Download PDF

SFZero has many features which set it apart from other ARGs and large scale real-world games: player-generated tasks, a decidedly situationist bent, and a focus on collaborative production over hunting for clues. But the most interesting and subversive aspect of the game is the way it provides a framework for positive emergent narratives within a player’s everyday life. Rather than layering an alternate game world on top of the real world, and asking players to locate the intersections between the two, SFZero asks players to recontextualize the real world as a game world, where anything and everything may be pulled into play at will. This shift is subtle but far-reaching, and is the key enabling factor for the social and political goals of the organizers, providing a sandbox for experimentation with pervasive play through inducing a constant state of festivity which may be invoked at any time.

Identity Construction
Being essentially without a plot, the world of SFZero also lacks a traditional rabbit hole. While the point of entry to the game is most definitely the website, the point of entry into the game world is the process of character creation. This is the moment when a potential player becomes an actual player, and the world of the game becomes visible as a layer on reality. The website explains the way characters function in the game as follows:

“Your character looks exactly the same as you. Your character will have all the same skills and attributes as you, and even the same memories and feelings… most importantly, your character is able to do things that you may be unable or unwilling to do yourself. Your character doesn’t recognize the artificial boundaries that prevent non-players from doing what they want to do. Things like fear, lethargy and the police don’t deter your character from achieving his or her goals.”

The directive is clear: be yourself, but upgraded. In our world, you are a superhero version of yourself, and you’ll need that upgraded sense of adventure to move forward in the game. You are not a normal person in the throes of an fantastic situation, as with many ARGs; instead, you are an extraordinary person surrounded by mundanity, and part of the game is to transcend that.

In fact, that is the only game there is. On the homepage, the description of the game states that “players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score.” If the primary goal is to build a real-world character who is an exceptional version of oneself, then the easiest course of action will be to simply be exceptional.

This recalls recent comments made by Jane McGonigal in an interview with Gamasutra, in which she characterized the difference between celebrity culture based systems of identity construction such as MySpace as compared to ARGs. “It’s not about fifteen minutes of fame,” she says, “it’s that sense that you have some unknown, latent super power that could be called upon at any time, and only when the game asks for something that only you can do, do you realize what your super power is.” By providing a character who already possesses this sense of untapped power and potential whom is essentially the same as the player, SFZero encourages the creation of narratives which evoke this superhero mythology, both publicly within the game community and privately as players create and complete tasks.

Delimiting identity construction in this way clearly establishes the lens through which the game is played as something more akin to a perspective change than a new layer to reality. The perspective players are asked to adopt is one of truly pervasive play – anything and anyone is potentially part of the game. And, most significantly, the player is the ultimate authority on that boundary, drawing and re-drawing his own magic circle.

The Boundless Magic Circle
Traditionally, the magic circle is used to delimit the game world from the real world in order to mark the boundaries within which game rules and logic must apply, without allowing these constraints to affect non-game-related social activities. As a genre, ARGs’ primary differentiator has been to extend the boundaries of the magic circle in time and space, allowing the game world and the real world to overlap at unexpected points. These intersections, however, rarely appear when players are not seeking them out, and then only at points pre-determined by the puppet masters. This is partially why the genre as a whole trends toward mysteries: by making the search for these points part of the game, the designers turn the problem of discoverability into an asset.

SFZero takes the concept of a flexible magic circle one step further by placing control over its boundaries in the hands of each individual player. It properly describes itself as an “interface” – a different way to view and interact with the world – one controlled by the player, not by the architects of the game. This represents a profound shift from the traditional ARG framework, in which the game designers decide what real-world elements are part of the game, to one in which the players decide which real-world elements will be drawn inside.

This occurs in two ways in SFZero: through personal framing and through the creation of tasks. The first allows the player to draw his own boundaries as to how much of his life the game will recontextualize. The second allows players to define the game world for each other, challenging one another and expanding the magic circle as they see fit.

These two dynamics create a unique blend of what Henry Jenkins refers to as evocative spaces and emergent narratives. As discussed above, the setup for the game recalls superhero stories to bestow players with a sense of adventure and daring. By allowing and encouraging the magic circle to include a wide swath of everyday life, SFZero reprograms the players’ mundane world into a physical space which takes on characteristics of traditional superhero stories. This occurs merely by planting the idea and providing the framework.

The social interaction which underlies all of this should not be discounted. Without the constant reenforcement of the online community which similarly buys into these constructed narratives, an individual player would quickly begin to question the validity of their newly adopted viewpoint. This is why SFZero must be a game: by embedding their urban situationist philosophy into a framework of competitive social interactions, the designers have guaranteed that participants who engage with the ideas will be reinforced in their beliefs and challenged to explore them further. And through the creation of tasks and voting on proof, the players collectively create an emergent narrative that shapes the notion of what SFZero is and isn’t. Jenkins describes games with such narrative potential as being “not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself,” a happy result of participating in a game whose framework can grow to include anything; every problem becomes a challenge, every minor accomplishment a measurable victory. This extreme level of play permeating everyday life has, until recently, been relegated to the structured time and place of festival.

Pervasive Festivity
So the benefit of living within SFZero’s boundless magic circle is clear: the constant construction of narratives in which the players are mightily powerful versions of themselves boosts self esteem and encourages play and experimentation. Along with a strong appeal to immersion in this world – the site’s clever legal disclaimer states that “any material displayed as part of the Game should be considered fictive until and unless proven otherwise,” – SFZero is as much akin to a state of permanent festivity as it is to pervasive gaming.

Festivals have long served an important social function by allowing public revelry and reversal of power dynamics in order to maintain order in non-festival times. In the twentieth century, however, we have seen an increasing number of permanent and semi-permanent festivals – spaces in which public play is readily encouraged and those who may retain power elsewhere are unwelcome. Extreme (and vastly different) examples of this are places like Las Vegas and San Francisco, but this is occurring on the neighborhood level in many major cities.

By designing a game with a flexible magic circle and then handing control of it over to the players, the designers of SFZero have created a system in which anyone can filter their everyday experience through the lens of festival and play. The online community aspects of the game underline this accessibility: while real world collaboration is encouraged, socializing with other players online is required. Scoring points above the basic levels requires earning votes from other players for a job well done, a group dynamic that encourages the constant pushing of one’s own boundaries in order to level up. Through the structure of the game and the socialization of the online community, acts of play that were once relegated to specific times and spaces become accessible to previously unreachable participants and draws them into the emerging narrative.

In much the same way that the internet is bringing many facets of urban life to those living outside the dense population of the city, SFZero brings festival and public play to those who are not accustomed to seeing large-scale videogames played on their streets. And the subversive nature of pervasive festivity should not be discounted; it is a highly political statement to claim not just some public spaces in some cities for play, but all public spaces.

Conclusion
SFZero bills itself as a “Collaborative Production Game” and “an interface” for a city, both of which it certainly is, but it could also be construed just as much as a philosophy or a political movement. Though it has a relatively small number of players, the designers have created an innovative framework for encouraging public play and festivity and for the expansion of social activity outside traditional capitalistic structures. And while viewing everyday life as one large scale game might threaten existing power structures, as long as the players maintain control over the scope of the magic circle and their own emerging narratives, it will remain strictly populist, and subject to the whims and goals of the participants.