This is a powerful idea because virtual spaces remove geography and time from experience. When you remove those two elements from an experience, we can create a world where every human has the ability to experience aspects of the planet from which they would otherwise be shut off.

In turn this allows us to make the world less faceless.

The problem we’ve experienced in this pursuit is understanding how to craft environments that allow people to move between the virtual and the real.

I took a shot at The Soho Theater in London a few summers ago with mixed results. And this year the Tribeca Film Festival has created a digital storytelling and transmedia space meant to merge real and virtual space. (Plus: there are countless alternate reality games, transmedia books, and digital stories exploring this realm. I’ve listed two of thousands.)

When these spaces fail (which they do often), I think they can be traced to the fact that the real and the virtual require difference interactions that aren’t compatible, not unlike the experience of a book and a movie. You are forced to apply one set of tools, e.g. real space interactive tools, to the wrong palette, e.g. digital spaces.

All of this comes to mind because I’m currently sifting through one of our new chapters, which explores the inevitable expansion of computer games into the alternate reality game (ARG) world. These ARGs are an outgrowth of combining that communal game sporty with ubiquitous mobile technologies, and yet they face this same “interactive” problem when these two spaces are brought together.

Outside writing the Second Edition, I’ve been considering this idea in terms of art and storytelling. As I’ve expanded my range of storytelling off the page, I’ve experienced the growing pains related to moving an audience between these two spaces. Many time I’ve felt as though I’m retro-fitting a transition in order to move people instead of focusing on telling a great story.

Of course, the producer-side fun with these emergent storytelling and game playing environments is figuring out how to create beautiful (or entertaining) art that spaces the virtual and real spaces in order to make the world a little bit more communal.

I just came across this Kickstarter campaign to help fund the post-production for this documentary on video games:

I’ll be donating to the cause on June 1, and you should consider it as well. I never grow tired of hearing designers and developers discuss how they made games.

However, I look forward to the day when these documentaries explore themes in the way literature histories do. I’m anxious for the genre to have its storytellers profiled.

Until then, I’m still down with this.

Dungeons & Dragons, the (2 new) Movie(s)

On a more practical, Hollywood note: There’s a dispute between Hasbro, which purchased Dungeons & Dragons when it bought Wizards of the Coast, and Warner Bros., each of which announced a Dungeons & Dragons film project.

I’m not sure where the sudden rush for D&D-inspired movies, but anytime the game is brought back into the mainstream public’s consciousness, I’m happy.

Unless that ends with a product like the 2000 film that was apparently a disaster (I didn’t even know there was a 2000 film), or the Saturday morning cartoon of my childhood that was simply ridiculous.

A few years ago, it seemed as if the MMORPG world had passed Richard Garriott by. He’d had two rather contentious breakups with corporations, Electronic Arts and NCSoft, and he seemed more interested in pursuing his dream of going to outer space.

Two years ago, Garriott re-emerged at the SXSW Accelerator, an event I emcee that pits start-up companies against each other in a “pitch off.” Garriott, who didn’t win, was there to launch his newest endeavor: a simple social game called Ultimate Collector, which was published by Zynga through Facebook.

I won’t lie, I found the whole enterprise a little strange. I’ve known Richard in a professional sense since the mid-1990s, and all of our interactions have centered on discussions about storytelling, epic adventures, and communities. Ultimate Collector felt like something else.

Just one year later, though, the world seemed to tip back onto its proper axis. Once again at SXSW, Garriott launched a $1 million kickstarter, The Shroud of the Avatar, an epic storytelling adventure. How excited was the game community: The project was successfully funded in less than 10 days. More than 16,000 people contributed.

Garriott no longer owns the rights to the Ultima name (it would seem), but the Avatar was the main character in the series, which means we will once again be returning to the world that helped launch the modern game industry.

They were kind enough to ask us to participate in the project, and we were stoked enough to say “YES!”

We spent three hours talking about Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, game developers, Richard Garriott (whom I had the chance to chat with at this year’s SXSW Accelerator), and the importance and impact of games as art.

I can’t wait to see the final product, and neither can  you!

We spent quite a bit of time reading 60 years worth of studies, interviewing folks, and sifting through medical research. What we found, not unsurprisingly, is that games with violent images (e.g. first-person shooters) have no effect on actual violence. 

In the wake of recent events and the re-kindled discussion about games and violence, we thought we’d share that chapter with you. This is Chapter 8: Gamers, Interrupted from Dungeons & Dreamers.

Regardless of delay and such, writing has actually started this time. If all goes well, sometime in the next year you’ll have an updated version of the book that finally finishes the story.

His original gaming dice. His original Dungeons & Dragons and Blackmoor campaign manuscripts. His first printing, woodgrain boxed set play copy of D&D. Letters from Gary Gygax. Other letters, notes, documents, artwork, photos, cartography, rare wargames and hand-made models and miniatures. And more.

All these items were once written, crafted or owned by Dave Arneson, gaming legend and co-creator of D&D. But when Arneson died in 2009, his personal archives and game collection become lost. In 2011, they were found, in an abandoned storage locker in Minnesota.

Gygax, one of the co-creators of the game Dungeons & Dragons, inadvertently helped create the massive computer game industry that exists by inspiring three decades of future game designers. There’s been much written on the subject [you can read our chapter on the D&D Creation Myth], and there’s currently a documentary being filmed about the impact of the game. He’s become such a geek cultural icon that there is a movement to have a statute of him built in his hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Take a moment to soak that in: the creator of a paper game that inspired the computer games industry getting a statue.

The techno-geeks have come quite a long way.

When John and I originally conceived Dungeons & Dreamers, we were adamant that we’d treat the subjects with the kind of importance that others use when talking about great literature or film. These games, oftentimes dismissed as simplistic, not so easily defined.

Eight years later as we rework Dreamers into its Second Edition, I stumbled upon Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks, a book that traces the real-life communities that spawned from D&D and the games industry. I have no idea who Ethan Gilsdorf is but the book certainly feels like a sibling to ours.

I can’t wait to get my hands on it. While it covers some of the same ground (Richard was part of the Society for Creative Anachronism, for instance), his exploration feels very much different than our treatment. His is a first-hand experience moving through the extended game culture, and my sense is that he treats these subjects with the same kind of light-hearted reverence.

The emergent digital culture that exists today owes much to game communities that in turn own much to Gygax and Dungeons & Dragons. Some may find that connection strange, but for those of us who have studied the history and spread of digital culture, the connections become real.

So: happy birthday, Gary, and thanks for everything.

When we were working on the book, Richard and his team provided us with some pictures from that time. Here’s a picture of one of the Ultima Online server racks.

As I dug through the Dungeons & Dreamers yesterday constructing a draft of the Second Edition introduction, I was struck by how intertwined space was with the computer game world.

SpaceWar!, the first computer game, was a recreation of sci-fi writer E.E. “Doc” Smith’s novels. The M.I.T. students, as described by Steven Levy in Hackers, went to great pains to create realistic physics reactions within the game. (Years later, id Software’s John Carmack would expend a tremendous amount of energy creating a real-time physics engine for Doom III.)

Just a few years later, Richard Garriott’s father – Owen Garriott – would briefly hold the record for longest time in orbit when he circled the earth for 60 days. Young Garriott, who came of age as his father rocketed into outer space and computers came into the nation’s consciousness, was changed forever by those experiences.

(Aside: Richard told us he’d always been annoyed when he asked his father what space was like. “It’s like being underwater,” he said. Years later, Richard would venture into space as part of the Russian space program. This past year, Richard and I met at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin where he was launching his latest game company. I was hosting the event where he was competing. I asked him: “Was it like being underwater?” He looked at me, and laughed: “No.”)

In 2000, Carmack founded Armadillo Aerospace, a company competing in the Space X Prize competition. Since its inception, Carmack has spent $3.5 million pursuing the dream of building a low-orbit space craft.

***

I’ve long been a proponent of NASA and the manned-flight missions we’ve undertaken as a country. The feats of science and engineering are astounding. The research we’ve accumulated about the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe are immeasurable.

Most importantly, though, space is about what’s next? It’s the great unknown, the idea that keeps us on our toes, dreaming, and striving for something bigger than ourselves, and answers we may never find.

Space has inspired three generations of computer programmers (and countless others). Until today.

Now we must ask what’s next? for entirely different reasons.