Do you have any plans to work on ARGs?

ARGs are their own kind of life form. They're really not games. A true ARG is closer to a rock concert. It's a temporal event, a gathering of energies all in one place for a short period of time. And afterwards, it's a bit like hearing the album from the concert. It doesn't ever have the vitality and the life of one that unfolds in real time.

So it's a totally different animal. And as a result, not an easy animal to think about how to monetize. By nature it's organic and temporal. So what we've done in the past is do things like Cathy's Book, where we've taken some of the elements of an ARG -- basically, what I call the distributed narrative components -- and taken that into a single-player or single-reader experience.

And hopefully someone can pick up Cathy's Book and read it years after everyone else did, and the experience is as fresh and accessible. Yet there's a backdrop of community that is available mostly in what is left behind, to help those who need help, or want guidance.

I don't want to dive into what kind of product or what kind of audience we're going to be going for, because it is probably going to catch a lot of people by surprise.

Could you say if you're more interested at this in point in real-time experiences, or standalone experiences like Cathy's Book or the upcoming Cathy's Key?

Well, we have a number of things going on in the publishing arena which we are very excited about, as we play with different types of storytelling, as we did with Cathy's Book and Cathy's Key. We've got a number of those kinds of activities underway. And I think those are very fun.

But the main thrust is creating toys and games and experiences which are dynamic, and multiplayer by nature, obviously -- "Nothing is more entertaining than other people." That is certainly a banner for making sure that the main thrust of what we're doing is multiplayer experiences.

I wanted to talk to you about your approach to transmedia storytelling. You've talked in the past about the fictions you've created over the years like BattleTech, and the way you tried to keep the story threads moving in parallel so they would stay in sync and hit the same milestones.

Absolutely. I've always believed that a fundamental property of good property development is the idea that you are telling your story across a wide spectrum of media, and that you're weaving those media together in a cohesive fashion. And indeed we did that with BattleTech for 20+ years. And we will endeavor to do that in some capacity with what we're creating here at Smith & Tinker.

I did a talk on this at DICE a couple years ago. Most people don't practice what I call "planned parenthood." They don't adequately prepare for the baby they're about to give birth to. So they make a single thing. They make a movie, they make a game, and they don't know any more about their world and what's in that world than what's in the game.

Then in the happy circumstance the game becomes enormously popular, all of a sudden they're going to be making a lot more. And they're caught behind the eight ball, frantically trying to write into a background of what's already there. And you get a lot of uncomfortable fits.

And often, they make another movie, as opposed to stepping back and realizing, "Okay, what we need to do is actually figure out what the hell we've created here. What is this universe? How does it work? What makes it tick? What are the primary sociological and economic and political engines that are moving behind the scenes, that make this a compelling story environment?

And if we figure all that out, then we have the ability to create new episodes within that universe, for many years, that are all in a cohesive, well-integrated format."

And unfortunately, a lot of people just don't do it. It's a small, additional investment up front, but in comparison to the cost of creating a movie or a game, it's very small. So, to me, it's an important component.

But it's amazing how many really smart, creative people don't put that extra thought into it, and then get caught up in their own environment. I think one could argue that Tomb Raider was subject to that in the early days. They had this brilliant first game, and a fantastically fun character.

But they didn't know really anything about her, or what her world was about, or what her motivations were. And they had to for many years write all that back into her, for it to actually create a motivation for why she's doing what she does. You end up with stuff that gets pretty derivative, if you're not careful.