[Sean Stewart] In which we enter an alternate reality

Bleeding Ink

About ten years ago I stumbled onto a website that, for all intents and purposes, appeared a legitimate portal to the Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications—or the Dharma Initiative. It’s Japanese inspired logo gleamed scientific credibility. It’s many pages revealed grants that had gone to scientists and their experiments. It had a contact page, an about page, a page explaining what it was like to work there--it even had job openings. Being a nosy computer nerd, I snooped around the source code and came across some peculiar lines. There was a glaring security hole which I quickly took advantage of—soon I was deep into restricted areas of the site that spoke of a special experiment on a remote island whose participants included Jack, Sayid, Hugo, Kate and so on.

I cannot tell you how much time passed. I can only relate to you that my fingers tingled and my heart raced. I had become an active participant in an Alternate Reality Game for the TV show Lost. And it changed my understanding of narrative forever.

Welcome to episode 22 of Bleeding Ink. Things are changing with this podcast. It will forever be about writing—but I’m taking it beyond the act of writing a novel. I’m exploring new media—expect interviews with media inventors, with pioneers who are reshaping narrative as we know it. As always, please visit bleedingink.fm to stay up to date on the show. Today it is my honor to present an interview with such an inventor—his name is Sean Stewart—and he’s helped create a new genre for storytelling: Alternate Reality Games.

Alternate Reality Games turn storytelling on its head. It allows for incredible agency from participants and distributes a narrative through familiar, real-world channels. Characters email readers. Txt readers. Call readers. Readers—should I say players?—solve puzzles that not only unlock more story but become the story. If at any point an ARG (alternate reality game) breaks the sacred oath by revealing that it might be a game, it has failed. This is NOT a Game is what immerses the audience into an alternate world. And such immersion it is.

Fans of ARGs have reported broken marriages, lost jobs and a total obsession with uncovering the "truth". It is storytelling dipped in heroin-laced dark chocolate. Swaths of communities form to conquer them. The bonds formed between players are long-lasting—Sean has even been invited to a few weddings of players who met through an ARG.

ARGs are cultural events. Their power lies in their transience. They present an experience like Woodstock or Burning Man, where congregations sever themselves from society, meet with purpose, shed egos, and join something larger than themselves, if only for a brief moment—a moment that ripples throughout the world. What writer wouldn’t want to engage their readers in such a way.

Sean and I talk about his entry into writing for ARGs—How Steven Spielberg helped form a dream team for what is now known as The Beast—the first, modern ARG. We discuss transmedia fiction and how Sean’s novel Cathy’s Book was the first of its kind and how it hit the NY Time Bestsellers list. We discuss games, augmented reality, dungeons and dragons, the components to ARGs, approaches to non-linear storytelling and much, much more. I promise you this episode will blow your mind as it did mine.

Learn

• How Sean helped pioneer a new art form that blends narrative with the internet’s greatest strengths
• How Alternate Reality Games present a level of narrative immersion unavailable to other genres
• What “transmedia” fiction is and how Sean hit the NY Times Bestsellers list with his transmedia novel Cathy’s Book
• How the Beatles mystery inspired the first wide scale Alternate Reality Game
• How Sean’s friend Neal Stephenson helped him land the lead writing role on the ARG surrounding Spielberg’s movie A.I.
• Why the skills acquired in DnD Dungeon Mastering translate well into telling stories
• How Jordan Weisman formed a dream team to create The Beast
• How to approach writing a massive non-linear narrative
• Why you should listen to your audience. And—who knows?—maybe they will write some characters for you (like the Red King).
• Why Dickens would have been a phenomenal puppet master.
• The lessons Sean learned from creating The Beast and how he mitigated those challenges with I Love Bees—and why audience demands unraveled those solutions.
• About the Sean’s with with Nine Inch Nails and the alternate reality game surrounding the release of their album Year Zero.
• Why “transmedia fiction” and ARGs are not one and the same
• How to incorporate fans artwork in your own work
• How writing non-linear narratives is a lot like gardening
• Why simple stories appear fresh and ground-breaking when told through a non-linear path
• Why storytellers need to give up power to their audience and how to give up as little as possible
• Why Choose Your Own Adventure books are fundamentally flawed narrative vehicles
• How Sean and Neal Stephenson became friends through the alphabet
• What the hell is magic Augmented Reality and Magic Leap
• How Sean went from writing Science Fiction to being science fiction
• How Sean’s Ink-Spotters.com is a jigsaw puzzles for stories

]]>