We spent every school night and entire weekends going over every square millimeter of these five records.
We destroyed every copy we had, spinning them backwards on our cheap record players.
It drove our parents nuts!
"Turn me on, dead man! Turn me on, dead man!"
And they hated it even more when they heard it again on the evening news!
I can't remember the last time I had so much fun.
And, although I didn't appreciate it at the time, something wonderful happened as we scoured these records, backwards and forwards, line by line.
We memorized them.
Who Buried Paul? is one of the best games I ever played.
This ridiculous rumor sucked my entire generation into a massively multiplayer adventure.
A morbid treasure hunt in which accomplices were connected by word-of-mouth, college newspapers, the alternative press and underground radio.
We can only wonder what would happen if something like this were to happen today, in the age of the World Wide Web.
Imagine how such a thing might get started, by accident ...
The Paul-is-dead rumor is an example of a powerful design principle that we can use to make our computer games more fun.
If you walk away from this lecture remembering only one word, let that word be this:
Contellation. It's usually used as a noun, referring to pictures in the the sky created by stars.
But I use it as a verb to describe one of the basic functions of human intelligence.
Constellation is pattern recognition.
To constellate is to apply order to chaos.
When faced with any kind of new experience, be it images or sounds or even just a strange idea, we marshall our personal knowledge and experience and project it into the novelty to imbue it with meaning and significance.
And what kinds of meaning and significance are we most likely to project?
The meanings we expect to recognize.
The significance we want to see.
Constellation is, in fact, a form of self-recognition.
So what kinds of experiences are most likely to invoke the principle of constellation?
The ones with the most novelty.
Rich experiences. Complex experiences.
Experiences that encourage you to discover relationships, to synthesize juxtapositions.
A record jacket like this one isn't going to excite much constellation.
But put something like this in front of people, and all kinds of evocative coincidences become likely.
Why is this useful for us as entertainers?
Because that moment when you peer into the mirror of chaos and discover yourself is satisfying in a uniquely personal sense.
You get a little oomph when you make a connection that way.
Those little oomphs are what make good stories and puzzles and movies so compelling.
And those little oomphs are what made the Paul-is-dead rumor so much fun.
Allow me to demonstrate oomph.
Many people believed that the mischievous John Lennon was the Beatle responsible for planting the death clues about Paul.
If he did, the joke was on him.
This is one of the pages in the Magical Mystery Tour booklet.
And this is John, wearing a phony mustache.
Beside him is a sign which reads, "The best way to go is by M D & C."
Thirteen years to the day after this album was released in England, John learned that the best way to go was indeed by M D & C ... the initials of his assassin, Mark David Chapman.
That's oomph.
How can we use this principle of constellation to make our games better?
I don't have to tell you that today's games are beginning to look pretty amazing.
Every year, the bar gets raised.
Higher frame rates. Smoother rendering. More plausible use of lighting and sound.
More realism.
And as processor speeds accelerate, and storage capacity expands, our ability to improve the virisimilitude of our world models will get better and better.
Unfortunately, there are limits.
There are limits to how much time we can invest in constructing our worlds.
There are limits to how much money we can spend.
And there are limits to how many times we can borrow technologies and aesthetics from established games in order to reduce the risk of creating new ones.
But even if these limits were to magically disappear, we could never hope to approach the subtlety, the nuance, the fine detail that characterizes the phenomenon we call reality.
Because the detail in reality is infinite.
This is where constellation can help us.
If you want your artificial characters to exhibit a wide spectrum of intelligent-looking behaviors, don't try to program them all yourself, one case statement at a time.
You've written enough bugs already.
Instead, try what Peter Blake did on the Sgt. Pepper cover.
Throw in some useless particulars.
Take a couple of those robot tanks, pick a random direction and send them rolling off across the playing field, for absolutely no reason at all.
Sometimes it'll look like an attack, or a feint, or even a suicide.
Whatever happens, it's bound to be more interesting than having them just sit there, circling.
And who knows? Maybe some reviewer will rave about your brilliant AI.
If you want your virtual worlds to appear deep and rich, don't try to define everything explicitly.
You'll never ship anything before Christmas that way.
Instead, try what John did in "Strawberry Fields."
Mix in a little cranberry sauce.
Select a random game event, something harmless, like a distant sound effect, and make it occur according to a regular pattern, also chosen randomly; and watch your players assign their own dramatic significance and tie at all together.
We didn't know why a hand kept popping up over over Paul's head.
But it had to mean something, didn't it?
And look how far we took that simple, meaningless pattern.
Let your players employ their own imaginative intelligence to fill in the gaps in your worlds you can't afford to close.
Chances are, they'll paint the chaos in exactly the colors they want to see.
What's more, they'll enjoy themselves doing it.
But the credit will be yours.
A Final Clue
In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with a final death clue.
This is one you won't find in any of the published lists. It may even be original.
During the height of the Paul-is-dead scare, my friends and I spent many a solemn evening poring over our Beatle records in hopes of discovering some hitherto unrecognized nugget.
We were a fairly precocious gang of nerds.
And we were fortunate enough to have access to a cheap little tape recorder.
One of our strategies for identifying clues in the songs was rather ingenious.
We drew up a list of the suggestive things you might expect the Beatles to say if they were trying to conceal hints about Paul's death.
Ominous phrases like "Paul is a corpse." "Six feet under." "We know how he died." You get the idea.
We recorded these phrases on our tape recorder.
"Paul's a corpse. Paul's a corpse."
Then we spun the tape backward with our finger to see if the resulting sounds matched anything that we were hearing on our Beatle records.
You might say it was a form of reverse engineering.
At the time, our little experiment didn't reveal any new clues, and after the excitement about Paul died down, we pretty much forgot about it.
But few months later, on the evening of February 15, 1970, our experiments bore unexpected fruit.
I was at my grandfather's house watching the official premiere of a new Beatles song on The Ed Sullivan Show.
At the time of this broadcast, the Beatles had already broken up.
But this was a filmed performance, an excerpt from a Beatles documentary that was about to be released to movie theaters.
A chill went up my spine as Paul began to sing the soon-to-be-famous chorus of this new song.
And why was the chorus of "Let It Be" so shocking?
Because one of the potential death clues that we had experimented with on our tape recorder was the simple, obvious phrase, "He is dead."
At the time, I believed that Paul must have chosen the title "Let It Be" for this song as a way of making fun of the silly old death rumor.
It just couldn't be an accident!
What I didn't know at the time was that Paul's performance of "Let It Be" was filmed in January of 1969, nine months before the scandal broke.
And have you noticed that on the cover of the Let It Be album, all of the Beatles are photographed against a white background ...
... except one, which is blood red?