I wrote this article for our college paper for our back to school
issue at the end of August, the interview was done in June, I
retooled it to sell to local papers last week (they didn't buy it
cause the interview was too old, ah well), but just thought I'd share
it with you anyway!

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Many people anticipated the release of this summer's blockbuster
movie A.I., the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
Much of the anticipation was the direct result of Dreamworks' and
Microsoft's unique online advertising venture. Instead of simply
using the usual print and broadcast media, the media giants took a
gamble on a writer to create an interactive online game that tied in
with the movie.

"They wanted to make a game," says Sean Stewart, lead writer for the
online creation, "but if you've seen the film, you know that it's not
something that you walk out of thinking 'Oh man, I've got to play the
game.'"

Stewart is an award winning science fiction writer who grew up in
Edmonton, Alberta. Feeding off influences like J.R.R. Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis, he started writing science fiction at a young age. Now at
36, he has published seven novels and he can count William Gibson
among his devoted fans. His most recent novel Galveston (Ace, 2000)
has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and the first ever
Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Stewart has
been rushing to complete a novel based on the game that will be
published in November.

This weekend, Stewart will be at the Winnipeg International Writers
Festival. He will be at appearing with the other Sunburst finalists
Saturday at the CanWest Global Performing Arts Centre. Also on
Saturday you can mingle with Stewart and many of the festival's other
writers at McNally Robinson in Grant Park. Stewart will also be at
the festival's finale event on Sunday.

In a phone interview at the end of the A.I. game this summer, Stewart
was overwhelmed by his experience. "It's an unbelievable project,
once in a lifetime experience. Let me tell you, as a guy who's
published a lot of novels, the chance to put something out there and
have 800 people read it down to the semi-colon and comment on it
excitedly for three days is something most writers never, ever get to
experience."

Dreamworks' intent was not only to develop a new advertising medium,
but to broaden and deepen the world of the movie. That's why they
contacted Stewart about the project; they needed an experienced
writer to develop the world and he had been highly recommended. The
team, who became known to the players as the "Puppetmasters," began
the project on Jan. 4, 2001. That gave them two months before the
sites went live on the Internet on March 8.

The game began when people watched the trailer for the movie and
noticed that there are some strange notches above "Summer 2001." If
you take the time to decipher these you discovered a phone number
which then lead you to a website. Follow the instructions and you
were catapulted into a futuristic world of robots, murder, and
puzzles.

The world was comprised of 36 beautiful Web sites (including some in
French, German and Japanese), 15 different phone numbers for the
voicemail of various characters, several fax machines, countless
email addresses and nearly 100 puzzles. The puzzles covered a wide
range of tasks including: decoding hexadecimal, creating a relief map
out of clay, folding a paper into a crane to reveal a message and
reciting Shakespearean texts.

"The game was absolutely based on the premise that there would be a
group intelligence," says Stewart. This game was the first of its
kind and they had to anticipate how players might react to the
situation and their environment. "Any Web-based mystery has to
understand from the get-go that the resource base (the Internet) of
the potential player pool was effectively infinite. This was never
intended to be a game that one person could play on their own. It was
just too hard, and you can't make it easy enough for one person to
play without making it irrelevant for Web-based play. That's one
sense in which it was completely matched to its medium in a way that
I don't think another Web-based game has been."

Shortly after the game received its first media coverage from
Aintitcool.com on April 4, Cloudmakers (www.cloudmakers.org) was
formed. Named after the murder victims boat, this group of players
grew quickly to over 6,000 minds working together to become what some
called a "distributed biological processing unit." And Stewart and
his team had to feed the beast.

"The biggest underestimate we made was just how interested people
would be." Within three days, the players went through material that
should have lasted three weeks. "We realized that we were literally
going to have to double the amount of content we put out for the rest
of the game because the rapacity with which the content was consumed
was so overwhelming."

The group of players worked together using an online message board.
They posted hundreds of messages a day, discussing the puzzles, the
plot and the puppetmasters. Stewart himself watched the message
boards to monitor the progress of the players, but is proud that his
team never interfered with the Cloudmakers, "We wanted the players
to know that every single puzzle they solve, they got on their own."

Since the thousands of players would go over all the websites with a
fine-toothed comb, their extreme thoroughness even changed the
direction of the game a few times. Stewart laughs remembering one
incident where a Puppetmaster accidentally used the same piece of
stock photography twice: once on a research company's website for one
an employee and then again for a sexbot on another comapanys
site. "Of course this was instantaneously pointed out, and we had to
write what I think was one of the better little side stories for the
whole game: Svetlana and the step-self. The new storyline explained
that some robots were being built to replace certain individuals.
We've had to be extremely responsive to, among other things, when we
screw up."

"We've been using The Trail (the player-created encyclopedia of the
game) to do our continuity checks, because there's 7,000 Cloudmakers
and we're way too busy to sit down and make lists of everything.
There's no way our resources are any where near as comprehensive, so
when we need something, we look it up on The Trail."

His knowledge of the way the players interacted came in handy when
Stewart made a cameo appearance in the game. The players were lead to
a phone number, but instead of a voicemail recording, they reached a
real person on the other end. After six hours on the phone, the
players had moved the plot forward by convincing Stewart's character
to act on some information they had.

When the story line came to a climatic finish in mid-July, the
project was considered a success by all. "Even if it doesn't make a
lot of money for a corporate sponsor, down the road people are going
to be doing things like this for the same reasons they make other
kinds of art. The almost irrepressible way that art comes into being.
This is the most fun I've had in my professional life"

The game's websites will remain online so that people can still
attempt to solve puzzles on their own. The quickest way to start is
to perform a search on the Internet for Jeanine Salla, the Sentient
Machine Thearpist listed in the credits in the trailer. While the
game is over, the Puppetmasters have said that there are still some
puzzles that were never even discovered!

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Just to add, Sean did end up winning the Sunburst Award! Congrats!