The Outer Limits
Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
There is another world that exists just behind our own, invisible unless you know how to look. This promise is right at the heart of spy fiction, and indeed of both varieties of AR games, those for which the ‘A’ stands for ‘augmented’ and also ‘alternate’. If you imagine a Venn diagram of all three, at the centre is where you’ll find 007: Shadow Of Spectre, the latest addition to HiddenCity’s roster of what it calls ‘realworld adventure games’.
Which is a longwinded way of explaining why I’m spending my Saturday afternoon stood on a windblown London street, eyeballing a stranger. Wearing a trilby and raincoat with the collar turned up, talking loudly into his phone while rocking a wheeled flight case back and forth, this man could not more obviously be a stooge. And so I convince my teammate to linger at the edge of earshot, waiting for the trigger phrase that will surely get him to spill the contents of that case. Reader: he is not part of the game. We’ve just spent the past five minutes eavesdropping on a total innocent.
In my defence, the prior hour has worked hard to erode the boundaries between reality and fiction. Things begin simply enough, with treasure-hunt-style clues sent via WhatsApp. Those lead to a phone box by the Thames, one of those red K2 numbers I’d long assumed had been disconnected, left in place only so that Hollywood films have something to put in their establishing shots. Wrong again. The phone inside starts ringing, a prerecorded voice on the other end of the line delivering our next lead.
And so to a pub around the corner where, in between pouring pints of Guinness for the afternoon rugby crowd, the barman hands over a weighty steel briefcase. From there to the library of a swanky hotel and, nestled among the biographies of Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, a coffee-table hardback that, when opened, reveals a hole cut into its pages. It’s tantalising to imagine a hotel guest idly picking this book off the shelf and discovering the ream of MI6 dossiers within, outlining a mind-control conspiracy.
These feelies, as I can’t help but think of them (I’m just old enough to remember the days when physical props shared box space with floppy disks), are an example of HiddenCity’s lovely production values. But even more than the thermochromic ink and rented phone boxes, the game’s greatest special effect is the one it gets for free: the city of London. The architecture, of course – all these familiar landmarks I’ve long learned to look past, seen afresh as they’re scoured for potential clues. But perhaps even more valuable are the layers of mental associations, built up over years of living here, and centuries of culture before that.
London is the natural home of spy stories, after all, the two so entangled that this isn’t even the first time I’ve rushed around the capital doing pretend espionage. The sadly defunct Fire Hazard Games used to run Undercover, a competitive espionage game in the West End in which your duo was tasked with secreting intel at makeshift dead drops, intercepting those of other players and evading hunters in possession of your photo. A little like the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer mode, then – with the vital difference that there you couldn’t shave off your beard in a café bathroom to avoid detection.
That wasn’t my team’s doing, by the way, but it lingers in the memory as the most incredible bit of commitment to meaningless victory I’ve ever witnessed. The peculiar mania of competition taking hold, perhaps. But I like to think it’s a result of brains primed to expect these kinds of stories in these kinds of places – the same reason that the only AR game (of the ‘augmented’ variety) to ever make any real impact is Pokémon Go. The core fantasy of its source material is a recognisable world into which these creatures are introduced, and so finding them in parks and woodlands and outside the chemist’s feels delightfully natural.
This cuts both ways, of course: playing games in these everyday spaces can leave an imprint on them. That one street we abandoned a party to sprint down, chasing an Electabuzz in the early days of Go. The pub where a member of bar staff, wheezing with laughter, caught me trying to enter passcodes into what I believed to be cutting-edge spy tech but was in fact part of their till system. These new layers added to my private map of the world, invisible to everyone else but undeniably there, even without a phone’s eye. Reality, well and truly augmented.
More than the thermochromic ink and phone boxes, the game’s greatest special effect is the one it gets for free: London