Jun 20, 2018 1:01 PM

You Can Now Live Out Westworld With Your Amazon Echo

Nope, that's not scary at all.

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This Amazon Echo doesn't seem to understand that all I want is a whiskey. I'm seated in the Tribeca offices of marketing firm 360i and the haunting voice coming out of its little speaker just says, "Never heard of it." The problem is that me and 360i's creative director Andrew Hunter both gave the order at the same time and "Rose," our guide at the Mariposa Saloon in this audio play, couldn't make it out. Nevermind, then.

Instead, we opt to take a walk through Sweetwater, the fictional town where Westworld takes place, and eventually wind up at a narrative dead end when we don't know the location of someone that one of the townspeople is looking for. It's over, and soon we'll be, theoretically, sent back to the the Mesa Hub to have our memories wiped and be shoved back out into the Mariposa to run through our loops again.

This is what it's like to go to Westworld thanks to a (fairly) smart cylindrical speaker.

Hunter tells Alexa to "go away" and explains the general premise of Westworld: The Maze: You, talking to your Alexa device, are dropped into Sweetwater, much like a Westworld host. You can hear the trains coming to town, the player piano in the bar. People talk to you, and in response you give answers, make choices, and learn your way around. The more you play, the more you know, and eventually you figure out how to find your way to the end. Like the artificially intelligent machines in the HBO show, you're working your way up on creator Robert Ford's pyramid of consciousness: Memory, Improvisation, and Self-Interest. If you get to the final stage, you win. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure narrative podcast. But, much like achieving true intelligence, it isn't easy.

"There no guarantee that you'll be put on the same path each time, so you can learn something you might need to know 10 times from now," Hunter says of the game, available today. "There are 60 different paths you can take to the finish line, essentially 60 paths to consciousness. And I think there are 32 ways to die."

He's not kidding. On the whiteboard directly over my shoulder there's a list that's non-cryptically titled "Potential Death Scenes" (examples: "stampede (cattle)," "fall off cliff," "coyotes?"). There are some 400 possible choices in the game; the "script" for it is 11,000 lines long and covers more than 250 pages. When Menno Kluin, 360i's chief creative officer, plops it down on the table in front of me, it hits with a thud heavier than that of your average movie script, and much more complex.

Talking to the team behind The Maze, though, it's clear this is how people marketing TV are going to have to do things going forward if they want to keep up. Tanner Stransky, the director of digital content for HBO, points out that 20 percent of Wi-Fi-enabled homes in the US already have smart speakers, and that number is only going to go up. Soon, talking to your Alexa or Google Home or Apple HomePod about your favorite show won't be any different than following the show on Twitter or scrolling through its Instagram. "We're like, 'Everybody's gotta get in on this,'" Stransky says.

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/IK1ofcjzn6Q&feature=youtu.be

And soon enough, they probably will. As voice-enabled devices find their way into more and more homes, traditional media outlets are going to have to find ways to use them to bring attention back to screens. Since Amazon Echo and Google Home already (accidentally) respond to sounds from TVs, it only seems right that those devices learn to play nice. That doesn't mean The Maze is going to fire up whenever Ford starts yapping on Westworld (the actual launch command is “Alexa, open Westworld,” FYI), but it does mean there's a way for the show to keep fans' attention once this Sunday's season finale is over and they've shifted their attention to other gadgets. So, just like Jurassic World virtual reality experiences or the real-world recreation of the "Not Hotdog" app from Silicon Valley, experiences that use voice will be the next wave of tech to be used for movie and TV promotions.

And in this new world, things move fast. HBO and the team at 360i only started work on the game in mid-March and basically had to conceive of the game, work on the script with Westworld production company Kilter Films, record the audio (Jeffrey Wright's Bernard/Arnold and Angela Sarafyan's Clementine are featured in The Maze), and build the experience in just a few months to get it done before the finale. "It was a sprint," Hunter says with a laugh. Surprisingly, 360i's head of innovation tech, Layne Harris, notes that actually building a game for Alexa—done using a program called PullString—is fairly straightforward. It's the constant testing and rooting out dead ends that takes time.

But now that the game is done and available on people's Alexa devices, HBO—and anyone else watching their moves—can see how well fans respond to voice experiences for TV shows. It's at that point that the network will become truly self-aware.

"We've always tried to be innovative," says Stransky. "We have a history of it and we're looking at everything from VR to AR to chatbots. We're really thinking there's a lot more to come here for us."

[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/TXIAwjND9R8&feature=youtu.be