Clearly QNTMFSLC (Quantum of Solace without the vowels) is an attempt to come up with a game which has a completely unpronouncable name, which having tried to tell people the name is something which worked. I was asked by Alex Fleetwood and Holly Gramazio of the lovely Hide and Seek to come up with an idea for a game for their Bond, James Bond sandpit. I’d been thinking about the Twitter API and looking at it as a message bus for a game for a while (among other less frivalous uses) and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Direct messages have always seemed to me like a hushed top secret conversation in a private room and seemed like the perfect opportunity for an espionage game.
Alex, Holly and I felt the idea had potential and was in need of some story and also of some better copy and character writing than a techie could produce, so I called former colleague David Varela to collaborate on the game. David and I both have “form” in using twitter in games and story telling, but this time we wanted to make it totally the way the game was played and make it bidirectional.
We wanted the game to be mission based, with some missions being ones where you had to read the instructions carefully as you could fail or be captured. Jeopardy is much underused in ARGs and pervasive games. The first running of the game was to be a prototype for a much longer and bigger version of the game to be played in the main sandpit of the year at the start of August at the Royal Festival Hall. In that one we’ll be using actors to play some of the other characters in the film who can help, hinder or capture the players, all of who will be on twitter weaving a deep web of story and game.
The game is designed to make Twitter on your phone the game controller. In keeping with games such as our earlier And I Saw.. I wanted the game to have a really simple and natural registration process that was both of the game and of the medium. So you get into the game by following Barbara Mawdsley, the name given by the screenwriters to M as played by Judy Dench but never uttered on screen (obviously this again adds to the mystery). M then follows you back and starts sending you direct messages with missions in them. You complete the missions by sending direct messages back to M. You can obviously ask M for hints or other missions by open replies or direct messages.
The tech for the game is relatively simple, although our setup at the BFI looked quite hi tech… both David and I have clearly wanted to be Bond villains surrounded by screens (white cat optional). The screens showed game status, the instructions and back story. This allowed David and I to puppetmaster the game effectively from the tools.
There are three main services (all written using AppEngine’s new cron jobs for scheduled services). We have one service which looks for new followers and then follows them back and DM’s them. A second service then sends out missions, while a third one looks for direct messages and sees if they match any current mission solutions and if it can it automatically marks them and sends them a new mission. The fourth bit of tech is a “Tweetdeck” for the game built in JQuery which allows us to see the game state, mark missions as failed or completed that the automated methods can’t and look out for players in need of help. Part of the game is to use your phone’s camera to send back photos for some missions so obviously we need to mark those manually. The final part of the game was to find a villain, the “Bonds” who’d completed the most missions got a good description, those who had not done so well got very sketchy ones.
Everytime a mission is given, failed or completed a message is posted to the qntmfslc twitter account which becomes a game stream. A hacked up copy of Twistori desktop was used to surface the game stream on a giant projection in the BFI.
We were really pleased with how well the game and tech worked (especially considering the short turnaround). We got really good feedback from players and are really looking forward to playing again. I’ve always wanted to say this. James Bond (you) will return in QNTMFSLC on August 1st 2009.
