Carson Conversations Forum | Sean Stewart
Carson Center
Author
06/25/2017
Added
72
Plays
Description
Sean Stewart, Creative Director at Magic Leap, speaks at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. His talk: “Storytelling and Creative Technologies.”
http://arts.unl.edu/carson-center/news/re-thinking-higher-education-focus-carson-conversations-forum
Searchable Transcript
Toggle between list and paragraph view.
- [00:00:00.733](upbeat instrumental music)
- [00:00:08.495]I looked at my pamphlet last night and it said this
- [00:00:10.368]is what my talk was about so I fixed the slide
- [00:00:12.682]so it said that at the top.
- [00:00:14.391](laughing)
- [00:00:16.039]Something you need to understand about me,
- [00:00:18.251]I started as a science fiction novelist.
- [00:00:20.528]That's science fiction.
- [00:00:22.584](laughing)
- [00:00:25.041]I'm with the vaporized platform.
- [00:00:28.874]I started working for this which is an interesting
- [00:00:32.453]platform to work for.
- [00:00:33.582]I published a bunch of books, so terribly, terribly
- [00:00:37.306]important books like Galveston, which won the World
- [00:00:39.711]Fantasy Award and Yoda, Dark Rendezvous,
- [00:00:43.612](laughing)
- [00:00:45.101]which did not.
- [00:00:46.053](laughing)
- [00:00:49.426]But in 2001 I was bitten by a radioactive Spielberg.
- [00:00:57.394]They were making a movie called A.I.
- [00:00:59.495]and a group at Microsoft wanted to make
- [00:01:02.018]a strange, crazy interactive product.
- [00:01:04.839]They wanted a very impressive science fiction writer
- [00:01:09.837]to be the lead writer of that so they came and asked.
- [00:01:13.415]He said no, but I have a broke friend.
- [00:01:15.912](laughing)
- [00:01:18.130]And I jumped into the breach and was the lead writer
- [00:01:21.517]on the first of what is now called
- [00:01:23.138]an alternate reality game.
- [00:01:26.357]Alternate reality games are giant Dicken's novels
- [00:01:28.477]that play out using every kind of media.
- [00:01:31.757]To give you a very fast idea of how you would get
- [00:01:34.439]into this sort of thing, that was the poster for the film.
- [00:01:37.458]If you looked really hard on the poster,
- [00:01:39.879]if you saw it in live form or online you would notice
- [00:01:42.071]a couple of odd things.
- [00:01:43.437]For instance in the credit block there was a credit
- [00:01:46.055]for Jeanine Salla who is the Sentient Machine Therapist.
- [00:01:49.815]If you thought to yourself, "What is a Sentient
- [00:01:51.895]"Machine Therapist?" and you went and you entered
- [00:01:54.018]it in Altavista,
- [00:01:56.397](laughing)
- [00:01:58.615]because it was 2001, you would find the webpage
- [00:02:03.791]of Jeanine Salla who is the Sentient Machine Therapist
- [00:02:06.338]who also had a practice at Bangalor World University's
- [00:02:09.651]campus in New York in the year 2142.
- [00:02:13.291]From there there were links to many other pages
- [00:02:17.331]and people who also lived in the world of 2142
- [00:02:19.974]and also had for instance, phone numbers like the one
- [00:02:23.228]you might find if you notice that there were tiny
- [00:02:25.371]little ticks in the word Summer 2001.
- [00:02:28.210]And if you wrote out all the numbers of ticks
- [00:02:30.550]it was a 10-digit number.
- [00:02:32.310]And what the hell, you could try calling it
- [00:02:34.454]and oh my God you'd be talking to someone who also lived
- [00:02:36.251]in 2142.
- [00:02:39.830]So you would follow that, those trails into a story
- [00:02:43.990]which then led to websites for corporations
- [00:02:47.254]and individuals who are having bad marriages.
- [00:02:50.672]There was a serial killer who was murdering Sentient houses.
- [00:02:57.270]It's science fiction, right?
- [00:02:59.094]If I tell you there was a kill geisha robot
- [00:03:01.312]you are not surprised.
- [00:03:06.310]One of the things that's interesting about the internet
- [00:03:08.187]as a kind of a printing press is the internet
- [00:03:10.809]doesn't care much about how the media is made.
- [00:03:14.308]We tend to think about art as a series of nouns
- [00:03:18.030]that are defined by their production process.
- [00:03:20.387]A book is made of paper and is distributed
- [00:03:22.888]and you buy it like shoes.
- [00:03:24.488]A movie is another kind of product which you buy
- [00:03:27.587]and you play in a machine.
- [00:03:30.028]The internet doesn't care about that stuff.
- [00:03:32.288]It'll do a website, it'll do text, it'll do video.
- [00:03:34.488]What do you want, doesn't matter.
- [00:03:36.307]What's important is you are the story
- [00:03:37.811]to which everything vectors.
- [00:03:40.787]We were asked to talk about it, me and the designer on it,
- [00:03:45.470]Yolan Lee, we were asked to go to Intel and talk about it.
- [00:03:47.950]They were saying so what is the more interesting thing
- [00:03:49.608]about this project?
- [00:03:50.611]What we ended up saying is the most interesting thing
- [00:03:53.411]about this project is the audience.
- [00:03:57.284]Most things we make when we grew up
- [00:03:59.427]were singular activities.
- [00:04:03.891]I read a book, I watched television.
- [00:04:06.430]Maybe I sat in a theater with a bunch of other people,
- [00:04:09.048]but each of us had an individual experience of movie
- [00:04:11.170]and then we went home.
- [00:04:13.491]The audience for the game thing story we had just made
- [00:04:17.587]wasn't like that.
- [00:04:19.688]It was distributed all over the world
- [00:04:21.288]and it was participatory.
- [00:04:22.611]They investigated clues, they went to physical places,
- [00:04:25.608]they called phone numbers, they found bits of the story,
- [00:04:28.211]and then they talked to one another about it.
- [00:04:31.568]Susan and I worked together with a guy named
- [00:04:33.310]Joe Denunzio who had a lovely coin for this
- [00:04:35.710]called search operas because the basic thing
- [00:04:39.091]is I look stuff up and then I gossip about it
- [00:04:41.507]which sort of life now, right?
- [00:04:46.531]So we said okay what makes this interesting
- [00:04:50.723]is the audience.
- [00:04:52.464]It made me think about science fiction but what I somewhat
- [00:04:58.248]flippantly said to the Intel people is that what I mean
- [00:05:01.550]by that in this case is that we recreated 19th
- [00:05:03.587]century science as an entertainment modality.
- [00:05:11.667]In the age of Darwin the way that science worked
- [00:05:14.371]is a guy would say hey I found a funny looking tortoise
- [00:05:17.546]here in Guyana and the next guy would say I'm in France
- [00:05:20.728]and I did and experiment on oxygen.
- [00:05:22.645]The next guy would say I found the bones of what seems
- [00:05:25.585]to be some prehistoric thing on my visit
- [00:05:28.547]to the Americas.
- [00:05:30.248]Then they would write all this stuff up
- [00:05:31.811]and they would send it into the Philosophical Transactions.
- [00:05:34.826]That was the way science progressed.
- [00:05:37.150]It was a worldwide collaboration of amateurs
- [00:05:40.367]who were pooling their information and resources.
- [00:05:45.046]Let me say that slightly differently.
- [00:05:47.891]We're live tweeting the Oscars, right?
- [00:05:51.809]We have entered the age in which we are all living life
- [00:05:56.227]and culture the way that Darwin and his buddies lived
- [00:06:00.008]with science.
- [00:06:01.907]Art, instead of being a noun, is in this sense
- [00:06:06.851]also a verb.
- [00:06:08.750]First there's content, there's the story.
- [00:06:10.691]I made that bit, that's the book or the movie
- [00:06:12.750]or whatever.
- [00:06:13.747]But then there's the experience of collecting
- [00:06:18.430]or engaging with that art.
- [00:06:21.465]Then there's the community that I share
- [00:06:23.891]that experience with.
- [00:06:25.127]Those two other things are really important.
- [00:06:28.448]I mentioned earlier the best thing that ever happened to me
- [00:06:30.448]when I wrote a book, because I won the World Fantasy Award
- [00:06:32.147]and 11 months later they sent me a little thing.
- [00:06:36.704]For each of the big ARG experiences I got invited
- [00:06:39.011]to someone's wedding.
- [00:06:41.827]Because during the course of the game
- [00:06:43.528]people met, were passionately engaged, fell in love,
- [00:06:48.691]and it was so important to them that they wanted the guys
- [00:06:51.230]who had made the game to be there at their wedding.
- [00:06:57.198]I have never yet had someone, oh my God, that's not true.
- [00:07:00.787]I did get a wedding invite for Yoda, Dark Rendezvous.
- [00:07:03.651](laughing)
- [00:07:05.128]Story for another time, very fast segue.
- [00:07:08.328]When a girl says he told me the story of the extended
- [00:07:11.368]Star Wars Universe for six hours and right then
- [00:07:13.987]I knew he was the one.
- [00:07:17.194](laughing)
- [00:07:18.942]Dude never let her go.
- [00:07:20.899](laughing)
- [00:07:22.798]There are not two of that woman.
- [00:07:24.718](laughing)
- [00:07:28.681]All right, so let me give you an example of the kind of art
- [00:07:33.241]you can make, and I say this as a novelist.
- [00:07:35.599]I read Henry James for fun, that's how old-school I am.
- [00:07:39.640]But there are things that you can do inside this,
- [00:07:41.865]oh as a graphic artist I'm a pretty good speller.
- [00:07:45.721](laughing)
- [00:07:47.822]Here's something you can do that you cannot do
- [00:07:49.465]in a novel in the same way.
- [00:07:52.302]Susan Barnes and I worked on a project called
- [00:07:53.958]last called Poker.
- [00:07:55.203]There was a character that you might interact with
- [00:07:57.582]called Lucky.
- [00:07:58.723]Lucky was the patriarch of a family.
- [00:08:02.019]He was trying to make sure everything worked out well,
- [00:08:05.236]and he was also dead.
- [00:08:06.761]So you spent a lot of time talking to ghosts.
- [00:08:11.259]One of the things that Lucky would do if he needed
- [00:08:13.641]a little help was he'd ask for a favor from you.
- [00:08:16.105]These things were called small favors.
- [00:08:17.561]And an example of one of the favors he would ask
- [00:08:19.822]is he would say I want you to go to a cemetery
- [00:08:22.479]somewhere near you lived and I want you to find the grave
- [00:08:26.350]of someone who died on the day you were born
- [00:08:31.661]and just do something nice, clean it up,
- [00:08:34.942]write a poem, take a picture, leave a gift.
- [00:08:37.203]Whatever you choose to do that's okay.
- [00:08:39.225]Then just tell me about it.
- [00:08:42.921]Many people wrote in to say that was the most profound
- [00:08:45.481]artistic experience they had had in their lives.
- [00:08:49.498]I was doing a little research preparing for this talk
- [00:08:52.985]and I found someone who wrote two years ago
- [00:08:55.741]about the fact that he and his daughter went out
- [00:08:57.742]to do this together and it's still and experience
- [00:08:59.880]that resonate with the two of them that they talk about
- [00:09:01.801]to this day.
- [00:09:03.225]It is profoundly personal because the audience
- [00:09:06.345]is bringing their whole selves into it.
- [00:09:09.241]And yet it's inside a construction,
- [00:09:11.742]I mean, you know I was writing the character of Lucky
- [00:09:13.321]and all that sort of thing.
- [00:09:14.862]It's this merge, collaboration between the initiating
- [00:09:19.161]artist and the audience who are also participating
- [00:09:21.464]artists in their own right.
- [00:09:25.480]That leads to some interesting questions about
- [00:09:28.361]where art is centered.
- [00:09:30.119]A lot of people, Robert got to everything all of us
- [00:09:33.022]are going to say.
- [00:09:34.483](laughing)
- [00:09:37.443]And it was awesome.
- [00:09:40.105]In a sense we were kind of vaporized,
- [00:09:42.505]but we remain as sort of dust trails.
- [00:09:45.721](laughing)
- [00:09:49.001]One of the things that happens is there is a different
- [00:09:51.523]ownership over art now.
- [00:09:54.461]I gave a keynote a few years ago at a thing
- [00:09:57.098]called Power Pixel.
- [00:09:58.185]My title was the Tyrant in Winter which is how can I pretend
- [00:10:03.001]to share power with the audience while retaining
- [00:10:05.382]as much as I humanly can, because I grew up writing novels
- [00:10:08.880]and I like being the boss.
- [00:10:11.102]But the fact is we are not the controllers in the way
- [00:10:13.843]we used to be.
- [00:10:15.140]Here are a couple of examples.
- [00:10:19.305]Who owns Harry Potter?
- [00:10:20.942]Okay, legal answer, J.K. Rowling owns Harry Potter.
- [00:10:23.557]Other legal answer, Warner Brothers owns Harry Potter.
- [00:10:26.183]Other legal answer, a bunch of lawyer who will sue your ass.
- [00:10:31.225]But in metaphorical terms, in the first five novels
- [00:10:34.540]you can see that there was a lot of work
- [00:10:36.778]that J.K. Rowling put in.
- [00:10:38.281]There's 717,000 words over those first five books.
- [00:10:42.521]Here's fanfiction.net, that's one website yesterday.
- [00:10:48.439]There are three-quarters of a million complete stories
- [00:10:52.182]set in the Harry Potter universe on that one website.
- [00:10:57.081]Among those stories, for instance, are the editions
- [00:11:00.184]of Hermione, Queen of Witches, which are all seven novels
- [00:11:04.262]rewritten from Hermione's point of view.
- [00:11:06.846]That counts as seven of those three-quarter of a million.
- [00:11:11.166]Not only has J.K. Rowling written less than one percent
- [00:11:16.239]of all the Harry Potter material that has ever been written,
- [00:11:20.402]J.K. Rowling has written less than 50%
- [00:11:22.323]of all the Harry Potter material that's ever been read.
- [00:11:26.446]She is the important.
- [00:11:28.963]She's primus inter pares, it's academic so we use Latin.
- [00:11:33.523](laughing)
- [00:11:35.683]But she does not own it in the way that we used
- [00:11:38.046]to own things as artists.
- [00:11:40.766]This is a dance.
- [00:11:43.182]I'm gonna do something slightly more Nebraska themed.
- [00:11:47.821]Are you ready for some football?
- [00:11:49.742]Last year the total revenues of the NFL
- [00:11:51.523]were 13 billion dollars.
- [00:11:53.199]That's advertising revenue, jersey sales, ticket sales,
- [00:11:55.443]the whole shebang.
- [00:11:58.461]Did I mention live tweeting the Oscars?
- [00:12:00.905]Years and years ago a bunch of people made up a game
- [00:12:04.062]called Rotisserie Baseball where you would pick players
- [00:12:08.046]and then you'd see how they did over the season.
- [00:12:10.779]Then you'd compare your list of players
- [00:12:12.025]against other people's players.
- [00:12:13.403]This has picked up and become very prevalent
- [00:12:15.919]to now we have for instance Fantasy Football.
- [00:12:18.563]How many people here have ever participated
- [00:12:19.860]in a fantasy league?
- [00:12:21.982]Right, there are a few of you.
- [00:12:24.183]Last year the revenues of this game that the audience
- [00:12:28.344]made up about football were 15 billion dollars.
- [00:12:34.542]The audience game about the thing is worth more money
- [00:12:37.961]than the thing.
- [00:12:40.720]Welcome to the world we now live in.
- [00:12:43.662]Sure wish I could remember what our next slide is.
- [00:12:46.585]Oh hey that's easy.
- [00:12:49.545]We're getting to the point of where storytelling is going
- [00:12:51.721]and what the Carson Center can do.
- [00:12:54.585]This spring I released an interactive comic book
- [00:12:57.923]game platform thing on the App Store where just to add
- [00:13:02.482]my version to Robert's number, we got picked as
- [00:13:05.361]games we love and I was really excited.
- [00:13:07.545]I wrote back and I said so how many games came out
- [00:13:09.182]this week to be on notice?
- [00:13:10.560]They said this week we released 4,000.
- [00:13:13.385](laughing)
- [00:13:15.065]There were 4,000 games to be released on the App Store
- [00:13:17.022]that week.
- [00:13:18.462]So I thought okay I'm super pumped now.
- [00:13:23.182]I was going to put this game out but I needed some help.
- [00:13:25.283]I needed that help to be really smart,
- [00:13:27.342]and really now, and fairly inexpensive, student.
- [00:13:32.382]And I asked myself okay, what am I going to need
- [00:13:36.563]from that person?
- [00:13:40.745]I ended up hiring Althea and I'm going to tell you
- [00:13:43.897]about Althea because Althea is one version of what you might
- [00:13:47.646]want to be producing here.
- [00:13:50.985]Content, remember that content, experience, community?
- [00:13:54.883]Content, well Althea shoots and edits film.
- [00:13:58.105]She's a USC graduate so thank you, Norm.
- [00:14:02.024]She can work in Final Cut or she can fool around in Maya.
- [00:14:05.363]She can make movie stuff and you need that
- [00:14:08.585]because when you put stuff up in the App Store
- [00:14:09.418]you have to have a little video of what happens
- [00:14:10.301]in your game play as well as if you were making
- [00:14:12.680]promotional material.
- [00:14:14.024]She can make graphics in Photoshop and inDesign
- [00:14:16.200]and a whole bunch of other things so that you can get help
- [00:14:19.205]making promotional material.
- [00:14:20.920]Because this is my graphics skill.
- [00:14:26.461]So you don't let a commercial product have that, right?
- [00:14:30.098]She can write and she can edit.
- [00:14:33.762]She also has a three-and-a-half octave singing range
- [00:14:36.040]but I haven't found a way to make that part
- [00:14:38.162]of the gig yet.
- [00:14:40.258]The consumer experience, she also has game design background
- [00:14:43.661]and some UX, UI design background so she understands
- [00:14:47.021]how it is that people want to maneuver through a website
- [00:14:51.021]or through an experience.
- [00:14:53.202]If I say hey can you fix up the website,
- [00:14:56.835]she's very good at HTML and Java.
- [00:14:59.042]She has a little bit of Ruby script, a little bit
- [00:15:00.861]of Python script.
- [00:15:02.520]So she can actually make those adjustment.
- [00:15:04.196]I'm a 51-year old who read Henry James for fun
- [00:15:07.122]so I'm not gonna be writing the Python script.
- [00:15:11.256](laughing)
- [00:15:13.317]Community, she's a native user of the social media stuff
- [00:15:16.258]that I don't always quite, I can't tell you about
- [00:15:21.101]my Instagram, and otherwise I'm fairly quiet.
- [00:15:25.581]She's a native users of those forums and she also knows
- [00:15:28.996]a little bit, her way around the API's for how to
- [00:15:32.978]embed stuff in Facebook.
- [00:15:34.941]Then we've gone together on the journey of learning
- [00:15:36.882]the advertising tie-ins for that sort of thing.
- [00:15:41.016]And she is a fan herself and this matters
- [00:15:43.181]because just as all those people are making
- [00:15:47.661]Harry Potter fan fics, J.K. Rowling has to understand
- [00:15:51.617]something about those people and treat them
- [00:15:53.218]with some respect.
- [00:15:54.495]You need people in your, as you cede power
- [00:15:58.279]you have to treat those people nice.
- [00:16:01.296]Just as in a brief experiment, in the room how many people
- [00:16:06.418]have heard of shaw accounts?
- [00:16:09.880]Pretty unanimous right?
- [00:16:11.544]Okay how many people can do some degree of digital editing?
- [00:16:16.264]You can make movies, it's a film school so good.
- [00:16:18.561]Photoshop, that kind of thing?
- [00:16:20.845]Yeah, okay how many people have game design experience?
- [00:16:27.101]Fewer but some, like maybe a dozen.
- [00:16:31.564]Scripting, I don't really care what.
- [00:16:33.323]Write a little code of some kind.
- [00:16:35.997]So more than the gamers, maybe twice as many
- [00:16:38.238]as the gamers.
- [00:16:39.341]And then how many are fairly active social media users?
- [00:16:45.442]That's really interesting.
- [00:16:47.202]Okay last question.
- [00:16:48.562]Anyone who raised their hand every other time
- [00:16:50.584]and can answer this question, if you're looking
- [00:16:52.979]for a job come see me.
- [00:16:55.565]How many people here know what JohnLocke/fic is?
- [00:17:00.524]Okay, I'm not gonna tell anyone, but you ask them
- [00:17:03.101]and they'll explain it.
- [00:17:04.744](laughing)
- [00:17:07.042]The reason it helps in this age of the world
- [00:17:09.000]or just to actually get to a funny end of the slide
- [00:17:11.944]because oh my God, I'm between you people and coffee,
- [00:17:14.381](laughing)
- [00:17:18.221]Star Wars Rogue One came out, that was a big thing
- [00:17:22.045]with the fan communities in science fiction
- [00:17:24.002]that I'm one of.
- [00:17:25.202]We wanted to do a little something and we had this game
- [00:17:28.120]coming out.
- [00:17:29.119]Here's the sort of thing that a person like Althea
- [00:17:31.784]can do in 10 minutes that I couldn't do in the rest
- [00:17:33.243]of my life.
- [00:17:35.538]Because did I mention I wrote Yoda, Dark Rendezvous?
- [00:17:39.097]And see like.
- [00:17:41.842](laughing)
- [00:17:43.277]For my selfish opinion this is what I want
- [00:17:45.234]the Carson Center to produce, that, that.
- [00:17:48.539]Many, many times.
- [00:17:49.786](laughing)
- [00:17:51.245]I'm gonna stop and let you guys eat pastries.
- [00:17:52.904](upbeat instrumental music)
The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!
You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.
Log in to post comments
Embed
Copy the following code into your page
HTML
<div style="padding-top: 56.25%; overflow: hidden; position:relative; -webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1;">
<iframe
style="bottom: 0; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; border: 0; height: 100%; width: 100%;"
src="https://mediahub.unl.edu/media/7938?format=iframe&autoplay=0"
title="Video Player: Carson Conversations Forum | Sean Stewart"
allowfullscreen
></iframe>
</div>
Comments
0 Comments