants

(irrespective of role). From this ethical standpoint, the whole genre of alternate reality games

is compromised.

4.6 Player Rights

Many pervasive games are based on the TING­paradigm of aesthetics (see McGonigal 2003a,

2003b), where it’s important that the game does not explicitly appear to be a game to the

player. In this type of game, it’s sometimes not desirable to exactly inform the players of the

ways they are observed during the game.

An unfortunately easy solution is a carte blanche approach, where the players allow the game

operators to gather information and fabricate reality in unclearly defined or countless ways. The rationale behind the approach is that if the game operator acquires the permission to do

anything, the players cannot guess what the operator will do – leading to a better game

experience (for people appreciating the TING­aesthetic). Ethically the carte blanche approach

is problematic: the players’ ability to make informed decisions is compromised, as they do not

understand the possibilities and limitations of surveillance and fabrication in pervasive

games.24 The player might not know who stores the information, who are the people having

an access to it and for what purposes it will be used.

24 Would the players sign a form where they consent to “any means of technical surveillance for the duration of the game”, if they knew that they were accepting the fact that they may be surveilled 24 hours per day by audio and video, the recordings may be stored for unlimited time and used for any imaginable purposes by a large number of

people without internal regulation? In extreme cases, the game operator might even claim that “technical surveillance” includes covertly reading their email messages, monitoring their web use, tracking their cellphone movements et cetera et cetera (even though such claim might not hold in court).

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The problems of a carte blanche approach are also relevant when obtaining information from

players, e.g. regarding special diets, health status et cetera. If the players are not appropriately

informed on the content and gameplay of the game, their ability of providing sufficient

information on their health status is difficult. Depending on the game, especially conditions

such as diabetes, epilepsy and heart diseases. Mental conditions may turn out to be relevant as

well, e.g. panic disorder and various phobias. In order to ensure player safety, a game asking

for carte blanche list of permissions in order to uphold secrecy, may also need to obtain a

relatively complete health information of all players and review it carefully.

All data stored on player activities should be deleted immediately when it is no longer needed

for operating and developing the game, and, in most games, the permission for the use of data

should be obtained in advance. It is far better to obfuscate the players by asking permissions

for types of sensory information not used in the game, than to use data without permission. In

addition, only needed data should be collected or stored, and after the game the players should

have a right to know what data was collected and how it was used. Data collected for the

game should not be used or stored for other purposes, except when an informed consent is

acquired. If medical data or other especially confidential information is collected, it’s access

and use may need special regulations and care.

4.6.1 Ridicule and Awkwardness

The players of Epidemic Menace 2 had concerns on ridicule on players. Although we do not

generally realize this, many societies place cultural restrictions on which games adults are

supposed to play in public. Games including e.g. elements of role­play (Epidemic Menace, Prosopopeia and Vem gråter) might cause such awkwardness in some players. This

awkwardness and the potential social repercussions are rather unpleasant nuisances than

tangible harms; it’s unlikely that an outsider comment on Epidemic Menace would be more

than a passing irritation. Communicating the nature of a pervasive game early on is usually

more of a practical recommendation than an ethical one: In order to facilitate playing and to

make sure the players entering the game are likely to enjoy it, it is good to ensure that players

know what they are about to do.

Placing this playfulness into public spaces not reserved for gaming can be seen as a beneficial

effect exactly because of the social norms that restrict playing: Loosening those norms allows

people to behave more freely in public, and can result in further pleasurable playfulness. The

openness and boldness required from theatre actors can be taught in stressful and awkward

(yet usually fun and rewarding) drama exercises, and pervasive gaming serves well in this

function.

4.7 Operator Power

As McGonigal (2006) notes, many pervasive games tend to shift the focus from free play

within the illusory constraints towards becoming actors playing their part in a vision dictated

by the game designer. According to her experiences on Go Game and I Love Bees the players

are often willing to go surprisingly far with obeying the commands issued by game

organizers, even when those orders are misunderstood. The players of I Love Bees managed to

overcome surprising challenges when they convinced a restaurant proprietor to open an hour

earlier in order to complete an assignment, as the organizers had accidentally designed the

game event for wrong time zone. In Go Game the players’ literal interpretation of a spiced­up

opening message became a surprising public show:

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Just before the game started, another Go Game writer decided to revise the opening

text message I had prepared. My text was a bit dry: “Welcome, superheroes! Press GO

when you’re ready to start the game.” We both agreed it would be better to set a more

playful mood, so she added a colorful interjection to the welcome message: “Howdy

superheroes – hold onto your hats, it’s time to drop your pants and dance! Press GO

when you’re ready to start the game.” I had already forgotten about this minor text

change when the teams assembled in Washington Square Park to receive their first set

of instructions. […] Instead, something completely unexpected happened. Half a dozen

players began unbuckling their belts, unzipping their jeans, and showing off their

underwear while waving their arms in the air. This caught the attention of other

players, who quickly realized – A ha! ‘Drop your pants and dance’ – this is our first

mission! So they, too, dropped their pants and started dancing. Before long, most of the

players were dancing merrily in their underwear. They took photos of each other to

‘prove’ their success in completing the mission. (McGonigal 2006)

In Vem gråter, Prosopopeia and Wanderer the game operator wields considerable power as

well. The responsibility of operator is heightened by the fact that the player’s ability to

voluntarily accept the gaming contract is reduced due to insufficient advance information.

In Prosopopeia the players were expected to sneak into an abandoned mental hospital at

night, which would have been illegal if the area wouldn’t have been rented for the game. They

were not expected to break and enter, as one of the doors was left open, but if they had broken

a window before finding the unlocked door, the game organizer would have faced interesting

problems of responsibility.

Still, the responsibility also falls on aware players of pervasive games, as they stand on the

thin line between game and non­game. Often the game­life interactions are emergent, chaotic,

surprising and uncontrollable – thus it’s not feasible to plan for all the scenarios in the game

design. As the Prosopopeia priest example demonstrates, the players are able and willing to

use their own judgement during the game. As decades of experience in Killer25 groups and

among urban role­players has taught, the players can be trusted to use common sense, and the

players must also be expected to take responsibility of their actions (see e.g. Talvitie).

5 Conclusion

In regular gaming, the magic circle of gameplay creates a special, contractual state where

ethical rules are changed. Limited forms of violence may be allowed (ice­hockey), stealing

can considered being a part of game (Everquest) and players’ privacy can be intruded on (Big

Brother). Pervasive games are different, as the magic circle is expanded in terms of space,

time and social relations, and as game actions are so ambiguous that they are often

inseparably mixed with ordinary life actions. Thus, only the players who willingly and

informedly accept the gaming contract can be subjected to the magic circle ethics. Outsiders

and unaware participants can’t be treated with magic circle ethics.

An event that provides an appealing game experience to one person can be deeply

problematic for another person. When exposed to the idea, some people will take a strong

ethical standpoint against it whereas others find it unproblematic and attractive. We hope that

the discussion above sheds light to different sides of the argument, and shows some

problematic and recommendable game structures.

25 Assassination games, such as Killer: The Game of Assassination written down by Steve Jackson in 1981, are played among outsiders. In Killer the outsiders are witnesses and obstacles, who are to be avoided while conducting real- world murders of other players with water pistols.

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Often the offences caused by pervasive games are rather nuisances than harms with lasting

effects, and usually the nuisances are caused by unlikely accidents rather than intentional

game designs. These nuisances might be compared with outdoor concerts and street festivals:

Disturbing the neighbourhood by playing loud music and causing traffic jam is better

addressed by politics than ethics. As public space is a shared environment, its use needs to be

governed contractually, and the political system exists for negotiating those contracts. As long

as pervasive gaming remains a niche activity, the nuisances it causes are likely to be too

trivial for the politics to address, so self­regulation is necessary within the field. To minimize

the risk of accidents, adapting the editor­in­chief model from media is probably a good idea in

major game projects. Appointing a person with extended responsibility and decisive power in

the project is a good way of minimizing the risk in the situations where the responsibility

would otherwise appear to disappear due to complexity of power structures. This would be a

natural role for the producer or lead designer of the game. In order for this system to really

work, the person must take a relatively public role transparent to players (and even outsiders

to some extent), and she needs to have the power to veto any elements of the game design. Many pervasive games and game­like activities should be perceived as art or political

commentary in addition to being seen as games, based on their motivation, purpose and

design. Especially the issues of public space and privacy have been commented in many

pervasive games. The artistic games perhaps transcend a need for clear, utilitarian valuation

and are subject to public artistic critique instead.

As we look at the fear caused by a nightly wanderer or the way student art is interpreted as

vandalism, this justification becomes more understandable: Perhaps we need, as a society, some boundary­breaking games allowing us to play in public spaces, meet the most unlikely

of people and perhaps give some candy to strangers. Unaware participation has a strong

potential to be a powerful solution instead of being a problem, even though we have mostly

featured problematic scenarios in this paper.

6 Acknowledgements

We want to thank the Prosopopeia discussants for commenting the paper, as well as the staff

of Gotland University and the organizers of Vem gråter for allowing us to study the game

afterwards. Of the many people providing good feedback to this report, we want to especially

thank Staffan Björk, Alison Harvey, Jussi Holopainen, Frank Lantz, Ari­Pekka Lappi and

Steffen P. Walz for comments.

7 References

Ackerman, M., Darell, T., and Weitzner, D. J.: Privacy in context. Human­Computer

Interaction, 16(2­4), 167­176 (2001). Allen, A.: Constitutional Law and Privacy. In A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal

Theory, ed. Patterson, D. Oxford, Blackwell (1996). Beauchamp, T.: Childress, F.: Principles of biomedical ethics. New York, Oxford University

Press (2001). Bentham, J.: An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. London, Methuen

(1982). Callahan, D.: Principlism and Communitarianism. In Journal of Medical Ethics, 29 (5), 287­

291 (2003).

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Ellis, A.: Offence and the Liberal Conception of the Law. In Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 13, No 1. (Winter, 1984). Feinberg, J.: Sua Culpa. In Ethical Issues in the Use of Computers, eds. D.G. Johnson and J. Snapper. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth (1985). Feinberg, J.: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law 4: Harmless Wrongdoing. New York, Oxford University Press (1988). Friedman, B.: Human Values and the design of Computer Technology.Center for the Study of

Language and Information (2004). Grudin J.: Desituating Action: Digital Representation of Context. Human­Computer

Interaction, 16(2­4), 269­286 (2001). Herrera, C.: Ethics, Deception and “Those Milgram Experiments”. In Journal of Applied

Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2001). Hielscher, J. & Heitlager, J.: Wanderer – Location Independent GPS Game. PerGames

seminar (2006). In

http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/pergames2006/final/PG_Hielscher_Wanderer.pdf

Huizinga, J.: Homo Ludens. A Study of Play Element in Culture. Boston, Beacon Press,

(1938/1955). Jonsen, A., Toulmin S.: The abuse of casuistry : a history of moral reasoning. Berkeley, University of California Press (1988). Jonsson, S., Montola, M., Waern, A. & Ericsson, M.: Prosopopeia: Experiences from a

Pervasive Larp. Proceedings DVD of ACM SIGCHI ACE 2006 conference, June 14.­ 16. West Hollywood, ACM (2006). Kant, I.: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, Cambridgre University Press

(1998). Lyons, D.: Forms and Limits of Utilitarism. Oxford, Clarendon (1965). McGonigal, J.: ‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play. DAC 2003

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McGonigal, J.: A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play. Level Up.

Proceedings of DiGRA conference. (2003b). McGonigal, J.: The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real­World Mission Based Gaming.

Forthcoming in Harrigan, P. & Wardrip­Fruin, N.: Second Person. MIT Press (2006). McGonigal, J.: Supergaming: Ubiquitous Play and Performance for Massively Scaled

Community. Modern Drama 48:3 (2005). Milgram, S.: Behavioral study of obedience. In Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67(4), 371­378 (1963). Milgram, S.: Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind. In American

Psychologist, Vol. 19, 848­852 (1964). Mill, J. S.: Utilitarianism. Buffalo, N.Y., Prometheus Books (1987). Montola, M.: Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle: Defining Pervasive Games. In

proceedings of DAC 2005 conference, December 1.­3, IT University of Copenhagen.

(2005). Montola, M. & Jonsson, S.: Prosopopeia. Playing on the Edge of Reality. In: Frizon, T. &

Wrigstad, T. (eds.): Role, Play, Art. Collected Experiences of Role­Playing 85­99.

Stockholm, Föreningen Knutpunkt (2006). Montola, M., Jäppinen, A., Lahti, J., Lankoski, P., Waern, A. & Holopainen, J. Deliverable

D5.4: Pervasive Games Design and Evaluation Guidelines for IPerG Phase Two. (2006). Montola, M. & Waern, A.: Participant Roles in Socially Expanded Games. In: Strang, T., Cahill, V. & Quigley, A. (eds.): Pervasive 2006 Workshop Proceedings 165­173.

PerGames 2006, May 7.­10., University College Dublin (2006a).

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Montola, M. & Waern, A.: Ethical and Practical Look at Unaware Game Participation. In

Santorineos, Manthos (ed.) (2006): Gaming Realities. A Challenge for Digital Culture

185­193. Mediaterra 2006 Festival, October 6.­8, Athens. Fournos Centre for the Digital

Culture (2006b). Montola, M., Waern, A. & Nieuwdorp, E.: IPerG deliverable D5.3B: The Domain of

Pervasive Gaming. Available in http://www.pervasive­gaming.org (2006). Palen, L., and Dourish, P.: Unpacking “Privacy” for a Networked World. In proceedings of

the Conference for Human Factors in Computing Systems (2003). Rawls, J.: A theory of justice. Oxford, Oxford University Press (1980). Talvitie, D.: A Manual for Urban Live­Action Roleplaying. 0.3 beta. In

http://users.utu.fi/aletal/roolipelaaja/citygamer (ref. 9th of June 2006). Vandeveer, D.: Coercive Restraint of Offensive Actions. In Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol 8, No 2. (1979). Zevenbergen, J. European Privacy Law and its Effect on Location Information. Location

Privacy Workshop, Individual Autonomy as a Driver of Design, Schoodic Peninsula,

Acadia National Park, Maine. August 5­7 (2004).

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/postmessageRelay?parent=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com#rpctoken=81918506&forcesecure=1https://clients6.google.com/static/proxy.html?jsh=m%3B%2F_%2Fscs%2Fapps-static%2F_%2Fjs%2Fk%3Doz.gapi.en.zEYBIe7cKms.O%2Fm%3D__features__%2Fam%3DAQ%2Frt%3Dj%2Fd%3D1%2Ft%3Dzcms%2Frs%3DAGLTcCMZnNzzA4VRFnXhSuLWus4XWHpxVA#parent=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com&rpctoken=1188909864https://content.googleapis.com/static/proxy.html?jsh=m%3B%2F_%2Fscs%2Fapps-static%2F_%2Fjs%2Fk%3Doz.gapi.en.zEYBIe7cKms.O%2Fm%3D__features__%2Fam%3DAQ%2Frt%3Dj%2Fd%3D1%2Ft%3Dzcms%2Frs%3DAGLTcCMZnNzzA4VRFnXhSuLWus4XWHpxVA#parent=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com&rpctoken=80863544

Displaying SICS Pervasive Game D5.5-Ethics.pdf.

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EUCACH Director Magnus Olsson: Dr. Rauni Kilde radiated…

Posted by Magnus Olsson on February 23, 2015
Posted in: Mind Control, Scientists Warns. Tagged: dew, directed energy weapon, dr rauni kilde, eu, eucach, frequency, magnus olsson, medical, mind control europe, morphine, nsa, radiated, rauni kilde, sweden, Transhumanism. 1 Comment

EUCACH Director: Dr. Rauni Kilde radiated for four days with DEW. Remotely assassinated by NSA?

EUCACH Director: Dr. Rauni Kilde radiated for four days with DEW. Remotely assassinated by NSA?

By Alfred Lambremont Webre

WATCH ON YOU TUBE

VANCOUVER, BC – Magnus Olsson, director of the European Coalition against Covert Harassment (EUCACH.ORG), revealed today in a NewsInsideOut.com interview that EUCACH Board of Directors member, former Chief Medical Officer of Finland and author Rauni Kilde MD was radiated by remote frequency, directed energy weapons (DEW) for four days shortly before her suspicious death on Feb. 8, 2015.

Rauni Kilde

Dr. Rauni Kilde

In a weakened condition after the remote frequency weapons assault, Dr. Kilde called for an ambulance, was refused admittance to the hospital of her choice, and then taken to a hospital where the admitting physician prescribed her two heavy doses of morphine after Dr. Kilde told the physician she was allergic to morphine.

Within days, Dr. Rauni Kilde was dead, probably assassinated.

Did the NSA assassinate Dr. Rauni Kilde?

In an Oct. 30, 2014 interview Melanie Vritschan, public relations director of EUCACH, stated, “We have evidence now that NSA is behind the Transhumanist Agenda to implant and robotize humanity.” Ms. Vritschan was referring to the overall control of the advanced remote directed energy weapons, and remote neural control weapons of the category that apparently may have assassinated Dr. Rauni Kilde.

Motive: Dr. Rauni Kilde’s powerful connections in EU Commission and EU Parliament and Her new Book

EUCACH director Magnus Olsson indicated that Dr. Kilde was active in making public the secret weapons and networks of the Transhumanist Agenda to her powerful connections in the EU Parliament and the EU Commission, part of the effectiveness she enjoyed as a former Cabinet level Chief Medical officer of Finland. According to Mr. Olsson, Dr. Kilde had recently stated that she completed a series of particularly effective meetings with officials in the EU on measures to control remote neural and energy weapons for robotizing and mind controlling humans.

In addition, there is speculation that her forthcoming new book may also have been a motive for the apparent assassination. Dr. Kilde had spoken widely of her forthcoming new book exposing the secret weapons and plans to neutrally control humanity. Magnus Olsson indicated that EUCACH.ORG is now talking steps to save Dr. Kilde’s book and continue with publication.

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Edward Snowden on the most shocking way the NSA spies on people 2014

Posted by Magnus Olsson on December 12, 2014
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Mind Control. Tagged: brain, brain activity, brain computer interface, brainchip, darpa, edward snowden, electromagnetic field, environment, medicine, nanotechnology, SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY. 8 Comments

Edward Snowden on the most shocking way the NSA spies on people 2014

Brain control

The best part from the NBC special “In the Mind of Edward Snowden”. Aired May 2014. He is referring to “Remote neural monitoring” (using technology to intercept the Scalar waves emanating from a person’s head, to listen to their thoughts and see what they see. Also, talking inside a person’s head using a method called “voice to skull” or synthetic telepathy.

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Magnus Olsson: Transhumanist Agenda are mind-stealers! Brussels conference to feature NSA whistleblower William Binney

Posted by Magnus Olsson on October 9, 2014
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Mind Control. Tagged: artificial intelligence, covert harassment, eucach, Haarp, magnus olsson, Military, nano brain, nanobots, nsa, SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY. 3 Comments

VIDEO – Magnus Olsson: Transhumanist Agenda are mind-stealers! Brussels conference to feature NSA whistleblower William Binney

mind

VIDEO: Magnus Olsson: Transhumanist Agenda are mind-stealers! Brussels conference to feature NSA whistleblower William Binney

WATCH ON YOU TUBE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYIej-sHhS4&feature=youtu.be

VANCOUVER, BC – In this ExopoliticsTV interview with Alfred Lambremont Webre, EUCACH.org founder and director Magnus Olsson gives an update on significant aspects of the Transhumanist Agenda, which he describes as “mind-stealers”.

Magnus Olsson estimates that already several million persons in Europe are actively “chipped and online” with nano-neurobots in their brains inhaled from chemtrails and now entrained to super-computers and HAARP. Approximately 80% of humanity has inactive nano-neurobots in their brains inhaled from chemtrails that can be activated and entrained to super-computers and HAARP in the covert program to “robotize” humans known as the Transhumanist Agenda.

Brain

Covert Harassment Conference 2014 with NSA Whistleblower William Binney

Magnus Olsson announces a major international conference exposing the Transhumanist Agenda to be held in Brussels on Nov 20, 2014, featuring NSA whistleblower William Binney. William Binney is a 30 year NSA veteran who resigned in Oct. 2001 because of the flagrant constitutional violations NSA was engaging in.

Other speakers include:

-Magnus Olsson – Director of EUCACH – European Coalition Against Covert Harassment

-Peter Mooring – Founder of STOPEG Foundation – STOP Electronic weapons and Gang stalking

– Dr. Henning Witte – Founder of White TV, Sweden’s first uncontrolled medium

– Dr. Rauni Kilde – Medical specialist and advisor

– Mojmír Babáček – Writer, Czech Republic

– Alfred Lambremont Webre, MEd, JD – Active with human rights and social justice

Information on the Conference can be accessed at:

http://covertharassmentconference.com/

Videos of the presentations will be available for those who cannot attend the conference.

References:

Covert Harassment Conference 2014 with NSA Whistleblower William Binney http://covertharassmentconference.com/

EUCACH.ORG

www.eucach.org

www.mind-computer.com

www.nanobrainimplant.com

www.mindcontrol.se

VIDEO – Magnus Olsson: Transhumanist Agenda are mind-stealers! Brussels conference to feature NSA whistleblower William Binney

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Thought Police “1984”

Posted by Magnus Olsson on June 26, 2014
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Mind Control. Tagged: a.i, AI program, artificial intelligence, bio brain implant, computer brain implant, darpa, edward snowden, george orwell, IARPA, mind control, nsa, the thought police, USA. Leave a comment

The Thought Police “1984”

NSA Building Big Brother “Pre-Crime” Artificial Intelligence Program

1984

NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden’s statements have been verified. Reporter Glenn Greenwald has promised numerous additional disclosures from Snowden.

What’s next?

We reported in 2008:

A new article by investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham reveals, a governmental unit operating in secret and with no oversight whatsoever is gathering massive amounts of data on every American and running artificial intelligence software to predict each American’s behavior, including “what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help”.

The same governmental unit is responsible for suspending the Constitution and implementing martial law in the event that anything is deemed by the White House in its sole discretion to constitute a threat to the United States. (this is formally known as implementing “Continuity of Government” plans).

brain index

As Ketcham’s article makes clear, these same folks and their predecessors have been been busy dreaming up plans to imprison countless “trouble-making” Americans without trial in case of any real or imagined emergency. [Background here.] What kind of Americans? Ketcham describes it this way:

“Dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.”

Do we want the same small group of folks who have the power to suspend the Constitution, implement martial law, and imprison normal citizens to also be gathering information on all Americans and running AI programs to be able to predict where American citizens will go for help and what they will do in case of an emergency? Don’t we want the government to — um, I don’t know — help us in case of an emergency?

thought police

Bear in mind that the Pentagon is also running an AI program to see how people will react to propaganda and to government-inflicted terror. The program is called Sentient World Simulation:

“U.S defense, intel and homeland security officials are constructing a parallel world, on a computer, which the agencies will use to test propaganda messages and military strategies.Called the Sentient World Simulation, the program uses AI routines based upon the psychological theories of Marty Seligman, among others. (Seligman introduced the theory of ‘learned helplessness’ in the 1960s, after shocking beagles until they cowered, urinating, on the bottom of their cages.)

Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

The sim will feature an AR avatar for each person in the real world, based upon data collected about us from government records and the internet.”

mind police

The continuity of government folks’ AI program and the Pentagon’s AI program may or may not be linked, but they both indicate massive spying and artificial intelligence in order to manipulate the American public, to concentrate power, to take away the liberties and freedoms of average Americans, and — worst of all — to induce chaos in order to achieve these ends.

PBS Nova reported in 2009:

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

mind police

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.

Known as Aquaint, which stands for “Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence” [which is run by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)], part of the new M Square Research Park in College Park, Maryland. A mammoth two million-square-foot, 128-acre complex, it is operated in collaboration with the University of Maryland. “Their budget is classified, but I understand it’s very well funded,” said Brian Darmody, the University of Maryland’s assistant vice president of research and economic development, referring to IARPA. “They’ll be in their own building here, and they’re going to grow. Their mission is expanding.”

***

In a 2004 pilot project, a mass of data was gathered from news stories taken from the New York Times, the AP news wire, and the English portion of the Chinese Xinhua news wire covering 1998 to 2000. Then, 13 U.S. military intelligence analysts searched the data and came up with a number of scenarios based on the material. Finally, using those scenarios, an NSA analyst developed 50 topics, and in each of those topics created a series of questions for Aquaint’s computerized brain to answer. “Will the Japanese use force to defend the Senkakus?” was one. “What types of disputes or conflict between the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] and Hong Kong residents have been reported?” was another. And “Who were the participants in this spy ring, and how are they related to each other?” was a third. Since then, the NSA has attempted to build both on the complexity of the system—more essay-like answers rather than yes or no—and on attacking greater volumes of data.

mind police

“The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering complex questions,” said a former Aquaint researcher. “Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We are building HAL.” A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her Ph.D. from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for several years but eventually left due to moral concerns. “The system can answer the question, ‘What does X think about Y?’” she said. “Working for the government is great, but I don’t like looking into other people’s secrets.

A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex questions such as “What were the major issues in the last 10 presidential elections?” would be very useful for the public. But that same capability in the hands of an agency like the NSA—absolutely secret, often above the law, resistant to oversight, and with access to petabytes of private information about Americans—could be a privacy and civil liberties nightmare. “We must not forget that the ultimate goal is to transfer research results into operational use,” said Aquaint project leader John Prange, in charge of information exploitation for IARPA.

mind police

Once up and running, the database of old newspapers could quickly be expanded to include an inland sea of personal information scooped up by the agency’s warrantless data suction hoses. Unregulated, they could ask it to determine which Americans might likely pose a security risk—or have sympathies toward a particular cause, such as the antiwar movement, as was done during the 1960s and 1970s. The Aquaint robospy might then base its decision on the type of books a person purchased online, or chat room talk, or websites visited—or a similar combination of data. Such a system would have an enormous chilling effect on everyone’s everyday activities—what will the Aquaint computer think if I buy this book, or go to that website, or make this comment? Will I be suspected of being a terrorist or a spy or a subversive?

World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein reported earlier this month:

In February, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Massachusetts-based multinational corporation, Raytheon – the world’s fifth largest defense contractor – had developed a “Google for Spies” operation.

Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had “secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites” like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.

Raytheon told the Herald it has not sold RIOT to any clients but admitted that, in 2010, it had shared the program’s software technology with the U.S. government as part of a “joint research and development effort … to help build a national security system capable of analyzing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.”

In April, RIOT was reportedly showcased at a U.S. government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category “big data – analytics, algorithms.”

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, argued … that among the many problems with government large-scale analytics of social network information “is the prospect that government agencies will blunderingly use these techniques to tag, target and watchlist people coughed up by programs such as RIOT, or to target them for further invasions of privacy based on incorrect inferences.”

“The chilling effects of such activities,” he concluded, “while perhaps gradual, would be tremendous.”

Ginger McCall, attorney and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Open Government program, told NBC in February, “This sort of software allows the government to surveil everyone.

“It scoops up a bunch of information about totally innocent people. There seems to be no legitimate reason to get this, other than that they can.”

As for RIOT’s ability to help catch terrorists, McCall called it “a lot of white noise.” [True … Big data doesn’t work to keep us safe.]

The London Guardian further obtained a four-minute video that shows how the RIOT software uses photographs on social networks. The images, sometimes containing latitude and longitude details, are “automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called ‘exif header data.’

RIOT pulls out this information, analyzing not only the photographs posted by individuals, but also the location where these images were taken,” the Guardian reported.
Such sweeping data collection and analysis to predict future activity may further explain some of what the government is doing with the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. [Background here.]

***

“In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are “nodes,” and relationships and interactions form the “links” binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent,” reported the Times. [Background here.]

In February 2006, more than a year after Obama was sworn as a U.S. senator, it was revealed the “supposedly defunct” Total Information Awareness data-mining and profiling program had been acquired by the NSA.

The Total Information Awareness program was first announced in 2002 as an early effort to mine large volumes of data for hidden connections.

Aaron Klein reported last week that Snowden might have worked at the NSA’s artificial intelligence unit at the University of Maryland:

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, told the London Guardian newspaper that he previously worked as a security guard for what the publication carefully described as “one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland.”

***

Brian Ullmann, the university’s assistant vice president for marketing and communications, was asked for comment. He would not address the query, posed twice to his department by KleinOnline, about whether the NSA operates covert facilities in conjunction with the university.

Ullmann’s only comment was to affirm that Snowden was employed as a security guard at the university’s Center for the Advanced Study of Languages in 2005.

Original:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-next-nsa-spying-shoe-to-drop-pre-crime-artificial-intelligence/5339360

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