I think I may have stumbled across a new term – Keyhole Game.

I found Skyrates via Chris Dahlen’s Save the Robot weblog, but when I searched for it the next day I stumbled upon the researchers and designers behind it. Their description of the game design intrigued me, especially their use of this new term.

In a keyhole game both the world and the players understanding of it can be quite complex, but the interaction is rather narrow. An example of this would be the stock market, which is incredibly complicated, but your choices are buying and selling (generally speaking).

Using the term somewhat like keyhole surgery (a link not for the squeamish), it refers to a tiny entry point into a much larger context.

The game plays in real time as you trade goods between islands with a rickety airplane that is often attacked by ‘sky+pirates=skyrates’. It takes about an hour and a half to fly from one island to the other and you can basically ignore the game in between, checking in a few times a day to make trades and cue up missions. It’s gameplay for attention deficit disorder, and it’s exactly tailored to my daily routine. In between meetings or answering emails, I get a message that my crew has arrived at their destination – thirty seconds later I’ve sent them on their way again. While it may not be the immersive experience that some games strive for, I have to admit it’s fun.

And it’s not the only type of game in this genre. Area/Code’s Sharkrunners allowed online players to locate real sharks in the Pacific Ocean by tracking GPS tags. Plundr links your IP address to virtual islands online and requires you to move around in the real world. A colleague of mine used to play a game where you trained a baseball team – checking in daily to assign training routines (run laps, throw pitches, weight training, etc). The twist was you never actually played the game – the game scheduled regular matches against other players but the entire nine innings were controlled by an artificial intelligence. The team that had been most diligent or strategic about their training regiment was victorious, and you simply watched (much the way a real manager can only tear his hair out when the game is on).

Of course, I would kick myself if I didn’t also plug Justin Hall’s Passively Multiplayer Online Game which rewards players for doing something they already do: surf the web. Each visited website is an experience point in your pocket, something you can spend to upgrade or buy tools to play a deeper game. Hey – just went to find the link and saw Justin’s new site: Passively Multiplayer. His talk with Joi Ito was the best thing at SXSW last year.

I like the stock market analogy in this discussion, mainly because it references the emergent properties ‘keyhole gaming’ can generate. Tiny interactions on a massive scale over time accumulate into a heap of meta-data. My case in this point is Wired’s coverage of crowdsourcing and Luis Von Ahn, the creator of CAPTCHA technology and his new projects, Games with a Purpose. With simple matching games and puzzles, Von Ahn’s team is collecting a dataset that may end up catapulting artificial intelligence to a new level.

Not to mention the opportunities for a tier-based game system which would introduce players to a story world very tangentially through insignificant interactions and offer them a peak into the larger game system that demands more of their time. I am reminded of the Michael Bay film ‘The Island’ when Ewan MacGregor spends his entire day injecting nutrients into a tube only to learn later on that these nutrients are feeding a new generation of…(spoilers removed).

So much more to say on the topic, but I gotta go – my Skyrates plane has just landed again!