JOHN HANKE: So I'm going to introduce
James Frey, who's here to talk about his book, "Endgame."
We've got a bunch of people from the Niantic team here-- very
cool.
My name is John Hanke.
For you guys that don't know me, I've
been at Google for over 10 years now.
I came in in 2004 when Google acquired
a company called Keyhole and worked
on Google Earth and Google Maps a really long time
before we started a project called Niantic.
And with Niantic, we've been working
to create games that happen out in the real world,
and that bend fiction and mobile gameplay in a new way.
"Ingress" is the game that's out there right now.
And the next big thing for us is this project called "Endgame."
James called.
Actually, his agents called me a couple years ago
and said that James wanted to I talk to me.
And I didn't know who James was at the time,
but I quickly did some research and found out
that he's a very established author,
wrote a book called "A Million Little Pieces,"
"New York Times" best seller, critically acclaimed.
"Bright Shiny Morning," another critically acclaimed book--
probably my favorite of James' what he calls, I guess,
"big boy fiction."
As I got to know James better, I learned
that he worked in Hollywood.
He directed movies, wrote movies,
made movies out here for about 10 years
before moving to the East Coast to become a real, bona fide,
critically acclaimed novelist.
What I also learned is that he has
this really innovative approach to writing and developing
fictions.
He created this company called Full Fathom Five,
employs a lot of writers in this collaborative way.
And they've written a lot of young adult fiction,
including "I am Number Four," which
was a movie that James co-developed
and produced with Steven Spielberg.
But they also had developed games and audiobooks that
accompany the novels, and done some incredibly innovative
things with technology.
And James explained that he was conceiving
of this project that, from the very beginning,
would create a universe that would unfold though novels
and through movies, and through mobile games.
And he basically pitched me kind of the exact same things
that we had been talking about inside Niantic.
But the cool thing was, it was coming
from a world-class creative who had this already
stellar reputation as a novelist and writer and somebody
deeply intertwined with the film and movie industry.
And I thought it was really the perfect opportunity for us
to take this technology we've been working on,
and to marry it with a world-class creative
and to see what we can invent in terms
of a new form of storytelling.
And we're well into that.
We have a site up now called Ancient Society.
It's where the first glimpse of what we've been working on
is out there, and a game that will come out next year that
will reinforce the novel.
But I think James is here to talk more about all of that.
So I'll turn it over to you, sir.
JAMES FREY: Thanks.
I think John just said everything I was going to say.
I have a weird history with this building.
It's always cool to be here, because I
used to live-- I lived in LA for a long time.
And I lived five blocks from here, from 1994 to 2002.
And I met my now wife when she was working here at Chiat/Day
making commercials for Apple.
And so I often used to walk over and pick her up
at the end of her work day.
And we would walk to-- there were very fewer bars
and restaurants around here in the '90s.
But we would walk to one of them and hang out.
And I love coming to this building.
I love coming to this building because of that.
And I love coming to this building because of Google.
It was in this building where John I first
met a couple of years ago.
We cold-called them.
I had heard of Niantic and had done some research
into "Ingress."
And I was fascinated by it.
And I thought it was the future.
And that's what I am trying to do,
is build the future-- not build the future of technology,
but build the future of storytelling and entertainment
and how a storyteller can use the technological tools
at our disposal now to tell better stories, deeper
stories, more immersive stories, more interesting and exciting
stories.
"Endgame" started, in a way, when I was 10 years old.
I grew up in Cleveland.
And one day my mom brought home this book called "Masquerade,"
which was a book by a dude named Kip Williams.
He was an English painter.
And he had written this book that was 16 pages of text,
and it had 16 paintings in it.
And embedded into the text and the paintings were a puzzle.
If you could solve the puzzle, it
led you somewhere to the location
on Earth where he had buried a solid gold, jewel-encrusted
rabbit worth $50,000.
As a 10-year-old, I had dreams of solving this puzzle
and buying a giant stack of "Star Wars"
action figures and Atari cartridges.
And I became obsessed with the book,
and I read it over and over and over again.
And what I loved about it was it somehow
was a book that became more than a book.
Usually a book is a static object and a static experience.
You sit somewhere and you read it, and it exists on the pages
and it exists in your mind.
What I loved about "Masquerade" is it somehow
became more than that.
It made me think about it everywhere I went.
It made me look around the world and wonder.
I knew in my 10-year-old mind that the rabbit
wasn't buried in my schoolyard, but I still wondered.
I knew it wasn't buried in my neighbor's backyard,
but I still wondered.
It somehow became more than a book to me.
And it took somebody three years to solve
the puzzle of "Masquerade."
The rabbit turned out to be buried at the foot of a tree
where an ancient English King was
rumored to have been beheaded.
And then the world sort of forgot about it.
I never did.
I always thought about "Masquerade."
I always wanted to try to do something like "Masquerade."
Like John said, I have a weird work history.
I went to art school.
I moved to LA.
I worked in the film business for a long time.
I wrote some movies.
I directed a couple movies.
I produced some movies.
When I was 30 and I was living right down the street,
I'd always-- the dream had always been to write books.
I quit, and I wrote a book.
I wrote "A Million Little Pieces" right over there.
It came out.
I was lucky enough that it did well,
and I was able to not go back into the film business,
just write books.
I did that for 10 years.
So I worked in the film business for about 10 years,
and then I wrote books for about 10 years.
And at the end of that sort of run,
I was bored with writing books.
I was bored with writing normal books.
And then these things started appearing.
I think these are extraordinary devices
that we take for granted.
I hold this thing in my hand, whether it's
an iPhone or a Nexus device, whatever smartphone you use.
And I have all the world's knowledge at my fingertips
at all times.
I can learn anything about anything
within about five seconds.
I can see a picture of any location on Earth
within about five seconds.
I can see a mapping coordinate, and get directions
to anywhere on earth within about five seconds.
I can take pictures.
I can watch videos.
I can play games.
I can call people.
I can text people.
I can engage in social media.
It's an extraordinary thing.
If you went back in time with this and handed it to somebody,
they wouldn't believe it existed.
As a storyteller, I thought about how could I
start using the technology embedded within this thing
to make better stories?
How could I take a book and expand it
out using the technology?
It sounds like a weird idea, but I sort of
had this idea when I was searching
for something on Google.
And an odd search result came up.
And I thought that would be cool to somehow link out of a book.
You're reading a book.
You pop a link on a digital book.
It takes you to a search result that
somehow illuminates whatever it was you were reading.
From there, I started thinking about "Masquerade" again.
I started thinking about a puzzle embedded within a book.
And instead of just doing it within the pages of the book,
like Kip Williams did, somehow trying
to do it using all of these technological tools
that were now at my disposal as a storyteller.
From there, I started thinking about what kind of story
could I tell?
What story would work?
What story would be a cool book that I could use technology
with that would tell a story, that could have a puzzle?
And then I started thinking sort of further than
that-- that I could build a mobile game with-- I play
mobile games-- that I could make movies out of,
that I could build a universe out of.
I like conspiracy theories.
I like aliens.
So I started looking at a lot of stuff like that.
What I'll start to tell you now-- some of it's
real information.
Some of it's fake.
I'm a master at blending those things.
So I will be very clear with you when
I'm jumping back and forth.
Real information-- human beings that look like us
have existed for 200,000 years.
Human beings that think like us have only
existed for 12,000 years.
This was discovered in 2003, 2004
by the Human Genome Project.
After they fully decoded the genome,
they started going backwards in time
to look at the DNA of people from different periods of time,
to see how we had evolved, if we had evolved at all.
They reached a point 12,000 years ago
where something happened to the genetics of our brain.
Two genes from opposite ends of the gene spectrum
were moved and fused, and it made us significantly smarter
and greatly enhanced our cognitive abilities.
There's no explanation for it.
Nobody knows how it happened or who did it.
The only thing they've ever seen like it
is when they genetically engineer animals
in their own labs.
That's a fact.
The same time that happened, all the world's earliest
civilizations were formed.
They were formed in the Middle East, in India,
in China, in South America, in North America-- all at
about the same time.
All of those earliest civilizations
were formed around gold mines.
Nobody has any idea why this happened.
Gold's not a functional metal.
You can't make a hammer out of it or an axe out of it
or a knife out of it.
It's not particularly rare or hard to get.
It's beautiful, but there are other beautiful things
in the world.
But all the world's early civilizations
were formed around gold mines.
At the same time those two things happened,
all of the world's earliest origin myths were born.
And they all say almost identically the same thing,
which is that our omnipotent creators descended from the sky
amid smoke and fire, created humanity, gave us rules
to live by, and then left.
But before leaving, they told us someday they would come back.
And when they did, the world would end.
So as a storyteller, I see that information, which is all real,
and I think it's cool.
And it makes me think, well, 12,000 years ago, aliens
came to Earth because they discovered gold was here.
And they needed it, for whatever reason.
And they saw these grunting animals
that bashed each other over the heads with sticks,
and they decided to genetically engineer
us to make us a little bit smarter so they could organize
us into a labor force so we could dig up their gold.
When they had the gold, they took off.
For my fiction I said, before they took off--
or for my fiction, what I have them doing
is starting 12 original civilizations around the world.
The reason I chose the number 12 is
because multiple religions and multiple ancient civilizations
use that number.
They use it in the Bible.
They use it in the Koran.
They use it in China.
They use it in Japan.
They all say humanity descended from 12 original civilizations
or tribes.
In the book, we use the oldest civilizations on Earth.
We vary in a very calculated way.
We chose ancient civilizations, but we also chose civilizations
from all over the world, so somehow it was balanced.
And what we say is the aliens told these civilizations
that when they returned, a game would
be played to determine the future of humanity
and that they had to keep somebody
under the age of 20 prepared to play this game at all times.
So for thousands and thousands of years,
these civilizations, all of which are extinct, all of which
have vanished, have actually lived on in secret
and kept people prepared to play the game.
In the book, we say that a lot of the world's
secret societies-- things like the Brotherhood of the Snake
or the Illuminati or the Rosicrucians
or the Priory of Sion-- are, in fact, real.
But they are not devoted to world domination.
They're devoted to keeping players
prepared to play Endgame.
All the players knew, all the civilizations knew,
was that the game would be kicked off
by a celestial event.
So they waited.
At the beginning of the first book,
12 asteroids simultaneously hit Earth's surface.
They do trillions of dollars of damage and kill
millions of people.
Most people on Earth think it's a fluke,
except for these players, who know that Endgame just started.
Switch back to real information for a second.
There's a pyramid in China.
It's called the Great White Pyramid of Xian.
It is built to the precise dimensions of the Great Pyramid
at Giza, except it's three times larger.
They know at one point the pyramid at Giza
was covered with white limestone and had a gold cap on it.
The pyramid in China is still covered with white limestone
and has a gold cap on it.
Chinese government doesn't let anyone near it--
doesn't let anybody within 100 miles of it.
Last time it was seen was in 1945,
when US fighter pilots flew over it and took
a bunch of pictures of it.
If you Google that, you'll see the pictures.
The Chinese government doesn't discuss
why they don't let anybody near it
or what they think happens there.
They just don't.
In the book, the players go to this pyramid,
where they're met by an alien, who tells them
that Endgame is the hunt for three keys,
that three keys have been hidden around the world.
They have to be found in order.
And the first player to physically
possess those three keys wins the game.
What they win is the apocalypse is coming,
and the slice of humanity descended from the winner's
civilization will survive the impending apocalypse.
Everybody on Earth is going to die.
Does that all make sense?
So I have that story framework.
I have a story that I think works,
that I think is cool, that blends real information
with fictional information, and that gives me a framework
to build what I call a 21st century book, or a 21st century
entertainment franchise-- a puzzle,
a mobile game, a series of movies and television shows,
novellas, social media-- almost limitless
what we could do with it.
From there I wrote the book.
I knew there was going to be a ton of labor involved
in doing this project, more than anything I'd ever done before.
So I found a friend of mine to write the book with me.
I wrote a 30-page outline in a 50-page sort of Bible,
handed it to him.
He wrote the first draft of the book.
From there, I rewrote the book three times.
And the book was finished.
The book was finished about two and a half, three years ago.
Once the book was finished, it was, OK, how do I do this?
And I had written out how I wanted to do it
in this sort of Bible document.
And the first partner I wanted to get
was Google, for a variety of reasons.
One of them because I had seen "Ingress."
I hadn't seen it.
I had heard of it and read about it and knew what it was,
and it very much matched up with my idea
of how to make a mobile version of "Endgame."
B, when I wanted to build the puzzle for the book,
I wanted to be use Google's App Engines
for a variety of reasons.
But I also wanted to use Google itself
and build a book that, when you read it, you're reading along.
And you'll come-- in a physical book, it's a footnoted word.
In a digital book, it's a hyperlinked word.
And you click it, and it would take you out somewhere
into Google, to a Google search result, to a YouTube video,
to a Google map location, to a Google Earth location,
to a book fragment, to a field trip excursion-- a book that,
when you read it, the same way "Masquerade"
took me out of it into a different world,
took you out of it into a different world,
and used all of these things-- search results, YouTube videos,
locations-- as a way to enhance the story and deepen
the story-- social media accounts, Google+ profiles.
I called John, or my agent called John.
He works up in San Francisco, I work
in New York and Connecticut, so we met here.
We had a one-hour meeting scheduled originally,
that turned into a three or four-hour conversation with him
and a couple of the guys-- who I think
are in this room-- who work on "Ingress," a couple
of the story puzzle guys.
And from there, it was, all right,
how do we start building this?
It was remarkable meeting John because, like he said,
we were thinking about exactly the same things
but from different points of view.
He's a technologist.
He knows how to build things and do things
that I don't and that are way beyond any version of what
my brain can do.
But I knew how to do things he didn't.
I know how to tell stories.
I know how to set up entertainment deals.
I know how to make movies and television shows.
And in many ways, it was a perfect marriage
of complementary skills.
From there, we started working on the game and the puzzle.
I'm not smart enough to write the puzzle,
so I hired a couple guys with PhDs from MIT
to write the puzzle.
We built the puzzle, which exists exactly like I always
conceived of it-- in a variety of places on Google
and then about 100 to 150 websites
that are all built and linked using Google's App Engines.
And we started building the mobile game.
And just like "Ingress," if you play "Ingress"--
and I would imagine-- how many of you play "Ingress"?
A lot of you play "Ingress."
The thing about "Ingress" that snapped for me
is, I was talking about a book being a static experience.
Most video games are also a static experience.
It's you get a game, you sit in front of a screen,
and you don't move.
You engage the game on a screen, and that's where it exists.
If it goes anywhere, it goes to a place
where you might interact with other players
in different parts of the world online.
But it's still a static, non-moving experience.
My idea was, for "Endgame," how do we turn
the world into a video game?
How do we build a game that you can play everywhere you go,
that you don't play sitting on your couch?
You play when you're walking to school, when you're
going to the grocery store, when you're sitting
at a stoplight in a car, when you're
in a line to get your driver's license-- whatever.
How do we turn the world into a video game?
And that's essentially what they were doing with "Ingress."
They figured out a way to make a game that forced people
to get up off their ass and go do stuff and interact
with each other and play against each other and choose a team.
And on top of that, they were building
fiction that went along with that game
and went along with that idea.
So not only are you getting up off your ass
to play a game that you can do everywhere you
go, there's an ongoing story that lets you interact with it,
that lets you participate in it, that lets you choose a side
and have a team and work with other people
to win or lose while playing the game.
It's the future, absolutely.
You know, the technology lets us do this.
So John and I started talking about, OK,
how do we do it with "Endgame"?
How do we take lessons learned from "Ingress"
and apply them to "Endgame" while also making it
something different and new and more exciting,
hopefully-- not that "Ingress" isn't exciting.
And we spent a long time talking about it.
He started hiring people.
From there, I took the book out to publishers.
We sold it to 35 publishers in 34 languages.
When it was released, it was the largest
simultaneous publication of a book in history.
It came out in 34 languages and 165 countries on the same day.
We built the puzzle.
The puzzle was enormously complicated,
not only in its conception and execution, both on the page
and off the page, but incredibly complicated legally.
We had to figure out how to do something that
was legal in 165 countries.
And then from there, once we had the publishers, the puzzle,
and John's team working on the game, and John's hiring people
to build out a team even bigger, we sold the movie rights.
20th Century Fox bought the movie rights
in the biggest rights acquisition deal
in the studio's long history.
The producers are a group of two men who
call themselves Temple Hill.
They made all the "Twilight" movies.
They made "The Fault in Our Stars."
They made "Maze Runner."
They're old, old buddies of mine.
And now this actually might work.
We have a book.
The book came out in October.
It hit the best seller list in 12 languages
in about 30 countries.
A book that's going to be a game that's
going to be a movie that will have ongoing-- it
will have fiction that we write in the books.
But just like "Ingress," it will have ongoing fiction
and new puzzles that allow the readers and the gamers
to interact with the characters, to feel
like they're participating in it, to help
us shape where it goes.
Right now the books and the ARG fiction are separate.
But we've been working a lot to fuse them.
So in the next book, which comes out next October,
they'll start to fuse.
And then by the time the third book comes out,
the October after that, it will be fully fused.
And what I think we believe we're doing
is building the future of entertainment,
of books and of gaming and of films
and of how those things are-- instead of allowing
them to happen accidentally.
And when I say accidentally, you look
at something like Harry Potter.
They didn't plan for Harry Potter to be what was.
It happened, it came out, it exploded,
and then they built a whole world around it
after its success.
My idea from the beginning of this
was that we could create that world from the beginning,
and people would come to it-- that instead
of waiting to see what happened, we build it and they come.
And that's what we're doing.
It's been crazy exciting, a ton of work,
not too stressful, actually, because you get up
excited and kind of scared every day,
which is what I think the best way to feel about your job is.
Yeah, and it's been amazing.
I get to work with a ton of people
who are a lot smarter than me and who
know a lot more about things that I don't know.
And I think it's actually going to work.
I think we're going to pull it off.
Any questions?
No questions?
All you smart people and no questions?
AUDIENCE: This sounds amazing.
I was so excited to come in this morning.
This is great.
My question for you is, how much of a leap of faith
was it when you started this project?
Because with a Harry Potter book,
you start out with a book.
You work with a publisher to publish it,
and then it just kind of grows from there.
So you have a basis of success.
With something like "Endgame," it's a great concept.
But it sounds to me you had to employ a lot of people
from the get-go to sign onto this project
before it could ever be fiscally feasible.
So if you could talk a little bit about the business
aspect of it in addition to the creative aspect.
JAMES FREY: I mean, really it was just convincing people
that my vision was possible.
It was getting into rooms with people
who could make this thing a reality
and convincing them that it was possible to do.
One thing I did was, the book was done.
And there was a sort of controlling plan document.
So I wasn't just coming in and saying, well,
this is what I want to do.
You want to do it?
I could say, this is what I want to do.
Here is the plan very precisely.
Here's what I need.
Here's what I would like to do with you specifically.
And here's the book.
You can read it.
I mean, people took real leaps of faith.
I mean, I was convincing people to spend real money
and put in real work.
And I don't know what to say other than that I think
a lot of-- I didn't know John, but I
knew everybody else I went to.
I had worked with them before.
HarperCollins published the book in the United States.
They published one of my adult novels before and about 40
of my company's books.
So it's a very longstanding, stable, productive
relationship.
Marty and Wick, the movie producers,
are guys-- Marty used to be one of my agents 15 years ago.
And they're guys I've known since I first
started writing movies out here a long time ago.
I worked for Wick.
And then as far as making deals, I always
say, like, just look at what the greater good is.
I'm not going to fight you and bitch and moan
about a little deal point.
The idea is to make this happen-- to prove it out.
And if we can make it happen and we prove it out and it works,
everybody's going to be very happy financially.
But that if I get hung up over stupid bullshit,
I put it in jeopardy.
When you make a partnership with anybody,
whether it's a business partnership or a friendship
or a marriage or whatever, you take a leap of faith.
And for me, I don't need to control everything.
I don't have to be in charge of everything.
You have to believe in the people you're working with
or you're in partnership with.
And if I've done anything well on this project,
it's choose great partners.
Like, I think the guys, John and Dan and Jim,
the whole team here at Google-- I always am
super-excited when I come here.
A, because the cafeteria fucking rocks.
B, because I get all the free Coke Zero I want.
But C, because I walk in, and I know
I'm going to spend my day with people-- and I don't say this,
like, jokingly or in a corny way.
I'm going to work with people who I really, truly believe
are smarter than me and who are awesome at their jobs.
They're the best people in the world at their jobs.
And we're doing exciting, fun stuff.
And every time I come-- it's not like I'm here every day.
Every time I come, there's something new happening.
They have something new to show me, something new to tell me.
And I would be a fool and a madman to walk in here and try
to tell them that I know more than them,
because I just don't.
You work with the best people you can
and you let them do their job and you trust them.
And then honestly, you let them know how much you
appreciate working with them.
It's been great.
The partners have all been great.
We do events together all the time.
We did-- me, John, and Marty Bone did an event last night.
We've done events all over the place together.
Always a pleasure to see everybody.
I'm always stoked.
And like I said, I get up excited most days.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
But my question is, were you aware
that there was scandal surrounding
the end of "Masquerade?"
JAMES FREY: Was I aware that there was a scandal surrounding
the end of "Masquerade"?
I was.
So the scandal surrounding the end of "Masquerade"
was that the winner of the prize was the new boyfriend
of the author's ex-girlfriend.
Does that make sense?
So clearly, there was some kind of inside shit going on there.
One of the things we did with "Endgame" was we
went to great lengths to make sure
that that was not possible.
I don't know where the key is hidden.
The way the puzzle works, Matt [? Lebowitz ?] and his team,
which is sometimes three people and sometimes
20 people-- I'm never sure how many he
has working for him at any given time-- built the puzzle.
Matt knows the solution to the puzzle, and one of my attorneys
knows the solution to the puzzle.
Nobody else does.
The way the actual mechanics of the puzzle work
is, when you solve one of the first puzzles in the books,
it will take you one of two websites.
Once you're there, you sign in.
You have to have a Google account.
So if you don't have a Gmail address, you have to start one.
You accept our privacy policy.
You accept our rules.
From there, part of our privacy policy
allows us to track you everywhere
you go-- only when you're engaged in our websites
or engaged in the puzzle.
So if you're on a puzzle website trying to solve a puzzle,
we know where you are.
We know how long you've been there.
We know what you're doing.
We can do that with every player on Earth.
Last I checked, there were players or people actively
working to solve the puzzle from 104 countries,
and over 100,000 people had solved
the first entry-level puzzle and are working.
There was a group of, let's say, 20,000 people who spend
multiple hours a day on it.
And there was a group of about 10 who were in the lead.
But we will know where they are, what they're doing,
and we will know when somebody wins.
When somebody solves it, there will be one person who does it.
We'll be able to prove it.
We'll be able to print out an entire record of how they
got there, how long it took them, what steps they took,
in order to both prove that it was fair
and ensure that it was fair.
And people ask me all the time, like, where's the key?
I don't know.
For a while, I actually had the key in my wallet.
For the first three weeks after the book came out,
the whole puzzle was built, but we knew,
or we believed nobody would solve it that quickly.
So I was walking around with this key in my wallet.
And I would pull it out at events, and be like,
here's the fucking key.
And I'm not sure-- I don't know if you guys were
at any of those events.
I'm not sure if people believed me or not, but it was the key.
Once you find the key, the gold, the prize
is $500,000 for the first book-- $500,000 in gold.
For the second book, it will be $1 million.
For the third book, it'll be $1.5 million.
The gold is in a bulletproof case
bolted to the floor of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
So when you find the key, you will go to Caesar's Palace.
You'll open that case.
It's actually hydraulic, so you put the key in, you turn it,
and the hydraulic case will lift up.
And you get to sweep away the gold,
and do whatever you want with it.
AUDIENCE: Is it going to be taxed?
JAMES FREY: That's actually a very valid question,
and one we had to deal with.
And in the rules of the game, we say
we are not responsible for you, your taxes,
or your interactions with the government of your country
in any way whatsoever, that once the golden moves physically out
of the case into your possession,
it is your business.
If you happen to win it, I would highly
advise you pay your taxes.
But it's got nothing to do with me.
AUDIENCE: When do you expect someone to win it?
It sounds like you're expecting a winner
before the next book comes out.
JAMES FREY: We don't really know.
We wanted to design the puzzle so
that it took approximately 10 to 12 months for somebody
to solve it.
It's, again, one of those things you can't really control.
You can build it in a way that you think will take that long,
but you can't control it.
Right now, it's on track to happen somewhere
within that window.
Right out of the gate, people were slightly ahead of pace.
Then people fell slightly behind pace.
Right now, I think they're right on pace.
I think it'll get solved in August or September
of next year, which will be right
before the next book comes out.
But I don't know.
I know nobody's solved it yet, which makes me happy.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] next book.
JAMES FREY: Yeah, we're not stupid that way.
Couple more.
AUDIENCE: Is it hard to catch up?
JAMES FREY: It's not actually hard to catch up,
I don't think.
I mean, I haven't done it.
I'm not trying to solve it.
As part of the rules, I can't win it, so--
and I'm also busy enough that I don't have the time to do it.
But I think it's possible to catch up.
I know people are sharing information.
And I think it's possible to catch up.
AUDIENCE: Will the game that's being built,
will that be part of finding the key?
JAMES FREY: No.
We talked about that early on.
But legally it was way too complicated.
One company needed to take responsibility for the puzzle.
I don't think Google wanted to indemnify either me
or the puzzle builders.
Google didn't become Google because the people running
it are stupid.
So we talked about that very, very early on.
But it was way too complicated to do for a variety of reasons.
So no, but there are still puzzles
that are part of the ARG fiction related to the game that
are totally awesome, in that you can
go in and try to solve them.
And once the game comes out, when you solve those puzzles,
it'll give you rewards in the game.
It'll give you better weapons, or better armor,
or better skills.
So there will be puzzles in the game that provide you
with rewards but not clues to the puzzle that
wins you the money.
AUDIENCE: In the game, do you get to create a character--
did you put a character in Endgame, so--
JAMES FREY: You do.
You get to choose a line.
And you have a username.
And you get to choose what your character's wearing.
And you get to go out on missions,
sort of like "Ingress," and find the weapons you want.
And then you get to go do battle with people.
They showed us an animation of the game yesterday,
of one of the battles happening.
It's going to be pretty awesome.
It's going to be really cool.
AUDIENCE: So with your friends, you
could make alliances and then go [INAUDIBLE]?
JAMES FREY: You can.
Like, in a few months, the two of you
will be able to make an alliance.
And if there's some 11-year-old boy in your class
you don't like-- and he's really annoying,
and he's also playing "Endgame," the two
of you will be able to gang up on him and take him out.
And if and when you do that, you have
to send your dad an email so that he can send it to me,
because I want to hear about it.
AUDIENCE: So we were talking about a book being [INAUDIBLE]
something that's more not just unbounded from the page,
but I think also unbounded from the-- part of a book
is you lock yourself in.
You get all the creative vision out into it.
And I think with ARGs and things like that, you're
dealing with the way it interacts with the world
and how that affects the back end
and the cycle of creativity.
Has that come into play within "Endgame" yet?
Are you seeing interaction having that feedback
into the future?
If not--
JAMES FREY: It has not, but we believe it will.
And we're sort of planning for it to.
One of the things with the ARG and the book
is the first book was done and was on a publication schedule
before we even started any of the ARG fiction.
So there's no way we can reverse engineer it back into it.
There have been a lot of conversations
and a lot of emails about book two.
And there's a draft of book two.
There's a pretty tight working draft of book two
about how to integrate the ARG fiction into the book.
And so in book two, like I said, there
will be a lot of-- the characters from the ARG
are starting to appear in the book.
By the time book three has to be finished, the ARG and the game
will be out.
And there will be real participation,
we hope and believe.
And there'll be real feedback.
And we'll be able to integrate it far more into it.
The other thing is, we can do novellas.
We have eight novellas finished right now.
But we can produce novellas very, very quickly.
And so part of the idea is that we'll
be able to produce novellas within, let's say,
two to four weeks of events in the game happening.
And because with a novella we're not
tied to a traditional physical publishing schedule,
if an event happens in the game and the ARG,
we can pop out a novella.
And we can publish it immediately.
So fans and players and readers will
be able to get material in ways that they never have before.
And part of that is because we built a system to be--
or my company built a system-- to be able to produce material
that quickly and efficiently.
And digital publishing lets us do it.
Once we have a manuscript done, it's
maybe three, four hours to format it
into the proper files.
We already have all the accounts set up
with all the digital distributors-- Google, Apple,
Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
It's just a matter of setting up a page for the novella
and releasing it.
So there will be a lot of that.
That's one of the most exciting parts of this whole thing
is we'll be doing storytelling in real time
with technology in ways that nobody's ever done it before.
It's one of the exciting parts and scary parts.
But that's definitely the plan.
One more question?
Two more questions?
All right, I've silenced the Googlers.
AUDIENCE: So in the game, it sounds
like you have to choose a line.
JAMES FREY: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: If you don't choose the same line as your friends,
are you going to be able to play together?
JAMES FREY: You will.
There will be ways to-- different lines
will be able to align with other lines.
So there will-- and then you will also
be able to betray them.
You'll have advantages over certain lines.
You'll have disadvantages over certain lines.
And you'll be able to align with some people from other lines.
AUDIENCE: So the people I want to play with,
I should pick the same line as them.
JAMES FREY: Or you should just-- you'll
be able to see what lines you can align yourself with.
Just choose complementary lines.
Or if they're, like, more a frenemy than a friend,
choose a line where you have advantages over,
and you get to go wipe them out.
AUDIENCE: For the game, could you--
are you going to be traveling not on your device?
Do you have to travel places to unlock special things?
Or do you do that in the game?
JAMES FREY: Well, in this game, one big difference
between "Ingress" is you can unlock
certain things by buying them.
But make sure your dad says it's OK first.
But yes, you'll be traveling on foot.
You'll be just like "Ingress."
That's one of the greatest-- if anything-- you know,
that's one of the greatest things about "Ingress."
The great, radical step that "Ingress" took
is that it gets you out into the world.
You're not sitting in a chair playing a video game.
You have to play it.
You have to go out in the world.
And we definitely-- that was one of the things I thought
was awesome about it and one of the reasons I called.
So thank you very, very much for coming.
I'm stoked, as always, to be here.
And I hope you get a copy of the book.
And I hope you read it.
And I hope you dig it.
And when the game comes out, I hope you play it and love it.
And check out ancientsocieties.com
where all the ARG fiction is.
There's a ton of awesome material on there already.
And there's only more coming.
And yeah, go Google.
[APPLAUSE]