After hours Toolkit

Alternate Realities: The future of marketing?

John Borland CNET News

Published: 16 Dec 2005 14:55 GMT

...video game producer and 42's chief designer, has served as the games' equivalent of a movie director.

What Stewart has done is give this young genre its most distinctive voice: literate, infused with a noirish poetry, and rich in the character typically lost in conventional video games.

"We all three have a background in game design, but all three of us are even more committed to eliciting an emotional response," Stewart said. "The things that make us happiest are the moments of real emotion, where the story grabs you."

Double life
Stewart's office shelves tell the story of his double life. A row of his novels has as bookends the prestigious trophies he's won for several of them, including the 2000 World Fantasy Award. Next to them is a copy of Microsoft's "Halo 2" game, which one of 42 Entertainment's ARGs helped launch. He has never opened it.

These two lives rarely cross. At a science-fiction bookstore in San Francisco, clerks praised him enthusiastically ("We love him. It's a shame they don't keep him in print... "), but mention of his online projects draw blank looks. Few ARG players say they've actually read his books.

A lanky father of two with an intense, steady stare, Stewart spent his early years in almost comically tough environs, with winters at his mother's house in frigid Edmonton, Alberta, and summers with his grandparents in simmering Lubbock, Texas. The resulting sense of being always an outsider — a Texan in Canada, a bookish boy clumsily helping his cousins tar roofs in Texas — has inspired many of the most memorable characters he's created since leaving college.

His novels are unrepentant fantasies, laden with nightmarish magic that floods Galveston, Texas, like a Gulf hurricane, peopled with ghosts and gods that act as extensions of the characters' own psyches. But the books are always fundamentally about the characters' realistic relationships, not about the magic itself.

"I wish he would write more books," said Kelly Link, a fellow writer whose Small Beer independent press picked up Stewart's latest novel, "Perfect Circle," after it was dropped by a bigger publisher.

The book was subsequently nominated both for the World Fantasy Award and science fiction's Nebula Prise. "I wish someone would give him a great contract. But I feel that we're going to have to wait 10 or 15 years to read the next Sean Stewart novel."

Blame that on Jordan Weisman.

In early 2001, Weisman was creative director of Microsoft's entertainment group. He'd persuaded Steven Spielberg (and a reluctant Microsoft) to experiment with an unconventional game to help market the director's "A.I." movie, and had already tapped Lee to direct the project they code-named "The Beast". Soon after, they recruited Stewart to be their writer.

The hope was to build on the way people seek information online. The trio launched The Beast quietly, telling almost nobody. But over a few weeks, traffic inched upwards, finally soaring into a genuine viral hit in which a "hive mind" of millions of players solved puzzles together, shared theories, and fielded midnight phone calls from game characters with astonishing aplomb.

"That was the only game I ever made where I followed...

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