Crossing Selves is an interactive game with different communities and their variable forms of expressions, a game with the computer, which uses texts, pictures and sounds. The project is based on discussions about gender-studies and theoretical questions about how information technology influences the society.

We are interested in, how pragmatic forms of communication are manifested on the syntactic level of a language in different gender communities and which attitude women and men take towards the computer. One practical questions of our research was, why just a few women are working in the area of information technologies (particularly in Switzerland).

Women act to each other significant more often cooperative and uses paraphrases to initiate actions. On the other hand, competitive situations are dominant in male communities. Instructions for actions are often given in the syntactical form of orders. A linguistic short form is usually used to communicate with the computer, which are orders on the syntax level. But problematically is not just the linguistic communication form but also the intention towards the computer. Men more often personify the computer and look at it in a mal functional way. In comparison women use the computer more as a tool and are interested in its possible applications and social consequences. These differences implicate that different communities are constituted along variable ways of behavior and the form of linguistic expressions. These Communities are compatible with the behavior of a particular SELF or lead to misunderstandings and frictions. In our game CrossingSelves we uses such stereotypical communities on the linguistic level. A subject called ITself asks the player in a particular linguistic form and the player has to react in answering the questions (from a pragmatic point of view, all questions are orders to act). The player has the possibility to react cooperatively, competitively or indifferently. ITself is for sure the computer itself. But we deal with the indifference of the expression, so ITself can also be a human, a social subject. On the strategic level of the game the interaction of the player has an influence on the course of the game. Cooperative actions speed up the course of the game, competitive actions slow down the course. That means, if a SELF is compatible to a particular community, the game speeds up to the next type of communities and if a SELF acts against the order of ITself, he or she rests in this community until she or he react more cooperatively.

Baudrillard described in his paper „The Simulation" and more detailed in his book „The Perfect Crime", that our society is tending to the metaphysics of the indeterminisme and the codes. The way the reference character of the icons is going away, the icons are robbed of its illusion. The simulation out of codes is taking its part. The reality is simulated in the virtuality, the redoubling of the reality is turning into hyperreality. The simulation is perfect, if it becomes reality. The pictures and sounds in CrossingSelve are simulated out of codes and have no reference character on something else than its codes. Also at the beginning if the player has the illusion, she or he can trigger actions of the computer, this illusion will be more and more destroyed and the computer is simulating its pictures after its own program. The machine has quasi removed itself from the humans.

THE GAME

CrossingSelves is a game with the computer and is always ending in the creation of the intelligent machine, which is independent of the humans. Our goal is the way there through different communities. The interaction with the computer has a direct influence on the way, that means the course of the game. The game is running on two levels. On the first, the player is moving through different communities, on the second the computer is trying to become independent of humans, what it reaches all the time. We hope with CrossingSelves to open variable spaces of experiences and that questions about the social development become conscious.