Fleck

» see fleck.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Fleck was a massively multiplayer game played on a map of the actual world. It ran in a browser on Flash and later on the iPad, using Google Maps as its board, so the land you were looking at was land that exists. Its own tagline was Grow Your World, and the welcome text promised you could save your neighborhood from alien infestation and own your favorite restaurants.

The mechanics took that literally in a way almost nothing else did at the time. You planted trees and shrubs on real plots. You dug zombies out of tombstones and fought them, and the game made a point of the ones encroaching on your actual home address. Restaurants could be bought, but only if they had reviews on Yelp, which meant the game's economy was assembled out of somebody else's database of real businesses.

It came from Self Aware Games, an independent studio in Oakland, California started by Seppo Helava and Colin Liotta. Their money came from somewhere much less strange: a free mobile casino game called Card Ace: Casino, which is what made them worth buying. Big Fish Games acquired the studio in 2012 and inherited Fleck along with it.

The end was posted on the game's own front page, in a line sitting under the signup box: Fleck's last day of operation will be August 16, 2013. That same month Big Fish announced a round of job cuts that also took out its cloud gaming business, along with offices in Vancouver and Cork.

~ the case file ~

~ zombies in the garden ~

Building on real geography sounds like a shortcut and is actually a trap. A designer who invents a world gets to decide where the interesting places are, while a designer who uses the real one inherits whatever is actually there, which for most players is a residential street with nothing on it. Fleck's answer was to import the interesting bits from Yelp and to seed the empty space with things to kill.

The odd note is how domestic it all was. The fantasy on offer was domestic rather than exploratory. You put a garden on a real plot and cleared the zombies off your own block. Pokemon Go made the real world a reason to leave the house three years later. Fleck pointed the same technology at staying in.

~ the second tenant ~

fleck.com has been serving pages since 1996, and for most of that time it was not this. A capture from January 2009 is titled Fleck.com, Annote the web, which was a tool for writing notes on top of other people's pages. By the start of January 2012 the same address answers as Fleck: Grow Your World, so the game had taken the domain over somewhere in between.

No launch announcement for the game gives a date, so the year above comes from the archive rather than from the studio. What the archive is clearer about is the finish: the last working capture is 5 July 2013, carrying the shutdown line, and by November 2015 the address only answers with a redirect. Today the domain has no DNS at all.

~ no map here ~

Fleck only covered North America. The playable area reached from the continental United States up into southern Canada and down into northern Mexico, and outside that boundary the map was just a map. The whole premise was that the game happened where you actually live, which left nothing for a player in Turkey in 2012. The map rendered here perfectly well, and the game simply did not reach it.

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