What do you lose by not controlling it that way, by not thinking it through?

Why is it worth the effort? So that you get more consistent, cohesive [stories]. The ability to weave them across multiple different types of media simultaneously and yet still have a cohesive, coherent and hopefully engaging intellectual property.

And one of the key things to do that is, change as little as you possibly can. You change exactly what you need to change, and only what you need to change, to get the ramifications you're looking for in the universe.

I think it's [also] a respect for the audience. Your audience is individually very smart, but as a collaborative, basically they're God on earth. They are the smartest thing on the planet as a collaborative.

So you really have to respect them. You're not going to pull the wool over their eyes. And they -- I think justifiably so -- want you to establish a set of rules for the universe, and then live within it. It's just a matter of respect for the audience, being able to do that.

The kind of person who keeps track of that, who makes sure you have that continuity and management -- what's the job title for that?

I think at each of the companies I've had in the past, we've had officially the role of continuity manager, whose job is to watch out for that universe and make sure that everything is cohesive.

Now, where that falls apart is when you go off and sell the company, right? Because then at that point, once I don't own it, it's harder for me to control it. So I certainly had things done with my properties that, you know, I would not have done. But unfortunately, that's part of the reality of the world.

But yeah, I think it's either part of the producing role, or the designing role. But it's always been clearly communicated who has that continuity responsibility.

What's the skill set for that person?

Well, it's someone with a fine eye for detail, an editorial sense, an enormous immersion into the universe. They're a writer/editor in that they're able to invest more into that universe.

[For example], there are sometimes novels by scores of different authors, and for the editorial piece, each of the authors is not as well versed in the universe as our continuity editors are. So the continuity editor's job is to work with the authors... and make sure they don't break rules, and put the right people on stage so that it works together.

When I was at Microsoft, I set up the franchise development group to shepherd these things through and to create an overall cohesive enterprise for what we're doing. And part of what my team did was to, whether we were looking at Halo, or working on Crimson Skies or whatever other game, our team would go in, work with them, develop the backgrounds, help write the bibles, create a cohesive environment.

And that would extend into the publishing deals for Halo that we did, and then we would help find the right novelists and work with them inside the bible to create the story -- with the Bungie team, of course.

But typically, the guys who were creating the games don't have the time, energy, or in some cases, the skill sets to build universes. They created this shiny point of light, of one experience, but like many filmmakers, haven't really thought about what surrounds that, [or] what's the world that would've created it.

You come up with a protagonist, but you also have to understand why that protagonist exists. Protagonists and antagonists are the creation of the environments in which they find themselves.

And so you have to create an environment that creates your protagonist and your antagonist, right? You can't take Conan and drop him down in the middle of Manhattan. You have to create a situation that would have created a Conan.