2007vt06 Transcription
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Credits
ARGFest 2007 - Roundtable ~ 42 Entertainment ~ Development Process Part II 30:35
- Introduction: Sean C. Stacey (SCS)
- Roundtable by 42 Entertainment - The Whole Picture
- Moderated by: Kristen Rutherford (KR)
- Mike Borys (MB)
- Steve Peters (SP)
- Sean Stewart (SS)
- Elan Lee (EL)
- Jim Stewartson (JS)
Credits: Roundtable: The Whole Picture, ARG Fest-o-con 2007, San Francisco, CA
Q&A Continued
PM Nightmares
KR: There was another question, back to the first panel, that I think people would like to hear you answer as well, all of you. I think it was Evan who talked about the nightmares you have, <audience laughter> and I wanted to go down the line and everybody talk about something that happened during one of the games and/or, why don't you talk about your nightmares?
SS: That's Jim's territory. <laughter>
JS: Well, the ads for Last Call Poker -- it was going live on at midnight on a Friday, and it was 11:20, and my nightmare was that the poker system didn't work. And oh my god, the nightmare was true. <audience laughter> So, my life is sort of a series of actual nightmares <audience laughter> at 42. I think another nightmare that came through was, alluding back to an earlier question, was in Week 2 of I Love Bees, realizing oh my god, we've got ten more weeks and all we've got is payphones. What are we going to do? <audience laughter> And that began the longest death march, I think, of our entire lives. <more laughter>
EL: I have no nightmares <covered by audience laughter>
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Founder!
SS: It's in the keynote.
EL: Honestly, the biggest fear I always have about all this -- I mean, we can talk about individual little catastrophes, but this is a genre that, as Sean was saying, we all feel really, really passionately about. We don't know what it is yet, and we don't know where it's going, and my recurring nightmare is that it'll fizzle out. It feels like it's growing, it feels like it's always getting bigger, and that's amazing, but I do live in constant fear that it's just going to hit some kind of wall and just stop. That would be really, really devastating.
SS: The moon landing, to speak to Elan's point. We can't build a Saturn rocket anymore. We couldn't very easily get to the moon if we wanted to, and like the Vikings landing in America, it will be a historical oddity that doesn't matter. That would be a big nightmare. And if we do enough of these things badly enough, we can make it happen. <audience laughter> I think I did mine, which is just the sense of having taken that many people's time and trust and betrayed it is the one that I can't -- I'm okay with any given thing going wrong, but the moment at which you realize that this is not fun enough...between that moment and the moment in which you think of some things to make it funner is a bad moment.
SP: I don't have time to have any nightmares. <audience laughter> I think in Last Call Poker my nightmare was "oh no, one of the cities for the live graveyard events -- the city's going to find out and shut down the graveyard." Oh wait, that happened.
MB: I don't know if you guys were in on this story. <Sean leans forward eagerly and audience laughs> I'm a really nice guy and kind of quiet. I don't fly off the handle. But boy, Nick was irritating me. And sometimes it's difficult to get work out of Nick. Nick isn't with us anymore. He didn't die; he left the company. He has twins and he just didn't have time anymore. You need a lot of time if you're going to be working with us.
SP: Nick was who? Tell them.
MB: Nick was a designer, and a very talented guy. He did a lot of the graphics for Vanishing Point. But we were really struggling with something we'd been working on for the past month, getting this puzzle to look and feel right. And over and over it was coming back and it was just wrong, wrong, wrong. And he's working from home and giving excuses as to why he's not coming in -- oh, there's a Chinese parade, and I can't-- <laughter> Every day, it was something crazy like that. So it comes, and I haven't slept in a long time, and he hasn't either, and I forget to hang up the phone, and he forgets to hang up the phone, and then I yell at Travis, "Nick is delivering crap!" <audience laughter> and I look at the phone and it's still connected. <more laughter> And I hung up, but immediately the phone rang, and I'm already writing an email, but you can understand what that conversation was like. And we still haven't made up! <audience laughter>
Growing Pains
AUDIENCE MEMBER: This actually leads into my question, which is <more laughter as Mike gestures helplessly> everything sounds nice and rosy at 42 Entertainment but what have the growing pains been? It's been five years, almost six, since the Beast started, it's been four or five years that you've been an established company, where are the growing pains? Because I'm sure there are people in the audience that have tried to, or have successfully made, alternate reality games that have not had the rainbows and the puppy dogs and all that stuff. Where's the growing pains in all of this?
MB: <to Sean> Before you go off on something amazing -- <audience laughter> I started with these guys maybe a year and a half ago, and I had no idea what I was in for when I started working with them. I had never worked so hard. And that, to me, was the -- it was just a crazy wake-up call.
JS: Well, I think the main problem is how do you grow? Because what we do is so all-encompassing, and it's at some level a fairly rarefied set of understanding and experience that allows you to create them, and so it's hard to figure out how we're going to get to the point where we can do two big ones at once. Honestly, we haven't figured it out yet.
SS: That's a great answer to that. <begins to say something and then stops> I'm not supposed to say exactly that. <in an ironic highly professional manner, he continues> It is sometimes moderately stressful. <audience laughter> And we have been known to work to 5:30 or even 6:00 -- <reassuringly, but clearly false> in the afternoon <audience laughter>
EL: One of our growing pains, as you can probably tell, has been hiring a PR company that will tell us what we can and cannot say. <more laughter>
SS: And also real, genuine business people who would like it to sound vaguely disciplined. As difficult as it is to do one thing, to have to split your attention and be working on -- I mean, how many people here have run a game? Lots of people here have run something. So, it's already hard enough when you're doing that -- and lots of you have had to do it around regular jobs -- but then to have to stop doing that for a moment and walk into a pitch meeting for something totally different, and then <makes a moving-on-to-the-next-thing gesture>. To take a self-serving example: it would not be fair to say that no one in this damn company can spell <Elan buries his face in his hands and the audience laughs> but it just so happens that I get asked to look over a lot of documents. <more laughter> Documents that are not really relevant to my job at that moment. <more laughter> <Steve and Elan are covering their faces>
There are only a finite subsection of us. I mean, you hear us tell these stories, but as hard as we work, our producer works way harder. And we have one producer. So imagine, if you will, that we happen to be working on a project right now, but we were simultaneously building two proposals and working on Vista. And one person is doing the client contact and the spreadsheets and is setting up the video shoots and giving instructions to the artists... That's really hard because there's never enough bandwidth. If you want to do another one after the one you're doing now, you have to be working on the next thing, and it feels so hard to pull yourself away from -- like, I've got 10,000 people on a board talking right now about what's happening right now, but instead I have to go to a meeting at Lucasfilm. So that's a growing pain, although by no means the only one.
EL: The other thing for me is as the projects get bigger, we always have to try to outdo ourselves. I mean that's a problem with many things. And it requires more and more collaboration and more and more creativity and more brainstorming. And we're all in different cities <he does a quick rundown of everyone's home city> and the travel gets tiring. I keep saying every project has cost me something, from a girlfriend to a friendship...the last one got me mono, that was great. <Steve mutters something about Elan kissing someone at the holiday party> <audience laughter>
SS: There was no kissing at the party. There were lengthy interviews with the police. I never heard about kissing, so I'll assume nothing happened. <more laughter>
Archiving
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I work in video games right now, and one of the things I think about and wonder about in the world of ARGs is archiving. I mean, you guys talk very passionately about the stuff that you create, and how it really means so much to you, and in video games we have the same problem of ten years from now, how do I show this to anyone? How do you capture something that is such a participatory event and make it feel like something than anyone would ever want to look at again?
EL: How do you capture receiving a phone call? Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Cloudmakers.org
SS: But, honestly, if you go to cloudmakers.org, the site updated, right? This is Elan's great white whale: replayability. Almost every project we have done since the Beast has attempted to inch the replayability up a little. With I Love Bees, at least the narrative is archived, but the gameplay isn't archived. It may be impossible to archive the Woodstock things. Everything we've done, and some projects that are in development, we're usually trying another angle on how to make it so that you don't have that infuriating conversation where someone comes up to you and says, "This sounds really cool! How do I play?" You can't. It's over. Our platform doesn't go away, but we haven't built the content right. We're working on it all the time, but it's a really hard question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: A quick follow-up on that, on the other side of archiving, aren't there copyright or nondisclosure agreement issues? Like there is a community initiative to put together a comprehensive archive, but aren't there contractual things that prevent...
EL: Yeah, there's a lot of issues. Whenever we work for a large client, we're a contractor to them, which means everything we create, they own. So that definitely adds a layer of complication to what needs to disappear at certain dates in order for that company to be comfortable.
SS: As an example, the first attempt to archive in a different way than what players were doing on Cloudmakers was... At the very end of the Beast, everyone fell into an exhausted stupor, except the guy who was the president of the company who had, without asking, signed up to write a novel about it. So, I wrote a novelization of the Beast, but eventually politics between Microsoft, Warner Bros. and the publisher were such that they decided just not to go ahead with the project. So there's nothing that we can do about that, and I have the manuscript sitting at home, and I can't do anything with it either.
The Wow Moments
AUDIENCE MEMBER: To put us in a good mood, while we're all sitting here thinking about what we can't read, you guys did your nightmares, but what are some of your awesome moments that you really didn't expect <indistinct>?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: The Wow Moments.
JS: At the end of Bees, there was sort of a live interaction where we had emails set up. I can't even remember how the puzzle went, but it was an interaction, basically, between Melissa and the players using Flea++ as the language, and it was back and forth very fast, and I was on IM with Sean, just rapid-style. And it was one of the most thrilling three hours of my life. It was just incredible. There was all of this activity and all of these people and the idea worked and it was really fun. <quietly> And also kicking your asses in poker was great. <audience laughter>
EL: I always get wowed by realizing that we've touched people. I understand hardcore fans and I understand that they exist. You really like a TV show or a book and you put up a blog or you create a t-shirt or whatever. But I remember once I Love Bees was over, I was over at Kristen's house and we were just talking about the project, and it was when I first walked in to see all of the stuff that fans had sent her. Like, papier mache, and books and stickers and notes and it was overwhelming, the effect that that character had had on players, that they were willing to say, "She might as well be real. Let's treat her as if she was real. She had that kind of effect on us," and it literally took my breath away. It was really magic.
SS: On the Beast, 357 condolence emails to Laia, when her grandmother died. <audience laughter> The example I'll go back to was the Beast -- and I'm sorry for doing this, because I know it feels kind of old-timerish--
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Get off my lawn! <audience laughter>
SS: Whole thing very fast: there was a character who became very important in the game that started as a 404 error. Because the players had WHOISed the site, and they learned what sites we meant to develop, so we learned not to do that again, and then we did it again like two more times. <audience laughter> Institutional memory is very small when you run out of time. So they knew the sites were coming but they weren't used yet, so instead of just having a regular 404 we put up a scary dude. <audience laughter> Some guy in the art department put up that. And then we were building another big puzzle and the programmers couldn't get it done in time, so we had to fill for a week, so we had the scary dude grow and take over a couple of the other websites we weren't using yet. And this character was called Loki and we did a whole spiel about how he ate dreams and all that kind of stuff, and he was gradually going to overwhelm all the websites. So he was going to take them out one by one by one. So eventually we took out websites in the game, and then we evolved that and we made a puzzle with no answer.
We got into a crisis where we knew that Loki would have to die, or we'd have no sites, and that would be bad. <audience laughter> And we put out a couple suggestions and we had a couple ideas of how it might go. But we looked at one another because we were delirious with sleep deprivation, cause that was before we were 42 and really professional. <more laughter> This was back in the old days, so we were allowed to say that we didn't sleep. <Elan rubs eyes> So we said, "Let's see what they do. Let's literally let them completely control how this interaction goes." And one of the things that the players decided to do was build a database of all their worst nightmares. So we saw that go up and we thought, "Let's use that," and I wrote a script which was essentially the soliloquy, the death-song, for that character that was cobbled together of fragments of everyone's original nightmares, and we turned the whole thing around inside 24 hours. So, the database went up, I wrote the script, we sent it to the developers, they did the art, they made a Flash movie, did a voiceover, and the thing came out -- 36 hours from start to finish. So watching people say, "Oh my god," then say, "Wait a minute -- that's me!"
The reason I pick that as a highlight is that it has all the elements that are the most intoxicating. It has a very tight loop between the developers and the audience; it has that highwire "Let's step off the cliff and maybe we won't fall, maybe they will carry us up," and they did, and it was chilling and emotionally effective, so it was the pure product for me as far as ARGs go.
I keep looking at the left side of the room. I've got to stop that. <exaggeratedly turns his attention to the right side> <audience laughter>
SP: <exasperated> I'm always following you. <audience laughter> I think the biggest wow factor for me is kind of stepping back, the whole picture. Stuff like this <gestures to the room> and where this has all gone. From 2001, one game and a community, it has evolved into everybody that's here. ARGFest started off with me and Sean having beers in Las Vegas. <looks at Sean Stewart> Sean Stacey. SpaceBass. I don't remember if [you and I] have had beers in Las Vegas. <Sean Stewart shakes his head> <audience laughter> You know, and it's turned into this. That this thing has become what it is... and then me, going from being a player, to being kind of a community guy, to sitting here with you guys, the whole picture is my biggest wow factor. It's just all those stories, and it never gets old.
MB: We have only a half a minute left, so I'll just say this. The fact that a day after each puzzle set is launched, there's a wiki page, devoted to the solutions and how you got them, and those write-ups are better than the write-ups that we made for our own puzzles. And sometimes people went back and came from a different direction that helped us with other puzzles that we were doing [and we thought] "Well, we can make these much better now if we just use this information," and it seems like we've thought about this the whole time and...
SS: All the way through bees, Jim and I were saying "Dammit! The wiki's down! How do we--" <audience laughter> <Sean gestures helplessly>
The other high point: so we're doing casting for I Love Bees and listening to people do VO. And I walk into the green room and there are a couple of random, unknown LA actors waiting to do their voiceover. And one of them looks at her husband and says, "You know, this reminds me of the Beast." <audience laughter> <Sean looks over at Kristen> She got hired. <applause>
