The buzz surrounding A.I. started long before it was a Steven Spielberg film. It started back in the 1980s when it was a Stanley Kubrick project, when fans began discussing -- through means more primitive than the Web -- what the famously hermetic director was up to.
The story was that Kubrick had planned to make the movie he called "Pinocchio" in the 1970s, but dropped it in response to the popularity of Star Wars. Then, more than a decade later, he started it up after being wowed by Jurassic Park's special effects.
Back then, this was the limit of what was known about Kubrick's plan for a movie based on artificial intelligence.
But since the early 1990s, on listservs and Usenet and on the Web, Kubrick diehards have been playing an educated guessing game about A.I., piecing together various nuggets of Kubrick miscellany to get an idea of what the director's first sci-fi effort since 2001 might be like. And in recent months, a younger, more Web-savvy set has been engaged in an elaborate interactive game that's actually a marketing effort for the movie.
Finally, this Friday, they'll all get to see the movie they've talked about so much.
"The big rumor was A.I.," said Brian Sieno, a fan who used to be an active Kubrick prognosticator in the early days of the alt.movies.kubrick newsgroup. "We'd been hearing about it for 20 years, and it was a big deal. After the years of watching Lucas and Spielberg movies, we thought, 'here's Kubrick come to show us how science-fiction is going to be done.'"
The Internet rumors abounded: One posited that the reason Kubrick was taking so long with the film was that he was secretly filming a kid over the course of his life in order to make the movie more realistic -- that one's false.
There were endless debates over the story, about how closely it would be related to the chief inspiration for the film, Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long."
"We'd heard about a test that Kubrick had asked (the effects company Industrial Light & Magic) to do, simulating New York City underwater," Sieno said. "We would have chopped off our left arm to have a chance to see the bloody thing."
And then, in March of 1999, Kubrick died suddenly at the age of 70, and many on Usenet wondered what would become of A.I.
"And boom, one day Spielberg announces that he's going to do it," Sieno said. "Now, this is one of the things I don't like about newsgroups -- there tends to be this snobby and arrogant attitude. People said, 'Oh, it's going to suck, it's going to be total Hollywood hack work.'" (Sieno put on a snooty nasal accent when he said this.)
Now, Spielberg's film may indeed be hack -- the critics so far have said it's middling -- but one thing's for sure: Its marketing effort -- which involves an interactive online game -- is as mysterious and brainy as some of Kubrick's best work.
The news of something freaky going on with A.I. websites was first reported a couple months ago by Harry Knowles, the proprietor of AintItCoolNews. He said that if you search in Google for one of the names listed in the credits on the movie poster -- "Jeanine Salla, Sentient Machine Therapist" -- you'll find a strange world of fake websites that hold clues to a murder mystery.
Within a few days of Knowles' report, many thousands of people had joined this game -- trying to solve both the murder mystery and the mystery of who was behind the mystery.
"I think there's a lot of people for whom problem solving is a thrill, not an annoyance," said Cabel Sasser, a programmer whose Cloudmakers site was one of the first devoted to the A.I. marketing game. "You started to see clues everywhere, and everyone who was into this game felt like they had solve it. One of the first things I did was set up the cloudmakers discussion list, and now it generates like tens of thousands of messages a week."
In time, it turned out that the game was actually being brought to people by some game designers at Microsoft; the company had partnered with Warner Brothers and Dreamworks to market the movie in an innovative way.
"The original concept was Jordan Weisman's, my co-producer," said Elan Lee, a designer at Microsoft. "He came to me and pitched this concept and I wrote it down and designed it, and we got the science fiction writer Sean Stewart to be the lead writer. We took it to Spielberg, and he absolutely loved it."
Lee added that the game's "basic idea is that when people interact with the Internet it involves a lot of searching for gems -- you're like an archeologist. This game floods the Net with a whole bunch of noise but also important gems. And it extends to as many forms of media as we know -- we've had live actors in bars across the U.S. interacting with players. We really try to blur the line between fiction and reality."
But Lee had never expected the game to receive as much attention as it has. "We got 25 million hits in the first day," he said, "so we had to work much harder on the puzzles. We had assigned a nine-month time on one of them. We said that nobody could ever find all the clues to solve it. But they solved it in about 20 minutes. Now we're working 18 hours a day to keep up with all these players."
Lee wouldn't say whether, with the movie's imminent release, the game is coming to an end. But he and Sasser did say that things are getting very very strange in this online labyrinth. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail Sasser sent Wired News:
"In fact, yesterday was one of the most amazing 'game days' we've had yet. Laia (one of the game's characters) had sent out an urgent e-mail, hinting that the 'Red King' character had been kidnapped, and it was up to us to help stop the kidnapping. Included in her e-mail was a scan of a "guest check" from a diner, that clearly revealed a phone number.
"After calling the phone number, everyone was in for an intense surprise -- a live human answered the phone, completely in-character, a game first. It was Mike Royal, ostensibly a security guard at the Statue of Liberty.... The rest of the day was spent valiantly talking this reluctant security guard to get involved in the situation and potentially save the Red King. Once they discovered that Mike played football in college, they started to use that to get on his 'good side.'
"It was social engineering at an unheard of level! A collective group of 6,000 people trying to spurn a hapless fellow into action. :)"
Microsoft's Lee said that these situations tickle his heart. "There's a huge amount of beauty in the relationship the game has with the players," he said. "And it's built quite a bit of mystique for the movie."
And mystique, remember, is what Kubrick had wanted all along.
