In response to my musing below on the possibility of a War of the Worlds style form-hopping story/game, Jesse Walker and Dave Tepper inform me that it’s pretty much already been done. Microsoft and the producers of the movie A.I. put together an elaborate murder mystery, dubbed “The Beast,” which played out on a series of websites from the future world of the movie players could discover. The game involved not just the websites (some of them hidden by “hackers” in the source code of other game sites), but faxes, emails, and phonecalls from the characters, and even a series of realspace events: rallies for an anti-A.I. militant group. The game websites, and the story of the mystery’s solution, are archived at the website of Cloudmakers, the collective which did the solving. Don’t click if you’re busy. I spent a couple of hours digging through all the elaborate game sites, playing some of the puzzles, and reading about the game’s progress.