PRESS
“The borders between the real and the virtual are constantly being crossed”. Sergey Chekmaev, Radio broadcast.
http://www.svobodanews.ru/Article/2007/03/06/20070306140548463.html
Writers have always communicated with readers through unchangeable text that was confined to paper. But computers have changed the situation. The reader doesn't passively follow the author anymore, he wants to live in his worlds, living the virtual realm as he sees fit. In multiplayer computer games words lose their self-sufficiency and become but part of the project. The author loses his full domination over the world, but in return he gains new ways to interact with the reader.
Science fiction writer Sergey Chekmaev talks about these new abilities and about how they influence the process and nature of creativity.
— There is a popular theory, which states that the time of Guttenberg is coming to an end and printed text will be replaced by some easier forms of exchanging information between the author and his reader. Do you agree?
— I think that it is too early to start forgetting the book. But we witness the advancement of new electronic mediums every day. Authors are faced with the problem of finding new ways of interacting with their readers. To save our connection with the electronic generation Next that prefer computers to paper, we try to use new capabilities that are granted by computers.
One of the most trusted examples will be the audiobook. Sadly, there is no real market for audiobooks in Russia, but it is developing quite rapidly. If the stock of cars keeps growing as fast as it does now, then the audibook market will too. But so far the audiobook is more of a gift-type purchase.
Besides audiobooks, there is a rapid growth in the sales of electronic copies of regular books, and whole servers are organized. For example, “Publicant.ru” holds electronic versions of books that can be bought for token money, as low as 30-40 cents. It's about as much as an author receives for one sold copy of his printed book. This money goes to the author without any go-betweens, such as the publisher. I have put several of my books on “Publicant.ru”. I can't say that I became rich, but I can already see some perspectives.
The most interesting of the new options of communicating with the reader, will be, in my opinion, various types of screenplays. The type that is common to us is the script to a movie, and the less known, but is expanding in a great rate — are the screenplays of computer games. Game scenarios, dialogs, story turns, and side documents, are attracting more and more authors. If the game is based on science fiction, then sci-fi writers are engaged.
— Labor division has reached a certain level. If, before, writing a story was a side job for the programmer group leader, now a professional is introduced.
— Since the costs of making a game are reaching movie budgets, then why aren't the music, graphics, screenplay and so forth handled by professionals?
If, in a movie, the scenario is written by a script writer, the music — by a composer, then why should everything in a game be done by programmers?
— What does the work of a writer for a game look like?
— There are different options. The most well known is the one that was tried by many of our writers — a pure game scenario. Sergey Lukyanenko, Marina and Sergey Diachenko, Alexander Zorich all did this in their time. The less known but the rapidly expanding way is the literary framing of the game. I have been doing this for several months with the online game TimeZero. The author creates a huge amount of documents adjacent to the game. For example game laws, journal entries or ancient manuscripts, that can be found by the players and used to receive assignments. The game's chronicles — about what has happened, and why everything is so terrifying. TimeZero unravels in a post-nuclear world that has suffered a nuclear apocalypse. The game is quite vast and has a lot of small missions, so-called quests that players can carry out. I write new assignments — describe what the player must do, create documents that will lead him on his path, notes and fragments that he finds.
TimeZero was created three years ago. There was a lot of material written before me. I have to refine the already finished material and generate my own ideas.
Besides that the programmers and I have devised a new type of game: the game will take place in the Universe that I am describing in my latest fantasy book — a war fantasy. It will be two reflections of the same Universe — the game and the book, but it won't be the usual game based on a book, or book based on the game, it will be two different sources that tell about one Universe.
In other words the book's readers will be able to keep discovering the Universe in the game, and, correspondingly, the players will be able to find about their world in the book.
— Games like that look boundless. A whole world, hundreds of characters.
— Online multiplayer games don't have a strict story, along which the player is moving, from start to finish, but they do have a powerful and pretty well-balanced emulation of the world.
— When I first entered the TimeZero project, I came across its constitution — a whole legal code. And when I was reading it I saw that it is a quasi-juridical text. A person playing this game has, besides everything else, to gain an understanding of the legal system.
— It isn't limited just by legal simulator. Beside the juridical laws, there are many economic and business laws. And a person that came to TimeZero and spent some time studying these laws receives quite a handful of knowledge in law, finance, production management and business. As far as I can tell, a huge amount of players do not come to the game to roam the radioactive wastelands and kill mutant rats. There are players that come to do business, build factories, develop new items and, as follows, sell them to other players.
— How is that possible? Something that has not been programmed into the game cannot exist there.
— That is the reason the game has a system of dynamic development. A person that spent some amount of time building a factory, and some time on research can contact the administration, which creates a new image of armor with his unique mark, which he can name, so it differs from all others and, correspondingly, sell. Thus it will be exclusively his produced item.
— This world can exist only if there is a united creativity center, an author that leads the development of the world on some certain path, or else the game will begin to degenerate.
— There is such a center, and several people are in it. There is a designer and an author, which is what I do. And we are always developing the game. For example, the premier of the new Russian blockbuster “Paragraph 78” took place in the movies a couple of days ago, and the game will open a territory that is completely devoted to the film on March 1st. The screenplay to the film was written by the well-known science-fiction writer Andrey Lazarchuk. But the movie has its story that leads the viewer from the beginning to the very end. The game is very different. To get to this “Paragraph 78” territory, players will have to do a lot of things. “Paragraph 78” is a secret paragraph of the instructions.
During the game players keep finding different paragraphs of these instructions, until they find number 78. I participated in developing all these paragraphs, except 78, because it is part of the movie's scenario. Undoubtedly, a certain amount of literary framing for any innovation in the game is very necessary. And I try to create new quests, new buildings, and new story lines and describe them, to keep players interested and make them want to keep playing.
— Could it happen that an author included into such a team of game developers, in some way, dissolves in it, becoming a technical coder?
— Any person brings his individuality to the target project. I, for example, was very interested in bringing a form of knighthood, an element of nobility into the game. A post-nuclear world, surviving, and jungle law: be or be killed. And at some point I was thinking on how is it possible to bring certain elements of knighthood into the world. As it turned out I was not the first one. The game had an unforeseen by the initial code, but created by the players, an Association of good deeds, that welcomes new players, helps them get accustomed, and gives them some initial items. For the same reason I was developing quests, which could only be completed with noble acts — save, protect, help. So you can't complete these quests by using the “come in and kill everybody” method. In the new fantasy game I was talking about, the second game of the TimeZero project, such an element will be present from the very beginning. There are global story events that can be reached only by the combined unselfish actions of all the players.
— There is a theory that a game is a form of escapism and that it leads to losing the link to the real world. Is there any real output from the game?
— First of all one gets to learn how to work in a team, because the basis of these games are clans, communities, that allow one to conduct his own campaigns, protect his buildings or attack others. Let's not forget, of course, that it is really a world that people really live in. Many relationships are transferred from the game into life. For example, a few weddings between players took place in real life during the existence of the TimeZero project.
— The borders between the real and virtual world are not very definite, in other words they are constantly being crossed in one way or another. But the value of any item, any action is defined in many ways by the amount of effort and concentration that one has put into these items and so it isn't that important if it happened in the real or virtual world. What is important is that the item is the point of concentration of a person's effort, time and some creative talent.
— This way people receive a certain amount of knowledge and skills. Of course it is no textbook. A textbook is theory. But such games, as escapist as they are, are practice, where a person can do many things that he cannot yet accom
