Wednesday January 25, 2006

The Story Doesn’t Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m interested in alternate reality games, not just as an advertising journalist, but as a writer. While working on a recent story for Creativity, I did a long phone interview with sci-fi novelist and ARG pioneer Sean Stewart, who had a lot of interesting things to say about the future of online narrative, the “hybrid space” of blogs, and writing in general. With his permission, I’m posting a partial transcript of that interview here.

A little background: Stewart, 40, is the author of eight novels and the winner of the 2000 World Fantasy Award. He grew up spending winters in Canada and summers in Texas. He got involved with “The Beast”—the 2001 genre-defining game that was developed by Microsoft to promote the movie AI—when author Neal Stephenson recommended him to the film’s producers. The team behind “The Beast”—including Stewart’s creative partner Elan Lee and mastermind Jordan Weisman—went on to form 42 Entertainment and to create such games as “I Love Bees” for Halo 2 and “Last Call Poker” for Activision’s Gun. (Lee, by the way, is doing an interview Thursday night on G4TV.)

If you’re not familiar with ARGs, Wikipedia sums it up pretty well: “An alternate reality game is a cross media game that deliberately blurs the line between the in-game and out-of-game experiences, often being used as a marketing tool for a product or service. While games may primarily be centered around online resources, often events that happen inside the game reality will ‘reach out’ into the players’ lives in order to bring them together. Elements of the plotline may be provided to the players in almost any form” including emails, phone calls, chat sessions, snail mail, and live events. Now, to the Q&A, which continues well after the jump:

Do you see these projects as being as important as your novels?
Right now, this art form is more exciting than novels. If I had to choose, I’d do this. And I don’t say that because of the paycheck—though being a freelance science fiction novelist is not a great way to put your kids through college, so it has been nice to get paid.

I honestly believe that the gods in their infinite mercy looked down and gave me a chance —miraculously and wholly unlooked for—to be at Kitty Hawk, to be in motion pictures in 1905, to be at a place and a moment in time where something extraordinarily exciting was just getting off the ground. As much as I’d like to think it had much to do with my merit, mostly it’s this huge stroke of timing and good luck to be in the right place at the right time, working with the right people, to have a chance to be in on something at an extraordinary cultural moment.

I think that every means of communication carries within itself the potential for a form of art. Once the printing press was built, novels were going to happen. It took the novel a little while to figure out exactly what it was going to be, but once the press was there, something was going to occur. Once motion picture cameras were around, the movies—in some format or another—were going to happen.

I modestly or immodestly think that we got some things fundamentally right about the way the web and the internet want to tell stories in a way that not everyone had gotten quite when we lucked into it. What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.

I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, during the winter. There are two very essential conditions in Edmonton. There’s inside and outside, and there’s no real doubt about which is which. There’s a sharp line preserved between the two.

I now live in California. California is an interesting place to me—and reminds me a bit of the South, where I spent my summers—because in California, what with the weather being clement and the price of real estate being high, you spend a lot of time in this hybrid space. We could call it patio space or—if you’re in the South—front porch space. It’s clearly inside in some ways, but it’s public in other ways.

The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”

The campaigns [I’ve worked on]—“The Beast”, “I Love Bees”, and “Last Call Poker”—one of the things that makes them interesting, artistically, to me is that they are part of a very small set of works of art that I can think of that deliberately exist in porch space. They have audiences that are literally collective and talking and engaged, both with the project and with each other. If you and I go and watch a movie, you have a unique experience and I have a unique experience, we just happen to be sitting in the same room.

The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They’re having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn’t really have an analog that I’ve been able to think of in the arts, although it does in another place.

What is the other place?
This behavior—this sort of creative, collaborative, enthusiastic scavengering behavior—is something that we call by another name when we direct it, not to entertainment, but to the physical world. We call it science, as it’s been constructed since Newton and the Royal Society, and that’s worked out pretty well for us as a species.

Where do you think it’s going? Is this form of storytelling going to be as popular as novels?
Something will be. What will happen is, twenty years from now, someone will be using the web for a storytelling platform, and here are some of the components that I am nearly positive will be part of that art form.

One of the things that we do that I think will continue at some level is platform independent stories. They might be in print, they might be in film, they might be on the web, they might be a cellphone message. The story doesn’t care. A kid who’s 15 now, in 10 years—when they’re 25—their cellphone will be their TV, their computer, their phone, their whatever. It will be pointless to say, “I only do the kind of storytelling that happens between a printed page.”

Well, it won’t be pointless. There will still be books. God, I hope so, because I have a stake in that. But I think that the art form we will look back on as being the dominant art form of the 21st century—as we look back on film for the 20th—is one that will take advantage of the web’s basic nature, which is that it’s all ones and zeroes. It can be digitized and delivered through any kind of platform. The story doesn’t care. I think that’s going to be part of it.

Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience—that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”

It is the nature of the web that you get to click on things. I think, at some level, the art forms that evolve to use that platform will need to let people click on things. In some way or another, people want to push a little on something that happens on the web in a way they do not expect to push on their television sets.

Twenty years from now, you will look back at something like “Last Call”, and you will say, part of the engine of what is clearly a ‘57 Thunderbird was right there in that 1898 Ford prototype, and some of things they were doing are just the dumbest things I can possibly imagine.

We’re still in many ways in early, early days in considering this as an art form. The initial conceit of AI, and we did the same with “I Love Bees,” is that it’s storytelling as archeology—or, possibly, the other way around. That is, you work out a story, you create all the evidence of that story, then you smash the evidence into a thousand teeny bits and sprinkle it around and people gather it up, put it together again and argue about what it must have meant about the civilization. Everything you find is real within the fictional bubble of the story.

One of the things we built with “Last Call” is a narrator. So, we tried to move from where the novel was in the time of Defoe—in which every time you wrote a book you had to say, “I found this manuscript in my uncle’s attic and it all really happened”—to where you are by the time of Jane Austen. Actually, you see it in Pride and Prejudice. It starts out as being an epistolary novel and Jane Austen is right at the moment where they start taking a big breath and just daring to say what people are thinking, even though, how the hell would you know what they are actually thinking? In “Last Call” we show thoughts and feelings, we do movie segments of things without saying, “This was caught on a security camera.”

We just do them because we do them, because no one goes to see Gladiator and says, “Wait a minute, there weren’t movie cameras in ancient Rome.” That’s the level of formal experimentation we’re talking about. We’re solving the problems of 1815. Now, we got from 1650 to 1815 in only three years, so that’s exciting, but we are in an early stage of development about what people will tolerate.

Suspension of disbelief is a much more fragile creation in the kinds of campaigns we’re doing right now than it is in novels, where everyone has taken the last two hundred years to agree on a set of rules about how you understand what’s happening in a book. That hasn’t happened here. Right now, this is at an unbelievably fluid and dynamic stage—a whole bunch of things that have been figured out in other art forms, we’re working them out on the fly.

Did you find these games appealing from the beginning?
I did. One of the dirty secrets of doing this stuff is that I am such a better writer now than before I did this project.

Why is that?
When you work as a professional novelist, in this day and age, part of what you are encouraged to do—and part of the natural process—is to slowly work down and reach more and more deeply within yourself to find your own authentic vision and slowly get past pastiching what others have done. Pastiche always came easily to me because I read very widely from a pretty young age and enjoyed most kinds of fiction. I could do faux Cormac McCarthy and I could do faux John Carter of Mars. Gradually, as a novelist, you’re encouraged to push down through that and find your authentic voice as a writer.

With AI, we got in over our heads. We underestimated just how hungry the audience was to be entertained and how much we would need to do to entertain them for how long. I ended up getting to a point where, as a writer, I was in a bizarre need-driven zone—to the point where I punched through everything I was as a writer into the much bigger, darker, oil-well deposit of everything I had been as a reader.

I was allowing myself to use all of it—Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner and Andre Norton and Tolkien and Dashiell Hammett,1984, Little House on the Prairie, everything—because there was a cast of literally scores of characters going in scores of directions—some personal, some political. It was every kind of writing that I had ever imagined or read, let alone done myself: political posters, pamphlets, business websites, personal diaries of 55-year-old women going through relationship agonies, weddings, funerals, demonstrations. It was extraordinarily liberating, in a sense, because there was no time to worry about “Is this tasteful?” You just had to go and keep going.

Has that changed your practice of writing? Do you write faster?
I don’t know that I write the novels much faster, but I write them with a lot more assurance and freedom. In terms of how I exist as a writer and the confidence with which I approach what I do, there’s no question that it’s had a huge positive benefit, which I didn’t predict.

Posted by jim at 10:14 PM ||