In 2005, Ian Kizu-Blair, Sam Lavigne, and Sean Mahan created SFZero: a “collaborative production game” or alternate reality game (ARG), that sets out to take game players from being passive consumers behind a screen to interacting with the real world and with each other. SFZero is currently played in at least 30 cities around the world, from Minneapolis to Baghdad.

They’ve collaborated with Jane McGonigal on Flashback!, an educational kids TV show for PBS, been written up in the San Francisco Chronicle, spoken and hosted events at Institute for the Future, and created Ghosts of a Chance, a game for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where gameplay involves creating art objects and mailing them to the museum for an exhibition/event.

What inspired SF0? Why did you first start the game and what are some of your guiding principles in doing so?
I first heard about alternate reality gaming when I read an article by Jane McGonigal about Microsoft’s “Beast” game that was made for as the movie A.I. I had a really visceral reaction that there were these new kinds of games coming into existence being played in the real world that were using new technologies to make games that straddled the line between reality and “fiction.” At the time I thought that Microsoft was developing these games to test the future of work or decentralized labor networks, like using unpaid labor for complex problems, like cracking the Enigma code. My reaction was that Microsoft was trying to engineer a new kind of Fordism, and trying to use these games to subjugate these workers to a new form of domination. Based on that reaction, I decided that a game had to be made that was free for everyone and that would free people from their current labor social relations.

The first game we did was based in Chicago, about the disappearance of an Art Institute student named Helen Chanam. There were fewer than 10 players, but we personally had such a powerful experience making it, that’s what we wanted to give to players, the experience that we had making that game.

After finishing work on that game and moving to San Francisco,  we knew that they wanted to make a game that many people could play and furthermore, that the players should make the game in large part, that it should liberate them from the existing social relations. By creating a character that is you but is not you, that you’re free to go beyond your own personal fears and anxieties, and social constraints, that would prevent you from doing the things you want to do. Not like going outside and running around naked, in a psychoanalytic sense, but the things that are freeing you from what you want to do, more in a Marxist sense, like living life to the fullest.

You’ve described SF0 before as a “collaborative production game”—what does that mean?
In many other games you’re passively consuming the content from the game—for example, video games are a lot like interactive movies. SF0 asks you to create the game itself, and within the game to create public installation art pieces. One such task is Things we bury for our friends, and one player buries something, and then we give another player instructions to find and dig up that object. Then they show what they did to by posting images to the SF0 website. That’s creating the game for someone else, the production aspect of the game. In order to play SF0 you have to be part of the SF0 community, it’s fundamental that the players create the game by creating the tasks that other players do. Almost all the tasks in the game are created by players, and then approved by Sam, Sean, or me.

Can you tell me more about SF0’s experience collaborating with the Smithsonian on a real world game, what were your expectations?

I was really surprised at how open the people at the Smithsonian, including the higher ups, were to doing something different they had never tried before. For example, they let us hide things in different places all over the museum and manipulate images on their website, even though there is a lot of crazy shit that goes into running a museum that I wasn’t aware of. They were really incredibly flexible in working with us.

Everyone has responded really positively to being part of a game in a museum. Kids were really driven to do it. We made it a lot harder than I think other people would have because we wanted it to be really difficult to finish. That turned out to be good because it took them three or four hours to complete all the tasks, there was a lot of content, and the game took them to all the different wings of the museum. Right now they’re running a repeatable instance of the game that classrooms can sign up for, so they have a game for them to play when they visit.

How do you see SF0 developing, what is the next phase of it?
At a certain point we started to look at SF0 as part of a greater narrative of real world games, just like video games when they started off, which were so primitive. Like SF0 is the most primitive form of real world game, and that we have to keep pushing forward.

A game like World of Warcraft didn’t just come out of a void, it’s part of a development cycle that started fifteen years ago, that includes Diablo, Diablo II, and then the Warcraft series of games, before WoW waseven a possible idea and before there was even such a thing as multi player online games.

When my parents moved, I found my old manual for Warcraft I from 1995 and started looking through it. And all this content in that manual that looks ridiculously quaint is in World of Warcraft in lush 3D color. But it’s all the same stuff—the characters, the motivational and character improvement cycle of the game, the backstory, the world that’s it’s set in.

Basically we’re going to take the idea from SF0 that the players make up the game tasks and extend that to create a system where the players really can make the entire game. We want to allow people to author their own real world games without our intervention, so they can make whatever they want.

What are some games or game-like things you like right now?
I’m playing World of Warcraft extremely slowly with my girlfriend. I don’t have TV, so we play for an hour at a time, as a mage and a shaman, We do our little missions together, twice a week. It’s nice that I’m able to play a video game with my girlfriend, and fun to make progress in it together and to teach her the rules.

What’s on your nightstand right now?
Actually I’ve been reading a really good book,The Man Without Qualities. [Musil] wrote it in the 30’s or 40’s but if you were reading it without knowing what time it’s from, the way that it describes the world and historical forces of change, like technology, social change it’s incredibly contemporary sounding.

Thanks Ian! You can participate in SF0’s latest event in San Francisco this Halloween.