The Story Doesn't Care: An Interview with Sean Stewart

ENCYCLOPEDIA HANASIANA

Sean Stewart on writing for ARGs..

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What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.

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We could call it patio space or—if you’re in the South—front porch space. It’s clearly inside in some ways, but it’s public in other ways.

The world of the blog clearly exists in patio space, in porch space, in that “I’m going to invite you into a level of intimacy not usually accorded to strangers, and yet you’re still a stranger. I’m going to write a blog, and you and I will communicate with one another, sometimes with startling candor, and yet in this mixed, hybrid place.”

The campaigns [I’ve worked on]—“The Beast”, “I Love Bees”, and “Last Call Poker”—one of the things that makes them interesting, artistically, to me is that they are part of a very small set of works of art that I can think of that deliberately exist in porch space. They have audiences that are literally collective and talking and engaged, both with the project and with each other. If you and I go and watch a movie, you have a unique experience and I have a unique experience, we just happen to be sitting in the same room.

The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They’re having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn’t really have an analog that I’ve been able to think of in the arts, although it does in another place.

What is the other place?

This behavior—this sort of creative, collaborative, enthusiastic scavengering behavior—is something that we call by another name when we direct it, not to entertainment, but to the physical world. We call it science, as it’s been constructed since Newton and the Royal Society, and that’s worked out pretty well for us as a species.

Where do you think it’s going? Is this form of storytelling going to be as popular as novels?

Something will be. What will happen is, twenty years from now, someone will be using the web for a storytelling platform, and here are some of the components that I am nearly positive will be part of that art form.

One of the things that we do that I think will continue at some level is platform independent stories. They might be in print, they might be in film, they might be on the web, they might be a cellphone message. The story doesn’t care. A kid who’s 15 now, in 10 years—when they’re 25—their cellphone will be their TV, their computer, their phone, their whatever. It will be pointless to say, “I only do the kind of storytelling that happens between a printed page.”

Well, it won’t be pointless. There will still be books. God, I hope so, because I have a stake in that. But I think that the art form we will look back on as being the dominant art form of the 21st century—as we look back on film for the 20th—is one that will take advantage of the web’s basic nature, which is that it’s all ones and zeroes. It can be digitized and delivered through any kind of platform. The story doesn’t care. I think that’s going to be part of it.

Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience—that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”

It is the nature of the web that you get to click on things. I think, at some level, the art forms that evolve to use that platform will need to let people click on things. In some way or another, people want to push a little on something that happens on the web in a way they do not expect to push on their television sets. [...]