Thanks for the comments about Bret and Will’s contributions!

Based on everything I’ve seen and heard about this project, it certainly appears to succeeded in introducing “Nightshade” and Andrea Cremer to readers – and not unsurprisingly, the project was a huge, collaborative effort. Seems only natural that a participatory, collaborative experience was designed in a participatory, collaborative manner. : )

- Scott

Wow, what a great and exhaustive writeup. Interacting with the audience in real time proved to be a huge challenge but paid big dividends in immersion and making everyone really care about what happened to Shay.

And I’d be remiss not to give two big shout outs. One to Bret Kane who wrote almost all of Shay’s dialogue in real time on Facebook as well as directing the videos we shot in Orlando. And two to Will Browning, the actor who portrayed Shay. Will never said no once to any of our wacky ideas and proved willing to do almost anything to make the campaign a success.

Reading all this feedback indicates a couple of things to me.

First, I’ve already addressed most of the concerns/objections raised by you and Mike at some point over the past couple of years (either in a presentation, a post at my personal site, at sharedstoryworlds.com, etc.). I don’t honestly think more than a handful of people on this planet have read every word of all of them, but the responses from you and Mike indicate that my statements here are being taken in isolation and not viewed in the context of everything I’ve already said.

That’s a reflection of how many moving pieces there are under the hood of what I call shared story worlds. As we’re seeing, there’s a lot to cover, and it’s all pretty much integrated. Talk about one part without covering all of the bases, and someone’s going to get misunderstood.

Second, we agree more than we disagree. For example, Mike’s totally right that IP owners can’t control what fans do. They never will, even in shared story world model. I’ve held that opinion for a very long time, and I cover it in one of my presentations from 2010. My exploration of shared story worlds is one response to that fact: how can IP owners better connect with fans/audiences/etc., ideally in a manner that begins with the premise, ‘fans add value to my IP,’ without sacrificing the necessary commercial control required to support the on-going IP operations (if the IP owner goes broke trying to maintain the collaborative sandbox, everyone loses)?

Third, we could continue to hash this out in the comments thread, with me having to respond to objections I’ve already addressed elsewhere, taking each new objection in a piecemeal fashion…or I can write a short book that lays out the core principles on which I build shared story worlds and my reasonings for doing so. Basically, I could assemble all of the various points I’ve made separately over the years into a larger, denser but more comprehensive document. One massive, easy-to-hit target, as it were. : )

This exchange has been immensely helpful, as it points out not just where I’m failing to communicate the ideas that seem so obvious to me, but it aids me in figuring out how to correct that.

Again, big thanks to you, Haley, and Mike. I truly appreciate your time and thoughtful responses!

There are other motivations, of course, that are neither fandom nor reward-seeking. Take a look at open source software. The vast number of contributors are either paid members of open source companies, or hobbyists who believe in the cause.

The cause of open source is a completely separate mythology from the goals of any individual project. The idea is that when you contribute to a piece of open source software, you help others, AND you’re fighting back against the establishment. The latest Microsoft IP scuffle is related to browser usage statistics is related to the display code you’re writing. To go completely meta on you, I think that’s the kind of mythology we’re trying to build right now with this conversation. But that has nothing to do with love for the individual project. It’s sort of one level above everything else.

I think we can agree that having people exhibit fandom is a valuable thing for IP owners. I think it’s a promotional value. Fan art radiates authenticity, specifically because it wasn’t commissioned by the IP owners. It amounts to a personal recommendation – but one that can be broadcast. Of course that has value.

Fan art can also signal the collective identity of the community. I’m more likely to take a look at a given IP if I see people creating interesting art based on it, and I read all sorts of cues out of the types of art I see. Is the art romantic, adventurous, creepy, adorable? What’s the style? What’s the medium? Portal fans make cakes, build props, and create their own high tech plush dolls, so of course I want to check out Portal.

And the shared identity of the fans is important. Consider My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. That IP has a much bigger cultural and commercial impact because of the way that its older fans have chosen to identify themselves. But again, that identity has to come primarily from the fans for it to have promotional value, which means that as an IP owner you can neither initiate nor control it. At the end of the day, how the heck do you quantify that?