Evan Chan is dead.

His murder won't go unsolved; an estimated tens of thousands of people worldwide are scouring the World Wide Web for his killers -- even though it will be another 65 years before he will be born.

Chan and the "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" mystery game he's part of -- based on the future world created by the Steven Spielberg film of the same name -- are front-runners in the next step in computer gaming. These games break the boundaries of the monitor and fully interact with their players in the real world, from phone calls, faxes and e-mail to events hosted by actors. A normal computer game is confined to the player's monitor, with occasional interaction online with other players in multiplayer mode. These two new games access player information from a database and use it to take games to players in the real world.

The upcoming Electronic Arts game "Majestic," in which players are dropped into a government conspiracy, pushes the envelope even more. That game uses telephone, fax, e-mail, voice mail, Web sites and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to bring the game into the user's reality. Majestic launches in late July, with a free trial called a "pilot episode" and then a $9.99 charge each month after that to join Electronic Arts' online gaming service. (The A.I. game is free.)

Majestic's plot is arced out for two seasons in the format of a television series, with a free pilot and eight episodes each season, says Neil Young (not the rock star), an executive of production at Electronic Arts and one of the game's creators. Young expects to add more seasons after that and says the plot will evolve depending on player response and real-world events.

Majestic "draws on very traditional elements of gameplay," he says. "I was trying to create something for the generation that played interactive games but have outgrown the reflexes or the ability to play for six hours a night. There's no running, jumping, shooting or flying. You play you, use your reality as an anchor for the fiction. When a woman you've instant messaged, seen on video, visited on the Web, seen drawings she's made, calls at 1 a.m. because people are trying to bash down her door, that becomes powerful."

So how does a database play with humans?

Game keeps track of you

"It grows as you interact," Young says. "It captures some information about how the player connects. For instance, it knows when you're online. The database also holds the script, the story the player is progressing through. That runs in real time, based on the last time you connected. An `experience server' processes the data and figures out when to contact you. That can engage in natural- language conversations over AIM."

Phone contact is done through recorded messages either delivered quickly over the phone (which then hangs up) or left on one of hundreds of voice mail accounts across the country. That and the fax feature are optional; if a player doesn't want those forms of contact, digitized versions will be left on a Web site for that player to retrieve.

Ralph Guggenheim, executive producer of Majestic, brings to the creative process his experience as a founder of Pixar, the company behind the computer-animated movie "Toy Story." Guggenheim says he left Pixar on a quest to push the limits of storytelling, and so found a kindred soul in Young.

"Neil's vision struck me as ingenious; it was one of the first new genres," Guggenheim says. "So many companies show the same [ideas] over and over. There's no real growth, no new style of gaming. Majestic is different. And given the typical behavior of this industry, people will be knocking it off soon."

The agreed-on starting point for the A.I. game was early April, when Web movie critic Harry Knowles received a mysterious message telling him to search the Internet for the name "Jeanine Salla," who appears in the credits for the movie.

Blink and you'll miss vital clues, especially since they change every week. Enter the New York-based Cloudmakers (www.cloudmakers.org), named after Chan's yacht. The site is an online community of more than 5,000 members worldwide dedicated to following the A.I. mystery. Visitors can browse areas called the Journey, for hints to help follow the plot; the Guide, a spoiler- filled recap of what has been discovered so far; and the Trail, an encyclopedia of the mystery and future world surrounding it.

"In some places in the game, we are asked to provide phone numbers or e-mail addresses to sign up to a list of some sort," says Brian Seitz, an NYU student and Webmaster of Cloudmakers.org. "Often, they make jokes that we're using out of date protocols and should have a better Internet browser or identification number. The phone calls have consisted of recorded messages delivered across the country domino-style. We've subscribed the character Laia Salla to our mailing list so that when she sends out an e-mail, it automatically goes there."

Feelings of real life

Andrea Phillips, a New Yorker who contributes to the Trail and Journey for Cloudmakers.org, says the game bled even more into real life in May with anti-robot rallies staged by the team behind the game in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

To add to the mystery, few knew (or would reveal) the identity of the "Puppetmasters," the nickname given by players to whoever is behind the A.I. game, who are employees from Microsoft and DreamWorks.

The folks at Electronic Arts are at the leading edge of a potentially powerful new trend, says Jawad Mir, who runs Toronto- based DreamWorks SKG Fansite (.

"I have a feeling companies will start to market their games on the Net in a similar fashion very soon," Mir says. "It is probably going to become a strong marketing and selling tool for years to come. How? For example, companies would probably give fans little teasers on their upcoming games that will get them interested instead of providing them with regular news and previews."

That's just one part of the excitement in this new style of imagination-driven game.

Feeling of anticipation

"There's a sense of anticipation," Young says. "Every time the phone rings, in the back of your head you'll be thinking, That could be Majestic."

"I've gotten these calls [from Majestic] hundreds of times and still feel that tingle down my spine when the phone rings," Guggenheim says. "It's not unlike a good scene in moviemaking, which you can watch over and over even after watching it being filmed and knowing how it's done."

"I think the first thing that really threw me for a loop was way back in mid-April, on the first day I was playing" the A.I. game, Phillips says. "I was looking at the In Memoriam page for Evan Chan and thinking how sad it was that he had died when he had just started seeming like a cool guy. Suddenly this window popped up on my screen - - black with green letters -- and it wrote out `GET OUT. PHYSICAL LOOKUP IN PROGRESS. HIDE WHILE YOU CAN.' Then it faded to a photograph of Evan's face, cold and dead, and disappeared. A little while later I discovered that had been one of Evan's autopsy photos. It was pretty spooky."

Unlike current graphics-heavy software, these new interactive games let players use their own experience and personality to progress, says Chris Johnson, a game animator in Seattle.

"I think a lot of the appeal is that it focuses on a variety of very interesting puzzles that can appeal to a variety of people depending on their interests," Johnson says. "To solve many of the puzzles [in the A.I. mystery], people have had to have knowledge of such varied things as `Macbeth,' chemistry, binary code, photograph editing and manipulation, origami, the Tarot and `Alice in Wonderland,' to name a very few. On top of that, the necessary amount of observation and recollection is very intriguing as well.

"In essence, it has required from the start a group of people who have knowledge of different things and interested in different fields to come together to solve the mystery. As a result, there's a very large spirit of camaraderie and teamwork that I think is what makes the game stay alive. The story is better than most novels you have coming out today, and better yet, it's interactive and free."

`Ultimate Virtual Mystery'

"`The Ultimate Virtual Reality Murder Mystery' is the name I give it," says Irwin Dobolowsky, a Georgia Tech graduate who helps collate the Trail for Cloudmakers.org. "It is definitely a murder mystery, as we're trying to figure out who killed Evan Chan. I say `Virtual Reality' because the puppetmasters -- those running the game -- have created a virtual world set 150 years in the future for us to play in, through Web sites, phone calls, gatherings and more. Side stories pop up throughout, seemingly unrelated at first but then later integrating back into the main story. We have an evolving entity based on the story of a man named Evan and the events surrounding and leading to his death."