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-: I looked at my pamphlet last night and it said this
is what my talk was about so I fixed the slide
so it said that at the top.
(laughing)
Something you need to understand about me,
I started as a science fiction novelist.
That's science fiction.
(laughing)
I'm with the vaporized platform.
I started working for this which is an interesting
platform to work for.
I published a bunch of books, so terribly, terribly
important books like Galveston, which won the World
Fantasy Award and Yoda, Dark Rendezvous,
(laughing)
which did not.
(laughing)
But in 2001 I was bitten by a radioactive Spielberg.
They were making a movie called A.I.
and a group at Microsoft wanted to make
a strange, crazy interactive product.
They wanted a very impressive science fiction writer
to be the lead writer of that so they came and asked.
He said no, but I have a broke friend.
(laughing)
And I jumped into the breach and was the lead writer
on the first of what is now called
an alternate reality game.
Alternate reality games are giant Dicken's novels
that play out using every kind of media.
To give you a very fast idea of how you would get
into this sort of thing, that was the poster for the film.
If you looked really hard on the poster,
if you saw it in live form or online you would notice
a couple of odd things.
For instance in the credit block there was a credit
for Jeanine Salla who is the Sentient Machine Therapist.
If you thought to yourself, "What is a Sentient
"Machine Therapist?" and you went and you entered
it in Altavista,
(laughing)
because it was 2001, you would find the webpage
of Jeanine Salla who is the Sentient Machine Therapist
who also had a practice at Bangalor World University's
campus in New York in the year 2142.
From there there were links to many other pages
and people who also lived in the world of 2142
and also had for instance, phone numbers like the one
you might find if you notice that there were tiny
little ticks in the word Summer 2001.
And if you wrote out all the numbers of ticks
it was a 10-digit number.
And what the hell, you could try calling it
and oh my God you'd be talking to someone who also lived
in 2142.
So you would follow that, those trails into a story
which then led to websites for corporations
and individuals who are having bad marriages.
There was a serial killer who was murdering Sentient houses.
It's science fiction, right?
If I tell you there was a kill geisha robot
you are not surprised.
One of the things that's interesting about the internet
as a kind of a printing press is the internet
doesn't care much about how the media is made.
We tend to think about art as a series of nouns
that are defined by their production process.
A book is made of paper and is distributed
and you buy it like shoes.
A movie is another kind of product which you buy
and you play in a machine.
The internet doesn't care about that stuff.
It'll do a website, it'll do text, it'll do video.
What do you want, doesn't matter.
What's important is you are the story
to which everything vectors.
We were asked to talk about it, me and the designer on it,
Yolan Lee, we were asked to go to Intel and talk about it.
They were saying so what is the more interesting thing
about this project?
What we ended up saying is the most interesting thing
about this project is the audience.
Most things we make when we grew up
were singular activities.
I read a book, I watched television.
Maybe I sat in a theater with a bunch of other people,
but each of us had an individual experience of movie
and then we went home.
The audience for the game thing story we had just made
wasn't like that.
It was distributed all over the world
and it was participatory.
They investigated clues, they went to physical places,
they called phone numbers, they found bits of the story,
and then they talked to one another about it.
Susan and I worked together with a guy named
Joe Denunzio who had a lovely coin for this
called search operas because the basic thing
is I look stuff up and then I gossip about it
which sort of life now, right?
So we said okay what makes this interesting
is the audience.
It made me think about science fiction but what I somewhat
flippantly said to the Intel people is that what I mean
by that in this case is that we recreated 19th
century science as an entertainment modality.
In the age of Darwin the way that science worked
is a guy would say hey I found a funny looking tortoise
here in Guyana and the next guy would say I'm in France
and I did and experiment on oxygen.
The next guy would say I found the bones of what seems
to be some prehistoric thing on my visit
to the Americas.
Then they would write all this stuff up
and they would send it into the Philosophical Transactions.
That was the way science progressed.
It was a worldwide collaboration of amateurs
who were pooling their information and resources.
Let me say that slightly differently.
We're live tweeting the Oscars, right?
We have entered the age in which we are all living life
and culture the way that Darwin and his buddies lived
with science.
Art, instead of being a noun, is in this sense
also a verb.
First there's content, there's the story.
I made that bit, that's the book or the movie
or whatever.
But then there's the experience of collecting
or engaging with that art.
Then there's the community that I share
that experience with.
Those two other things are really important.
I mentioned earlier the best thing that ever happened to me
when I wrote a book, because I won the World Fantasy Award
and 11 months later they sent me a little thing.
For each of the big ARG experiences I got invited
to someone's wedding.
Because during the course of the game
people met, were passionately engaged, fell in love,
and it was so important to them that they wanted the guys
who had made the game to be there at their wedding.
I have never yet had someone, oh my God, that's not true.
I did get a wedding invite for Yoda, Dark Rendezvous.
(laughing)
Story for another time, very fast segue.
When a girl says he told me the story of the extended
Star Wars Universe for six hours and right then
I knew he was the one.
(laughing)
Dude never let her go.
(laughing)
There are not two of that woman.
(laughing)
All right, so let me give you an example of the kind of art
you can make, and I say this as a novelist.
I read Henry James for fun, that's how old-school I am.
But there are things that you can do inside this,
oh as a graphic artist I'm a pretty good speller.
(laughing)
Here's something you can do that you cannot do
in a novel in the same way.
Susan Barnes and I worked on a project called
last called Poker.
There was a character that you might interact with
called Lucky.
Lucky was the patriarch of a family.
He was trying to make sure everything worked out well,
and he was also dead.
So you spent a lot of time talking to ghosts.
One of the things that Lucky would do if he needed
a little help was he'd ask for a favor from you.
These things were called small favors.
And an example of one of the favors he would ask
is he would say I want you to go to a cemetery
somewhere near you lived and I want you to find the grave
of someone who died on the day you were born
and just do something nice, clean it up,
write a poem, take a picture, leave a gift.
Whatever you choose to do that's okay.
Then just tell me about it.
Many people wrote in to say that was the most profound
artistic experience they had had in their lives.
I was doing a little research preparing for this talk
and I found someone who wrote two years ago
about the fact that he and his daughter went out
to do this together and it's still and experience
that resonate with the two of them that they talk about
to this day.
It is profoundly personal because the audience
is bringing their whole selves into it.
And yet it's inside a construction,
I mean, you know I was writing the character of Lucky
and all that sort of thing.
It's this merge, collaboration between the initiating
artist and the audience who are also participating
artists in their own right.
That leads to some interesting questions about
where art is centered.
A lot of people, Robert got to everything all of us
are going to say.
(laughing)
And it was awesome.
In a sense we were kind of vaporized,
but we remain as sort of dust trails.
(laughing)
One of the things that happens is there is a different
ownership over art now.
I gave a keynote a few years ago at a thing
called Power Pixel.
My title was the Tyrant in Winter which is how can I pretend
to share power with the audience while retaining
as much as I humanly can, because I grew up writing novels
and I like being the boss.
But the fact is we are not the controllers in the way
we used to be.
Here are a couple of examples.
Who owns Harry Potter?
Okay, legal answer, J.K. Rowling owns Harry Potter.
Other legal answer, Warner Brothers owns Harry Potter.
Other legal answer, a bunch of lawyer who will sue your ass.
But in metaphorical terms, in the first five novels
you can see that there was a lot of work
that J.K. Rowling put in.
There's 717,000 words over those first five books.
Here's fanfiction.net, that's one website yesterday.
There are three-quarters of a million complete stories
set in the Harry Potter universe on that one website.
Among those stories, for instance, are the editions
of Hermione, Queen of Witches, which are all seven novels
rewritten from Hermione's point of view.
That counts as seven of those three-quarter of a million.
Not only has J.K. Rowling written less than one percent
of all the Harry Potter material that has ever been written,
J.K. Rowling has written less than 50%
of all the Harry Potter material that's ever been read.
She is the important.
She's primus inter pares, it's academic so we use Latin.
(laughing)
But she does not own it in the way that we used
to own things as artists.
This is a dance.
I'm gonna do something slightly more Nebraska themed.
Are you ready for some football?
Last year the total revenues of the NFL
were 13 billion dollars.
That's advertising revenue, jersey sales, ticket sales,
the whole shebang.
Did I mention live tweeting the Oscars?
Years and years ago a bunch of people made up a game
called Rotisserie Baseball where you would pick players
and then you'd see how they did over the season.
Then you'd compare your list of players
against other people's players.
This has picked up and become very prevalent
to now we have for instance Fantasy Football.
How many people here have ever participated
in a fantasy league?
Right, there are a few of you.
Last year the revenues of this game that the audience
made up about football were 15 billion dollars.
The audience game about the thing is worth more money
than the thing.
Welcome to the world we now live in.
Sure wish I could remember what our next slide is.
Oh hey that's easy.
We're getting to the point of where storytelling is going
and what the Carson Center can do.
This spring I released an interactive comic book
game platform thing on the App Store where just to add
my version to Robert's number, we got picked as
games we love and I was really excited.
I wrote back and I said so how many games came out
this week to be on notice?
They said this week we released 4,000.
(laughing)
There were 4,000 games to be released on the App Store
that week.
So I thought okay I'm super pumped now.
I was going to put this game out but I needed some help.
I needed that help to be really smart,
and really now, and fairly inexpensive, student.
And I asked myself okay, what am I going to need
from that person?
I ended up hiring Althea and I'm going to tell you
about Althea because Althea is one version of what you might
want to be producing here.
Content, remember that content, experience, community?
Content, well Althea shoots and edits film.
She's a USC graduate so thank you, Norm.
She can work in Final Cut or she can fool around in Maya.
She can make movie stuff and you need that
because when you put stuff up in the App Store
you have to have a little video of what happens
in your game play as well as if you were making
promotional material.
She can make graphics in Photoshop and inDesign
and a whole bunch of other things so that you can get help
making promotional material.
Because this is my graphics skill.
So you don't let a commercial product have that, right?
She can write and she can edit.
She also has a three-and-a-half octave singing range
but I haven't found a way to make that part
of the gig yet.
The consumer experience, she also has game design background
and some UX, UI design background so she understands
how it is that people want to maneuver through a website
or through an experience.
If I say hey can you fix up the website,
she's very good at HTML and Java.
She has a little bit of Ruby script, a little bit
of Python script.
So she can actually make those adjustment.
I'm a 51-year old who read Henry James for fun
so I'm not gonna be writing the Python script.
(laughing)
Community, she's a native user of the social media stuff
that I don't always quite, I can't tell you about
my Instagram, and otherwise I'm fairly quiet.
She's a native users of those forums and she also knows
a little bit, her way around the API's for how to
embed stuff in Facebook.
Then we've gone together on the journey of learning
the advertising tie-ins for that sort of thing.
And she is a fan herself and this matters
because just as all those people are making
Harry Potter fan fics, J.K. Rowling has to understand
something about those people and treat them
with some respect.
You need people in your, as you cede power
you have to treat those people nice.
Just as in a brief experiment, in the room how many people
have heard of shaw accounts?
Pretty unanimous right?
Okay how many people can do some degree of digital editing?
You can make movies, it's a film school so good.
Photoshop, that kind of thing?
Yeah, okay how many people have game design experience?
Fewer but some, like maybe a dozen.
Scripting, I don't really care what.
Write a little code of some kind.
So more than the gamers, maybe twice as many
as the gamers.
And then how many are fairly active social media users?
That's really interesting.
Okay last question.
Anyone who raised their hand every other time
and can answer this question, if you're looking
for a job come see me.
How many people here know what JohnLocke/fic is?
Okay, I'm not gonna tell anyone, but you ask them
and they'll explain it.
(laughing)
The reason it helps in this age of the world
or just to actually get to a funny end of the slide
because oh my God, I'm between you people and coffee,
(laughing)
Star Wars Rogue One came out, that was a big thing
with the fan communities in science fiction
that I'm one of.
We wanted to do a little something and we had this game
coming out.
Here's the sort of thing that a person like Althea
can do in 10 minutes that I couldn't do in the rest
of my life.
Because did I mention I wrote Yoda, Dark Rendezvous?
And see like.
(laughing)
For my selfish opinion this is what I want
the Carson Center to produce, that, that.
Many, many times.
(laughing)
I'm gonna stop and let you guys eat pastries.
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