The Majestic Game, Interactive Media Environments, and a New Turing Test: Blurring the Boundaries Between Virtual and Real
Damian Ward Hey

There is something potentially more disturbing going on here than the participation in a murder mystery in which you get e-mailed by a simulated murderer or voice-mailed by a screaming, simulated soon-to-be victim. There is the looming threat of Baudrillardian hyperrealism.

Howard Rheingold comments that “hyper-realists see the use of communications technologies as a route to the total replacement of the natural world” and that:

The most radical of the hyper-realist political critics charge that the wonders of communications technology skillfully camouflage the disappearance and subtle replacement of true democracy — and everything else that used to be authentic, from nature to human relationships, — with a simulated, commercial version. …

Why torture people [political dissidents, or other ‘trouble-makers’] when you can get them to pay for access to electronic mind-control? (Rheingold, 2000, pp. 317-318)

The danger that alarmists fear is that the simulation will become socially and politically more “real” than real life situations whose contexts are buoyed by actual socially overdetermining economic, political, religious, etc., institutions. People will then begin reacting more en masse to the inconsequential world of simulation than to the real world. When this happens, the argument goes, one of two things, and possibly both, will occur: 1). The economy and socio-political structure of our society will collapse because people are producing in simulated situations rather than “actual” ones and/or 2) The wily hegemony of our society will further the narrative and blur the ability to distinguish between reality and simulation, whereby, as seen in the Rheingold passage, “electronic mind-control” will be exerted by the same hegemony over the hapless worker-inhabitants of simulated realms.

• Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association

Lance Strate, “Media Ecology as a Scholarly Activity” (President’s Address) … “The Majestic Game, Interactive Media Environments, and a New Turing Test: …
www.media-ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v3/index.html  

• Alternate Reality Games: Daily Narratives Turn Into Interactive …

The Game concerns the redemption of its main character, turning him into more of …. a test bed for experimenting and prototyping new ways to communicate, …
www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/12/22/alternate_reality_games_daily_narratives.htm