So how do you, as a game designer, counteract that?

I don't know if I can. Because in essence, just the fact that I'm designing a game is feeding [the problem] in some respects. Again, I'm creating a structure that most people can create for each other, but it is a structure. And some of what we've lost is that ability to play with no structure. It's almost something that has to come from home, when you say, "Hey, let's put all that down and make something up."

Now, [with] a lot of the games we do try to touch on that by having a lot more creative input. But it takes place within a structure. If it's creative input with no structure, then by definition you don't need us. They can do it by themselves. (Laughs)

When you say that imagination-based play stops with eight-year-olds, are you reading studies on this?

In the toy industry, you pretty much can't pay anybody above a six year old to go down the toy aisle. They are only... they're going to go to the electronics aisle. In the toy industry only a handful of years ago, the sweet spot was seven and eight year olds. Now the sweet spot is in five and six year olds.

But on the other end of the scale, games can get adults to start thinking imaginatively again. I recently got a set of Star Wars PocketModel cards, and I was amazed how much I let myself "play" when I started putting the spaceships together.

That to me is the goal. The PocketModel to me was -- everything I do comes from the fact that I'm actually just a twelve-year-old in a much bigger body. And being able to take the kind of fun of taking the little pieces and getting to move them around the table... there is a tactile sense which our computers don't give us, and it's an important component.

But it is about that inner childhood. And even if we're stuck doing it within a structure, at least that structure can get us back in touch with that inner child sense of fun.

Along the line of ARGs, [Smith & Tinker employee] Jessica Price once explained to me that ARGs give you many ways to immerse yourself in a fiction that seems real -- but it's always clear to the player what they're participating in. Otherwise, it becomes a hoax, or a trick. But are there ways to blur that line?

I think we're very conscious of never trying to perpetrate hoaxes. For two reasons: one, if you really understand the hive mind, you know it's impossible to perpetrate a hoax. The hive mind by definition being infinitely smarter than you is going to be able to debunk you at any point, and relatively instantly.

And, once you try to convince somebody something is real, by human nature, our immediate response is, "No it's not." And so you immediately set the audience in opposition to yourself. You've given them the task of debunking you, as opposed to -- by inviting them in to play with you, you've created a collaborative situation with the audience, where they're not trying to defeat you but indeed work with you for a common experience. And so you really can't win in doing a hoax.

Now, having said that, one of my core concepts in creating the ARGs was that there's only one platform, and it's the planet. And everyone on the planet can be used as part of a storytelling mechanism, as part of an immersive experience. And once you do suspend your disbelief, [it] can provide a pretty amazing, amusing, confusing, grey zone of what is real and what is not. But this is helped by the fact that I voluntarily stepped into this experience.

We certainly looked at things like MMOs. An MMO is an artificial world, right? So if the world is artificial, then why can't we use an MMO to do an ARG? And MMOs are in some respect an oxymoron. They are not really massively multiplayer. There may be millions of people in the environment, but you don't work with millions of people. You're only interacting with small groups of people.

So in reality, the only truly massively multiplayer games have actually been ARGs, where you're actually collaborating with a million-plus people. But, if you were to run an ARG inside of an MMO, then you actually could have the whole audience collaborating on one aspect of the MMO. Which would be a fascinating thing to do, and hopefully we will in the future.