Jim Munroe interviews Sean Stewart and Elan Lee

Jim Munroe interviews Sean Stewart and Elan Lee from 42 Entertainment
Game Designers' Conference in San Francisco, March 10, 2005
Transcribed by Phuong Nguyen

Sean:...and so when we were told that we had won this thing, I asked Elan is this a big deal or whatever? And he said yeah, it is a big deal. "You probably don't know how strange it is that they would even recognized what we did as a game let alone gave us an award," and he paused for a second and he said, "kind of like the Academy giving an Oscar for a skywriting demonstration."

[laughter]

Jim: Great, great. And so do you have a background in videogames or have you done...?

Elan: Yes, I was the lead game designer for Microsoft for five years and...

Jim: So is this kind of like a homecoming, or what's the feeling around that?

Elan: that's a tough question. It feels...when I was in the game industry, the mainstream game industry working for Microsoft, it never felt I was in the exactly right place. Oddly, the other game designers tried to break out of the box and tried to do something new and innovative and exciting and it felt very constrained around here...and so to approach it from a different angle and get in through the back door and to be appreciated for that feels very nice.

Jim: What was sort of the breakthrough point for you to decide to do that?

Elan: I was still in the Microsoft when we made the Beast, the AI campaign, and that did really well and it sort of started this whole alternate reality gaming thing. Sean and I really worked hard on that and when we finished, the only thing either of us wanted to do was to make more of them because they were so cool and we had all these people playing and it was really exciting. And the reason that one worked was because only no one within Microsoft knew about it, only four people in the whole company that knew about it.

Sean: A black op.

Elan: Seriously. It was very, very secret and very hidden.

Sean: Two people at Dreamworks, four people at Microsoft. Outside the team, those were the only people who knew. Patty Kennedy and Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks knew and four people at Microsoft knew.

Jim: Was Microsoft tied in directly to AI ?

Elan: Microsoft had bought the games right from Warner Brothers, so there was partnership that existed and they wanted to build games centered around a movie. This was the first game of a series of games that was going to come out, the other ones unfortunately never made it out.

Sean: Did you come out of Schindler's List thinking, "Gotta play that game"? They had to find a way to make it meaningful to make games out of that movie, you don't come out of AI thinking, hey: first person shooter! And so to extend that the in dubious taste Schindler's List analogy, you can't really make a game out of that movie, but you can make lots of video games out of the Second World War and you make lots of video games inside that world. Our idea was to build a world so that they could make games around that world. We didn't make the other games but we built the world.

Elan: For example I was getting emails from people two offices down saying, "Did you hear about this weird AI thing? You've got to try it," and it was very indicative of no one knew hat this as, no one knew where this thing was coming from, it was all very secret. Which allowed us to do a lot of things that a Microsoft project could not do: we didn't have to attend meetings, we didn't have to get approval from 18 levels of managers, you know, we got to cut a lot of corners... so when it was done and when it was successful, and when we go back to do more, now all of suddenly everyone knew about it. Now all of sudden: here's your section of the building, and here's your team, and here's your budget, and here's your financial manager and here's your testing team and we were like, great, power and responsibility! But half a year later -- and almost no progress -- we thought it was just not an ideal environment for a game that is supposed down and dirty and scrappy and at that point we sort of jumped ship and started 42 Entertainment and been building them ever since.

Jim: Ok, and now that this is on it's way to becoming a genre, alternate gaming genre, do you personally have as much enthusiasm for it or is creating the new thing the driving force?

Sean: If you think about the history of the automobile, what we did was take a carriage and stick a steam engine in it and make it go, and that was really exciting -- but we haven't made 57 Thunderbirds yet, you know what I'm saying? There's a long way to go before you can exhaust the possibilities of the can of worms that we opened up. I've stopped to talk parenthetically to say, the guy's whose idea it was to do the the Beast, was a man named Jordan Weitzman -- Elan's boss at Microsoft and the presiding genie of 42. I don't know if you know any of Jordan's other games: Battle Tech (which was doing multiplayer online games when people were using 300 baud modems), Mech Warrior, Crimson Skies, many many many games...

Elan: Quite a name in the games business...

Sean: A whiz kid.....

Sean: We're really where the car or the movie industry was in 1903...there's still like a guy playing an organ at the bottom and people holding up placards saying, "Oh No!" It's not like we did a thing and now everyone knows how to do the thing and goes on to the next thing because this thing is still very amorphous so... with I Love Bees we changed a huge number of the core parameters of what an alternative reality game can be and at first the people who played the Bees would be like "what the hell is this?"

Jim: [laughs] That's exciting!

Sean: We have given ourselves a niche that is both exhilarating and a bit terrifying which is: we are the guys that are doing something that has never been done before -- and that's actually a tough pigeon hole to be in, because no one's beta-tested it, the next game we do we'll probably use some of the ARG stuff but will again almost certainly be something no one's ever done before.

Elan: Yeah, I still get very excited about it rather than thinking about new things while it is a genre in its infancy and still a genre defined by innovation and defined by reinvention and the games that are within this genre that are just knockoffs of what has been before don't tend to get as much recognition and don't tend to do as well as the games that embrace the genre and say, hey, you know this is a reality game therefore we need to look at reality as whole and combine all the different ways there are to communicate with people and all the different ways to storytell.

Sean: Exactly. That's a good point. These kind of games...now I'm gonna sound evangelical....these kind of games....do you listen to music much? If you listen to a Velvet Underground album from the late '60s, leaving aside the individual tracks, there is a sound to that record. There's a sound to a mid-stage Bowie albums, there's a sound to the record. ARGs are the sound of the twenty-first century. They sound like what today feels like. You're sitting here with a mini- tape recorder on one hand and a Blackberry on the other hand and you've got a cell phone somewhere I'm guessing... you're talking to us... you emailed me yesterday... that's life. And the key thing about an ARG is the way it jumps off all those platforms. It's a game that's social and comes at you across all the different ways that you connect to the world around you.

Elan: The electronic sphere is what we've dubbed it.

Sean: So the ARG...a video game.. a classic video game...even a really good video game is TV as a game...it's a 1950s platform taken to the furthest degree. ARGs are a 2001 platform that we're just now starting to build.

Jim: But the telephone, which Bees uses, isn't a new form of communication...

Elan: Well, I think for any new platform there's a gestation period. It needs to be accepted, it needs to be modified, and it needs to find a tone. Once the technology adapts itself to what the community wants it to be then it becomes ripe for a gaming platform. It's pretty much only at that point that we can figure out how people are going to be comfortable interacting with the technology or the communication method and hijack it for our own purposes.

Sean: And Nokia for instance, do you know about the Nokia game? So Nokia, where ever they're from, Finland right? Finland notoriously the country where no one likes to meet other face to face, they talk on the cell phone all the time, so the Nokia game is a hugely successful game, that is played entirely over phones. I was talking once to Jordan Weisman, who I mentioned earlier, and he said "Did you know that video games sales have been down in Japan for the first time in history?" and I said, "Ahh, I wonder why that is." And he said, "They're being out-competed by another entertainment platform," and I said "What?" and he said "Cell phones. Japanese teenagers have found cell phones and the truth is no game is as interesting as another teenager."

Jim: That's true.

Elan: And that's part of the reason that ARGs are a hit because they are intensely social.

Jim: Right and also because they have a human brain, several human brains behind it. And that's the sort of thing that hits me... you know, artificial intelligence is maybe not so important... maybe when you have massively multiplayer games with people puppetmasters behind them kind of like pulling the strings and rolling with the punches and coming up with new things... Do you think at some point it'll move on to other players creating the content?

Elan: Yeah there's a famous quote that Jordan says this all the time: the very few cannot entertain the very many for very long. Which is I think is very indicative of where this has to go. There is only so long that we will be able to create enough content to satisfy the appetite of these growing numbers of fans, even when the numbers were quite low it's very hard for us to you know... they burn through everything... they eat up everything... they always want more... and so like Sean was saying the most entertaining thing to another sixteen year old is another sixteen year old. I think that sort of thing applies to most audiences. The most interesting thing to a horde is another horde and we keep being... are forced to acknowledge that and find ways to integrate that into future game designs because that's the only way this will survive.

Sean: In both of the games we've done we've tried to encourage players to create peripheral content and to become engaged with one another on that basis, in the long run I mean one of the next things you're going to see... sooner or later an ARG is going to have to develop a combat model, and by combat model, I don't necessarily mean that people have to fight but I mean an interaction that has meaning in the game that can take place between two players in the game w/o us monitoring and responding. That combat model might be, "Hey baby, wanna go on a date?" "Hey sailor, no way," you know? Some kind of interaction that can happen... this is the basis of the World of Warcraft, or Everquest, right? In that case, the creators have dialed down the greater importance of their story but have just created a big place where you can go and hang with their buddies. ARGs have been much more story-focused with us pushing much more of the content but I think that if you wanted it going for a long time, you can eventually either go on the model we built that is short and intense or if you want to build a community that stays long for a long time, you're going to have to see the story-making power increasing. The longer you want it to go, the more of the story-making power you're going to have to feed the players.

Jim: Right, the difficulty I see in that kind of thing is the question of authority. People are used to having the "real" puppetmasters and probably there will be the kind of tension where "Oh, this sounds like this was created by someone my age, I don't like it as much or I don't think it's legitimate." On the other hand you have something like punk rock where 16 year old kids play to 16 year old kids and you know, that became something, it's acceptable, you don't have to be older, or... you know...

Sean: Right, but how many of those records do you play now? [laughs]

Jim: Well, whether or now it makes good art is debatable, but it certainly makes a community.

Sean: Bill Gibson has this line...I was at this conference once ten years ago.. and they had Gibson on the panel, and it was about the future of interactive fiction and he was there because it was in Vancouver and they kind of had to have him as you know the Guru of the Future. But his comment, after the other four panelists had talked about the glory of hypertext and where it was going to go in the future, was "Well, you know I'm a professional writer, what I do for a living is put words in a certain order and I kind of hope they stay that way." You know? The theory is that, those of us who are professionals, are at least a little better at making narrative shapes that contain energy and hold energy. How to balance those things, I don't know. But I'm very excited to find out.

Elan: When you open the door to player-created content, to me you can pull it off as long you're very clear with the audience if you set their expectation accordingly. If they're able to very clearly understand what was created by a puppetmaster and what was created by another player and then understand that the reward for solving or beating content created by another player is going to be at this level, but the reward for solving something by a puppetmaster is going to change the game way up here. As long as you can provide that experience and make it very clear in so that they understand what challenges can they accept and what they want to bypass and what's at stake then all of a sudden you've got a very interesting world when they can make their own choices and take the game where they want to take it.

Sean: hmm, that's nicely put.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, a hierarchical system of choices at some point.

Sean: Imagine you built an ARG of the war of the roses.

Jim: Ok.

Sean: You're all villagers somewhere in Lancaster. You figure out what you're going to do with the village, you figure out what you're doing with the town, over here we're going to be Yorks and Lancasters. And you know Richard the Second will come through recruiting and Henry the fourth will come through recruiting and our armies will pass and the fate of the nation will depend on those engagements and what you do and we'll be watching that. What happens in your village you know your political trials, struggles, hangings, or witch hunts or whatever matters to you because you're part of the society and those are rule sets that will allow you to figure out what happens. But we still control the higher stakes of the environment and that's a nice model.

Jim: My main question, or my last question is this uh.. I heard about AI through a another friend or whatnot, and I Love Bees is a similar kind of thing. I'm very sensitive, I'm almost allergic to hype, so anything that like, having interviewed you Sean in the past, I know you know it's not just advertising. The marketing element of it is certainly...I mean...you know...

Sean: It's a turn off, absolutely...

Jim: Yeah, so is there anything...like what...is there anything...like the engine of commerce is a really powerful thing to attach your wagon to...and it's like fantastic you know...and I believe you can kind of pull it off and do really great stuff and you guys have...but yeah the question is, what are the levels of tension or like the points wher e you go, oh this is where...this is where suddenly I see the tension point where I've been wrapped up in making story up until now and now I see, okay this is the difficulty, where are the challenges in that kind of creative marketing and what not? And if you want, I'm curious for my own thing, so obviously, for stuff that you want off the record...I mean obviously, I would love to use it...but I'm just fascinated...

Elan: We hate marketing, too. Honestly, I mean.

Sean: The reason we get gigs as a marketing company is people say, we need to market to people who hate marketing. And because we hate marketing I guess we're in this...I guess the word is "quisling."

Elan: You say you're marketing-allergic, but I mean we're marketing-phobic, maybe even beyond that. When we approach a project the intent is to always...we need our audience...there's no doubt in anyone's mind when they look at this...this is a promotion for Halo 2. "I saw the clue in the trailer, this is a promotion for Halo 2.” At some point, every audience member for our games needs to make a decision to momentarily dismiss it... momentarily take a leap of faith or suspension of disbelief and say, "I'm going to forget about that part for just a second and see what this thing is." And our goal, our job, if we do it right, is to make that comfortable and inviting so that they are very anxious to get to that point and when they get to that point they have no problem when they get to that point, "I saw in the Halo trailer but whatever... what's going on in this world?" And the delicate nature of these projects is that once that trust is established, so step one is establish that trust so that they are willing to do it, and step two is to maintain that trust: don't do anything that will make them feel dirty for playing, is going to make them feel marketed to, is going make them feel like we're forcing anything on them...

Sean: You never have to buy a product, you were never encouraged to buy a product, there was never a sell, all of it in fact...and we tell this up front to the client, what we will do if you have an interesting world we'll tell an interesting story and we'll let people engage in that and that's cool but we are never going to put up an ad that says, "buy an Xbox!" you know?

Elan: And it's never going to say Microsoft, and it's never going to say Bungie.

Sean:And right, because of the two big projects we've done, and the marketing thing, and there's second answer to your question that I will get down to in a minute, when you are dealing with IP, intellectual property, for a really successful game or a Steven Spielberg movie, there's actually one thing that works in our favour is that we don't want to use any of their characters -- and they don't want us to either. I mean, that's the beauty of it, in fact they don't want their IP infringed on so in AI, in our game that we did, our game takes place four years after the film, and there's one character in our game who's 45 or 50 who was 10 in the movie and it's the only character overlap in the movie. Similarly, you never see, I don't know if you've ever played Halo, but you never see the Master Chief, there's no battles in outer space in our game. I mean there's about is about six very ordinary people following their lives six months leading up to when the game occurs. Usually the licensees are also happy for us to stay away from their core characters, constraints, and situations which makes a nice match.
The second answer to your question is, lots of people in the ARG community are really interested in finding another way, another model. There's a game starting this month called Perplex City, which is attempting to go with a different revenue model. And we are watching with eager interest. The trouble is, the way we've done it, ARGs are not cheap to make.
I would venture to say, on what little I know of Michelangelo, that if they were a lot of gigs not painting madonnas, he would of painted a lot more not madonnas. But the people with the money to pay you to paint tended to have some things they wanted you to put on the ceiling. And you don't have to love it, but...

Jim: But those are some of the constraints to work with...

Sean: Those are some of the constraints that we're under...we don't have to shoot people in our games but we have another kind of constraint. We are actually working on two different ideas that are not marketing revenue models and we'll see.

Elan: One of the other roadblocks when we approach something like this... the conflict that arises is....we understand all too clearly the trust that arises between the puppetmasters and the players and the conflict that is created between that...and the people who are paying the bills want very much for their names to be all on everything and there's this constant clash, and what we kind of realize there is that...what we try to tell all our clients when we start any project, we will try to convert a large number of people from a push model to a pull model. What a push model is what very standard advertising is... you're sitting around and things are just being forced at you... and you reject most of them...every once in a while you're interested in one...but you're bombarded... and it's information, information and you ignore most of it. And we're going to try and translate that into a pull model and kind of excite people about a property and a world so that they go out and they pull the things towards them. So that they are going to go, you don't need to put your commercial on primetime eight o'clock on NBC, go put it on a cable channel at 4am and we guarantee that not only fans will stay up to watch it, they'll record it, they'll analyse every frame of it and they'll put it on the internet and dissect each and every one of them.

Sean: You hire us to market it to people who can't be marketed to, so here's the deal, we're not going to market to them. But hold that thought....

Jim: but also, you're discussing cultural products, it's not soda pop...

Sean: It would be really hard to make the soda pop ARG...
although...

Elan: some of our clients are presenting some really interesting challenges... and we are forced more and more into start thinking about "how could you build an ARG that has no story and no roles and no characters, you know?"...how do you build one around that? but it's really fun to think about.

Sean: I'm always always extremely suspicious of this whenever someone else uses this but I'm going to do it anyway. You know the guy who's making $150,000 and wearing a three-piece who says, "But yeah, I'm subverting the machine from within"? Ok, so we're going to argue that we're that guy. One of the things that you could look at it is that "I'm Joe Consumer, and I grew up in the era of MTV and TiVo, so you're fucked. If you want me to pay attention to your message you gotta make it worth my time, because I'm no longer required to sit through your commercials." If you have a commercial message, we are on the leading edge of making it work the consumer's while to pay any attention to, so if you'd like, we are the consumer advocacy group that says: these people are smart people and they don't want to listen to you if you want them to listen to you you have to give them something of value, just restating your message doesn't cut it anymore. This is a relationship where you have to give them what they want, not just for their money but even for their attention. So it's the same impulse in some senses that makes people make "funny" commercials because there is a value equation here where the consumer no longer has to support it.

Jim: But it's a much harder sell, in that you're going to bringing them through a whole range of emotion. Not just like, "Oh that's hilarious, I have good feelings now associated with Coca-Cola now," you know...it's like...you know that's sad... of course there's a group of people who very hungry for it and looking for something... but promotion and advertising is huge part of our culture.

Sean: there's a funny open niche... on one side you have a lot of marketers who want to reach an audience but that audience doesn't want to hear them. Over in the game world, there aren't many games, no one's building many games that are giving you what art gives which is the chance to laugh, to feel nostalgic, or to fall in love, or those sort of things. We make movies that do that, we write books that do that, we're not very good at making games that do that. But games are social and interactive, so they ought to be able to carry that kind of emotional load and now, not speaking even remotely as someone who works for a company that has to get clients to build things. You know me in my other life...I'm a novelist. So scoring for me is getting an emotional response and some shared sense of "Omigod, you wake up in the middle of life and this is what's it like," and that's sad, and that's funny, and I don't know what it is but that's awfully like life and that for me is scoring. In the context of an ARG, I want to build a game that does what a novel or a movie will do, so there is this kind of empty slot on the board between company-with-product and game-without-emotion that will meet an intersection point.

Jim: Do you want to talk about some of the differences between the two projects, AI and Bees?

Elan: The differences between the two kind of indicates where we have to go. AI was all about what you know -- because there are puzzles and you had to have a lot of knowledge or know people who had a lot of knowledge in order to solve them. I Love Bees was all about where you are, because it's a geographically-based game, you have to go out and be near a phone and go and answer it. It was a transition we made very consciously to lower the barrier to entry, to really lower that bar as low as possible because we want them to qualify to play simply based on the location where they live and who they might know in a location that was previously inaccessible. And I think it's kind of interesting that we have identified those two models and used them very effectively I think and now sort of, what comes next? The two big candidates are who you are and what you have, and I'm not exactly sure how to describe without violating all these kinds of NDAs about where those lead, but there's this interesting trend about how to bring them into these games, things to identify about them and reward them, simply for living. Simply for having a cell phone, simply for living in a certain location. Systematically going through all of a person's attributes and saying "We're going to make that the game today, so your first name's John, so all the Johns...you know..."

Sean: the big difference, and to expand on what Elan was saying, it was so much more physical. You couldn't play it with just your brain, from the head up. You had to go out, you had to do it in the real world, you had to meet people in the real world, you had to communicate with other human beings in real time in the real world, and that physicality was very nice, one of the reason we loved doing the pay phones I just made you the pitch that this is the first art form that is borne out of the 21st century. There's something very beautiful about playing it on a technology that's going to be obsolete in two years. Pay phones are being phased out really really fast as part of our landscape, there's something really nice and very physical about that.

Jim: I'd like to think of that's native to the age, it's appropriate, wherein other things are trying to jam an old form into a new time, it's like, what is the shape of this age and it's like we'll create something to fill that.

Elan: That's really well said.

Sean: It's not possibly as exciting as how many pixels you can get on a screen but I happen to like that stuff.

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