It’s been a week since prolific author Neal Stephenson and The Lord of the Rings VFX studio Wētā Workshop launched Artefact, a web game they hope will become a seminal medium in the entertainment industry.
Housed on the Lamina1 platform, “Artefact” is described as “a cooperative world-building experience that invites players to step into the aftermath of the Spike, a stalled singularity that tore the Internet apart, ended the reign of the AI megasystem, and forced humanity to rebuild with a new decentralized system.”
The goal here is to experiment with the process of IP creation and ownership when driven by fandom. This is the flagship project of Lamina1, one of several “spaces” planned by the platform run by Stevenson and co-founder and CEO Rebecca Barkin.
“With ‘Artifact,’ we’re getting a really new, original IP that’s almost post-AI mythology,” ‘Artifact’ executive producer Ryan Gill told Variety. “We don’t have a lot of that. And as we move into other Space adaptations of film, television, books, and everything else, the organizing principles remain with all the people who were in the Space from the beginning and had a fundamental understanding and participation. And the means of how to really prove that and how we can build IP natively from there and shape through it. And that’s what Space does with other IPs as well.”
Gameplay in “Artifact” begins with the player acquiring a thumb drive and activating a rig (a salvaged machine pieced together from scraps of CPU, drive, and machine code) to go in search of artifacts and evolve digital entities that can store and transmit lost knowledge. Players work together to find artifacts that keep appearing across Lamina1, while building trust within the community of players known as the Phyle, in order to uncover the great mystery at the heart of the game.
As daunting as that may sound, the Artefact team knows it and has spent a lot of time thinking about ways to make it as easy to play as possible for as many people as possible.
“When we’ve been working on taking existing IP and turning it into interactive IP, it’s a way to move people from passive consumption to how can they interact with the world and create with the world?” Barkin said. “It’s a really tough battle, because people just want to consume. So we had to think about different barriers to entry and different ways to do it, depending on different types of profiles of people and players. And one of the reasons we allowed people to post PDFs and images and things like that was just to lower the barrier to entry. It means you can insert yourself and your ideas into the game world, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do that unless you were a developer.”
Seven days after the launch of “Artefact’s” on October 31st, Lamina1’s gaming community currently has 372 members. Barkin said these players have been part of the community since day one, which could give them an advantage in the long run, but that’s far from the only way to interact with “Artefact” as it grows.
“There’s going to be a lot of different entry points to keep new people comfortable in the game,” Barkin said. “And I think this is an important piece. We’ve had a lot of discussions about how do people get in from a rollout strategy standpoint. And word of mouth is really going to be our biggest asset if Mint comes in, so how do we make sure we always have new entry points for people to get into the game, maybe not with the same advantage that early folks have, but still in a really fun and accessible way.”
Gill likens the “Artifact” format to two tried-and-true entertainment techniques: procedurals and serials.
“If you look at the paradigm of episodic storytelling, streaming has taken over quite a bit, so people are used to episodic and binging and all this kind of stuff. In a video game sense, it’s kind of a combination of that in a way,” Gill said, adding, “We have procedural and sequential. We’re doing this in stages.”
In the procedural portion, Gill said, each phase of the game is “a different space in the world that you can go to and interact with people, and there might even be side missions or things you can help out with.”
“It’s a combination of an episodic way of telling a story, and merging that with the video game feel that we’re used to, but it’s really more like a literary narrative experience at heart,” Gill said. “You’ll get the richness of Neil’s novel, for example, but it’ll be experienced in a more dynamic and immersive way. And this isn’t fixed. This is like the pilot episode. This is episode one of season one. And it’s going to be very evolving, and it’s not for us to decide all the ways it’s going to evolve.”
The Artefact team has made sure that these decisions are up to the creator community.
