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Elan Lee's Alternate Reality
EL: Cathy’s Book is another wild experiment. It’s on the New York Times bestseller list right now, which is very exciting for us. That sort of validates a lot of the assumptions that we made about the product. It’s a very, very early step. You buy the book, and it serves the absolute goal of being a book. It’s entertaining to sit down and read the thing. When someone says, I called Joe to see what the deal was with blah, well, there’s his phone number, you can call Joe yourself and see what the deal is with blah. It’s kind of like fiction enhancements–just a little bit more real. When we talk about a photograph that Cathy grabbed and tore up, as you flip through the book, there is that photograph, torn up in pieces, and the fun part is you can put them back to together and flip it over and see a phone number on the back, which you can call, which leads to the next part. But the interactive model kind of ends there. There’s no mystery that you can solve that the book won’t on it’s own. GS: So the story is an end in itself? EL: Exactly. But again, this was just version one. We wanted to try, can we create real world examples to enhance the storytelling process in a way that people are comfortable with? You’re comfortable sitting down, reading a book. Future versions will build more on that. We don’t want to abandon the concept that, hey, a book is fun just to read start to finish, but we’ll be able to provide more interaction, and make that interaction more relevant, and more important, without which, things will not happen, parts of the book will actually not resolve themselves until you take action to resolve them.
GS: How will that work? A book is there, in your hands. You can’t block off certain sections. EL: We look at it as, there’s the plot, and then there are subplots. The main plot is something we’ll always lock down. It’ll always come to a satisfying conclusion by the time you get to the end of the book. But those subplots are things that we can really experiment with, and that’s what you’ll see in version two. Version three will be far more experimental. GS: How important is writing in your games? Even beyond Cathy’s Book, there seems to be a narrative behind all the work you’ve done. EL: One of the partners of our company is a guy named Sean Stewart, an award-winning science fiction/fantasy novelist who is, in a very real sense, the backbone of most of our projects. Without the narrative, we have really good delivery platforms, but no story to deliver. Sean pushes our stories forward in a way that brings them to life. Fifty percent of our players are female, which is unheard of for video games, and I would argue that the main reason for that is our stories rock. That’s Sean Stewart working his magic. GS: Is that fifty percent of all players, or of the hardcore fanatics? EL: It’s hard to say exactly. We don’t actively pole our users. What we do instead is we find out what communities already exist, and we monitor them very closely. Even in the core, like the hardcore gamers, when they run their own self-poling, they’re fifty percent women. It’s really unexpected. But it makes us very happy to see because it means we’re firing on cylinders that most games leave idle. GS: You had mentioned the Lost ARG as an example of an unsuccessful ARG. What do you think went wrong with the experience? EL: It’s not that I disliked the experience, I disliked the implementation of it, and I think the distinction is very important. I personally monitored Lost very, very closely, and was watching the community and watching the players and playing it myself and trying to be thorough in my analysis of what went well and what went poorly. Lost made an assumption that I know I personally am guilty of time and time again, that a given activity that is fun will continue to be fun when it’s repeated a large number of times. It’s something that you need to course correct from. In the case I Love Bees, when people got bored answering pay phones over and over again, we started making live phone calls, and we did actual games online, and changed up the game model because we didn’t want it to get stale. Lost never quite captured that. While their story was good, their delivery never changed, and people got bored of it. Just looking at the people contributing actively, it seems clear that their numbers took a steep fall. GS: Lost itself seems to have an ARG-like quality. Do you see a connection between shows like Lost and the rescent rise of ARG’s? Maybe something in the air? EL: Absolutely. A lot of this has to do with the internet. Because communities form and talk, television producers and game producers now have access to these discussions, and they see that their audience is a lot smarter than in the past they’ve been given credit for. As a result, people are willing to take a lot more risks. Lost is a great example. They’re constantly forcing the audience to make speculations. I’ve been watching Heroes lately, and finding the little half DNA symbol all over the place is a fun, engaging activity. If you look at the communities hypothesizing about it, you can tell in the script writing, there are producers watching those conversations, because storylines and the characters react to exactly what the community is talking about. Because of that access, there’s a lot more trust, and a lot more experimentation. |
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