## Description
_The A.I. Game_ refers to the viral marketing activities surrounding the
release of the Steven Spielberg movie _A.I.: Artificial Intelligence_. The
game is cross platform in combining websites, staged events in American cities
and other media such as telephone.
The game initially started with a strange credit sequence at the end of the
movie trailer that included “Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla”.
Googling for that information the player is shown a variety of sites dating
from the future year 2142. Each site in turn has additional puzzles to solve.
Each solved puzzle gives the player a tiny piece of information that helps
advance the story. The story revolves around the murder of Evan Chan a
fictional character in the game. In line with the film the main themes include
robots, AIs, slavery and a struggle for equal rights.
The game’s content was updated weekly in line with the advancing story up
until the release of the movie several months after the release of the
trailer. New sites would go up and old sites would go down or get hacked by
opposing factions.
The game is designed in a fashion that it is virtually impossible for a single
player to solve the game. It requires the forming of web communities to pool
gathered information in order to see the whole picture. Puzzles have players
read from literature, decipher enigma codes, translate from a dozen different
languages and dig in the source codes of various websites. There were even
real-world events in various major American cities where “anti-robot” rallies
were held by professional actors hired for the game. Aside from websites there
are also telephone numbers to be called for mysterious messages and emails and
faxes that can be received.