Why isn’t a there a spy game where we actually get to be a real spy rather than a hallway-roving kill machine? You know, where we actually have to talk to contacts and extract information and tap phones and piece together clues, a game full of exotic locales and deception and backstabbing and subplots? A game where a gun is used as often as a real spy would use it (that is, almost never)?

Where’s the game where we play a salty Southern lawyer who has to piece together evidence to exonerate a black man falsely accused of murder, breaking down witnesses and spotting inconsistencies in testimony?

Indeed, I was terribly disappointed with the Art Heist ARG because of this – I thought that I’d be having to employ art fraud skills, explore art history, read up on real art fraud and so on. This ARG is hugely successfully (but once again I didn’t have the time or inclination to keep up the effort to stay involved). But the lack of exploration of the themes really puts me off. I think that if I’m going to interact and be a sleuth of sorts, that I will have to know and do things that experts in the area being explored (art for example or murder) would do. It seems many games stop short of giving the interactor a ‘role’ or motivation and don’t persist the theme from there.

It does seem to be like the pressure to get the bottom of a mystery is at odds with bots not understanding or answering basic questions that are relevant to the game.

CHRISTY> Good. Do you think David is dead and not Jamie?
GRETA> oh poo. fing is Christy i was fibin wen i sed i wanted to chek yor membership detales. I need to ask yoo a favour.

The Starship Titanic bots dealt with this by being malfunctioning robots disconnected from the reality – and there was also no obvious murder mystery to ask about. I didn’t think that was wildly effective, but I think I prefer it to injecting misspellings and jargon and then just ignoring the jaw-dropping, relevant questions that people ask.