SuperGaming: Ubiquitous Play and Performance for Massively Scaled Community

The [digital] utopian communitas exists as an imagined community, as the Mystical Body. Real community exists, on the contrary, where people throw their lot together and stand in face-to-face ethical proximity.

Michael Heim 38

A design imperative for social software engineers, game developers, network designers and all the other architects of digital community: more, more, more.

Why more?

"The more the better" (Andrew Fluegelman, founding member of the 1970s New Games Movement, on the optimal number of players for their patently oversized and intensely physical games [141]). Players experience phenomenological pleasure in being part of a much larger, co-present whole. "More is different" (P.W. Anderson, physicist, on the emergence of unpredictable atomic interaction in complex particle systems [373]). Unexpected things happen when you scale up.

"More is needed" (Pat Miller, computer scientist, on the massive number of Central Processing Units required to construct a "do-it-yourself" supercomputer [2]). To become exponentially more powerful, to pass the coveted threshold to "super," you need to connect as many individual parts as possible. These three tenets comprise the more, more, massively more connectivity I dream of for network communities in today's new-media landscape. Massively more is a vision of digital social networks designed and deployed to produce more pleasure, more emergence, and more superpower, through community formation on a massive scale.

This vision flies in the face of one of social software's favorite conventional wisdoms: digital communities don't scale. Current social-network theory holds that the twin hallmarks of online community – "mutuality," or the opportunity for two-way communication, and "density," or the existence of enough internal connections that a majority of members know and interact with each other – are increasingly difficult to maintain past a certain growth point. The generally accepted threshold at which community decline begins is 150 members, and beyond 10,000 members is considered by many online community experts to be absolutely untenable.¹ But in 2003 and 2004, a single city block in downtown San Francisco served as the staging area for a series of four social-network scaling experiments, in which spectacularly co-present communities of hundreds and even thousands of members were created via pervasive digital platforms. Together, I believe these playful and theatrical experiments show social networks to be significantly more scalable than was previously thought to be possible or, in some cases, desirable. Indeed, contemporary experiments in and around the emerging culture of pervasive gaming chart the course of the future of collective engagement.

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First, the four experiments:

12 June 2003, San Francisco – Over 450 people, most of whom have never previously met or communicated with one another, take over a Market Street neighborhood for three hours, adopting superhero personas and racing to complete a series of public adventure missions. They download site-specific Go Game challenges onto their mobile phones and roam the streets, assembling ad-hoc superhero costumes, staging provocative digital photographs and videos, and performing their downloaded stunts with the help of recruited passersby. The players receive additional live direction from two-dozen secret agents (actors) planted in plazas, cafes, banks, offices and back alleys. The producers call the Go Game an "urban superhero adventure." They call this particular event "a Go Game of massive proportions" (Fraser and Kelly).

16 July 2003, San Francisco – Over three-hundred people, most of whom have never previously met or communicated with one another, occupy the pedestrian crosswalk at Market Street and 4th for ten minutes, spinning back and forth like whirling dervishes every time the traffic signal flashes "Walk." Although the spectacle has been designed to appear spontaneous, its participants actually have been carefully organized and directed through a week's worth of e-mails, text messages, listservs, and other forms of digital word-ofmouth. Digital photos and videos taken by participants in Whirling Dervishes find their way onto over five-thousand Web sites, the front page of the San Francisco...