The Ministry of Reshelving

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, Jane McGonigal and three dinner companions were chatting about doublespeak, censorship, and surveillance when someone idly commented that George Orwell's dystopian novel ''1984" should be reclassified as Non-Fiction, or even filed under Current Events. ''Five seconds later, I said, 'Wait--we could actually do that,"' recounts McGonigal. So last Monday she took the lead in launching the Ministry of Reshelving project, an ambitious, opt-in performance piece whose goal it is to secretly reshelve 1,984 copies of Orwell's book in bookstores in all 50 states.

Though such an undertaking sounds daunting, it's child's play for McGonigal, a doctoral candidate in performance studies at UC-Berkeley who earns a living working as a designer and ''puppetmaster" for 42 Entertainment, an Emeryville, Calif.-based outfit that creates elaborate ''alternate reality games"--played by thousands via chatroom, cell phone, e-mail, even billboards and want ads--in order to drum up excitement for various new products. But McGonigal's true passion, she said via e-mail from San Francisco, is ''making games that give people a platform for changing social norms and public policy." As of this writing, she reports, some 55 ''ministers"--from California, New York, Idaho, Kentucky, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and a half dozen other states--have relocated over 100 copies of ''1984." Evidence of these hijinks is being posted around the clock to the photo-sharing website Flickr (flickr.com/groups/reshelving).

Is Boston behind the curve? By no means! On Thursday morning, McGonigal said, a Bostonian ''minister" informed her that a copy of ''1984" had just been moved from the Fiction section of the Borders in Downtown Crossing to the Political Science section, where it was reshelved next to a book titled ''Inside the Mind of Bush."