"What Is Reality?!"

That question appears in perhaps the best written video game of all time, Grim Fandango, during the hilarious open mike night scene at the Blue Casket, in which the player gets to improv poetry in a mock spoken word/poetry slam. Removed from its comic context, though, it's a question that I found myself asking today in reaction to another interactive fiction, the media-spanning Cathy's Book, which I started reading last night.

Created by the folks over at 42 Entertainment, Cathy's Book spills outside the page by including phone numbers and website addresses, all of which tie in with the story. In fact, the books subtitle is "If Found Call 650-266-8233," and if you do you'll get "Cathy's" voicemail, the greeting to which contains ominous references to cell phone tracing, other characters from the book and a even the book itself.

I looked up the first URL I found, for a site called doubletalkwireless.com, clearly an "in-game" (to borrow a term from the alternate reality gaming realm) site. Then I looked up another, a reference to a place called the Musee Mechanique which the marginalia in the book said to google. I did, and found what looked like it at the top of the list, except that I wasn't sure if this was in-game or not. The creepy carnival music and penny arcade laughter lead me to believe it was, as did the fact that none of the press releases were recent, but even after dialing the contact number I wasn't sure. In fact, it wasn't until I found a piece by NPR about it that I knew it wasn't a direct tie-in with Cathy's Book.

So hat's off to 42 Entertainment for making me question reality after only reading seven pages. Having just finished Allan Moore's metaphysical meditation Promethea, maybe I should just accept that all creations of the imagination are as real as anything else.