[Music: 'The Imperial March', Star Wars (piano version)]

Antony Funnell: I've chosen to open this week's edition of Future Tense with a bit of piano music. Hello, Antony Funnell here, thanks for joining me.

Today's program is about co-creation and fan culture and this piece of music sort of says it all. If you go to our website you can view the actual YouTube clip from which it came.

The music is called 'The Imperial March', or Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars. And the man playing it—I think it's a man—the person playing it is dressed from head to toe like a Star Wars Stormtrooper; helmet, boots and full body armour. It's possible that the clip is meant to be humorous, but then again, you never know.

Being a fan has long been a serious affair, regardless of genre, but the platforms and tools we have today are taking fandom to a whole new level.

In this program we'll explore the nature of modern co-creation, we'll hear about a form of deliberately political fan-fiction called Slash, and we'll also hear from a writer/producer about navigating the tricky path between professional writing and audience participation.

Our first guest is Scott Knight, Assistant Professor of Film, Television and Videogames at Bond University in Queensland.

Scott Knight: The type of active participatory engagement that came from fan culture, stemming back into the 1970s and 1980s, that sort of flowed through into more general audiences. So the activities of fans, particularly television fans but also film fans as well, has changed the very nature I think of general audiences. So where in the past general audiences wouldn't even have considered to be participatory in the way of, for instance, creating fan art or fanfiction or fan films, fan vids as they are called now, for YouTube for instance, this has become far, far more prevalent within the last 10 years or so. And primarily obviously it's because of the internet, the digitisation of culture, but it's the access to media creation technologies, apps and software, iMovie for instance, this has dramatically fostered mash-up creation. So you have the access to these media creation technologies, and of course now you've got even more outlets for those projects. Obviously YouTube and Vimeo are examples there. So audiences can create these fan films or vids or whatever it may be, and then they can be shared and distributed and seen by millions of people all around the world. So co-creation and fan creation has trickled down into more general audience behaviour.

Antony Funnell: And those heightened expectations about participation and co-creation, according to Professor Knight, have seen the relationship between the producer and the consumer of popular cultural change significantly, with consumers of content now beginning to feel a real sense of co-ownership.

Scott Knight: Whatever the property may be, whether it's Star Wars or Doctor Who or Star Trek, many people see these properties as folk culture, but of course the reality, the corporate reality is that it's intellectual property owned by major media corporations, and those media corporations wish to hold on to the rights and the licences of their materials. It's very difficult, it's a minefield, it's very complex, the boundaries, and there is a push and shove, there is essentially a culture war that exists between the corporate owners of these licences and audiences that wish to just experiment, to play, to create, to engage in artistic endeavour with these materials.

Antony Funnell: Scott Knight from Bond University.

One area where co-creation has long been influential is in game culture. In one sense you could argue that gamers have helped lead the way in transforming passive fan culture into something much more dynamic. And studying the changing nature of video and online game playing has been a particular focus of Professor Knight's work.

Scott Knight: When we look at games, the game community is not the same as any other media audience, it's a particular type of engagement that players have with games. It is automatically an active participation, unlike other media forms. And so this doesn't exist in any other media form, and particularly you've got online communities associated with games, so you've got the meta culture, the culture that exists surrounding games, but you've also got the culture within games, the community that exists for each game within games. And so this affords a particular type of active participation quite different to any other media form.

There has been a long history of level creation tools, for instance, with PC games, referred to as modding culture. So players are not only playing games, they are engaged in such a way, in such a deep way that they may modify the games through patches or skins or maps, they can re-skin the game using other properties, for instance. So this in the past may have required the player to be able to write code, to be a programmer in that sense, to modify existing games.

But what we find in the last five, six years or so, there has been a shift. So instead of you've got those hard-core players playing particular PC games with level creation tools, these level creation tools or game creation tools are now mainstream. So I'd point back to a game like Little Big Planet, and this is a game released on the Sony PlayStation back in 2008, which was a game that was very much associated with the DIY culture, so that sort of art and craft aesthetic was part and parcel of this game Little Big Planet. The tagline for this game was 'Play, create and share'. So not only did you play particular levels in this game, but you were able to make games within that game itself, and then share them through online communities. And then that I think was in some ways an idea that influenced the game Minecraft that came about around 2010. So this is a game that uses very chunky building blocks, reminiscent of toys and childhood and the idea of just messing around, of playing, experimentation, making mistakes and creating worlds that in a sense look like a type of digital Lego.

So you have those two games. And then just within the last two years or so you have large-scale games like Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions, these are two games that both very much use mash-up culture in quite different ways.

Antony Funnell: So are you saying that modification culture has now become part of the corporate landscape of gaming?

Scott Knight: Absolutely. I think in the case of Minecraft, just to take one, Minecraft has radically changed the landscape of game audiences and to game communities. I think the corporate owners, particularly Microsoft…Microsoft have acquired the Minecraft IP for several billion dollars, I think it was $2.5 billion…they have realised, Disney has realised, Microsoft has realised and many of the other major corporations have realised that there is a huge desire now for user created content, and that audiences for mainstream games do want to create games themselves using the tools that exist in games like Disney Infinity and Minecraft.

Antony Funnell: So co-creation is fast becoming a profitable tool for game producers. And according to Associate Professor John Banks from the creative industry faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, that brings with it a whole other dimension of complexity.

John Banks: I think a decade ago there was a lot of excitement around the idea of co-creation, a lot of words were thrown around, like it was empowering, democratising, et cetera. And I think we can still hold on to aspects of that, but I think we need to ask harder questions about what are the conditions under which it is empowering, in what sense is it empowering or democratising, and when isn't it?

Antony Funnell: And in the games sector where, as we've established, co-creation has taken on a life of its own, well, in the games sector, anxieties over fairness and exploitation are definitely beginning to come to the fore.

John Banks: When I first encountered what I would call co-creation in the context of the games industry, that would have been in the early 2000s, back in 2003. And at the time the gamers I was talking with and undertaking research with, they were very excited that developers were listening to them, were paying attention to them, were listening to what they wanted out of the game, the game experience, and they could actually have input into it through a range of different approaches, whether it was beta testing, testing the game while it was in development and giving the development teams feedback, or a move on from that, actually contributing content, making objects for the game world, modifying it et cetera. And there was a lot of excitement about that. I still see that.

But I also see an understanding amongst some gamers, not all but some, that there is a value transaction happening here, that the developers, the studios and indeed the publishers are essentially generating content from them that in a sense is unpaid, and that there is potentially extraordinary value there. Some of them have discussed in terms of all this art content we are making, wow, they don't have to employ artists, animators et cetera, 3-D modellers, to create this content.

But when does that awareness slip into an understanding that the relationship is unfair or that the value that is being extracted from them is in some sense exploitative? Because they view it as an interest, a hobby, they don't want to view it as work often, it's something that's different from work, so they often avoid using that language, except when perhaps the company has really overstepped the mark in some way, perhaps is taking and using content and adding it into official product releases without the gamer's or the person's position or acknowledgement of what they've contributed, or the gamers who are involved in a relationship with a company feel that the company is taking the game and the experience in a direction that they don't want, that they are annoyed about, angry about, they feel like they are not being listened to, and then they start using that language of exploitation.

So what's really interesting here, it's a quite dynamic relationship. Co-creation is a relationship between the users and the producers, in this case the game developers, and that relationship can take different forms, and different kinds of tensions and conflicts can emerge.

Antony Funnell: You've also been looking at the reaction to players around the use of data analytics, haven't you, and the way in which gaming companies, like many companies in the world today, collect data on their game's users.

John Banks: Data analytics and indeed big data in the context of media content generally is a big question, not just in the video games industry but definitely in the video games industry. So when you think about it, game developers can track so many of the interactions that the gamers are having with their platforms and their games. And there are questions around that as to what extent the gamers themselves are aware of that, how transparent is that tracking, that data collection. And a step further from that, how transparent is the uses that the company is making of that data?

So, for example, are they on-selling that data? Are they harvesting it and combining it and creating datasets that are then on-sold to other companies that may be interested in those interactions and those consumer behaviours, and are the players aware of that? And I think that that is problematic, because that could be arguably a form of co-creation. The players' activities are generating value for the company, just by the sheer fact of playing the game and interacting with each other in the game environment. And yet, what's occurring there may not be transparent to the players themselves.

Antony Funnell: A dynamic relationship indeed. John Banks from the Queensland University of Technology. And a relationship that can run into trouble if the fans feel the co-creative experience is being used against them. But anxieties can also run the other way.

Laura Miller: My name is Laura Miller and I am the books and culture columnist for Slate.com.

Antony Funnell: And Laura has been investigating what we might politely term as the more assertive side of fan culture and co-creation, where the fans not only engage, but begin to take over.

Laura Miller: It's really huge. I mean, there are these online archives where people upload and comment on just millions and millions of original fan narratives. Sometimes it's fan art. And often it takes the characters into places where the original creator hasn't sent them or doesn't want them to go. The classic thing is to have them be romantically involved with each other, sometimes very explicitly so, but there are all kinds of fan created narratives, and often whole separate universes and histories for the characters that fans have created.

Antony Funnell: And am I right in saying that with Slash fiction, which is a sub-genre of fan fiction, the fans take two male characters and then explore a fictional romantic or sexual relationship between those characters, even though that sort of relationship was never intended by the author?

Laura Miller: Yes, that is actually one of the most popular provinces of the fan fiction world. These stories are almost entirely written by straight women and read by straight women, but clearly they are very interested in men and their emotional lives and their sexual feelings, and one of the ways that they explore that is through writing these narratives where…the classic example is Captain Kirk and Mr Spock from Star Trek, that was really where Slash started as a fan enterprise. But it really could be any character, and sometimes it's real people. A very, very active area of fan fiction is the band One Direction, imagining two members of that band as being secretly romantically involved, that kind of thing.

Antony Funnell: You mention One Direction and I know one of the band members, Harry Styles, is very popular in this brand of fan fiction, and there's something called Mpreg which is another category of fanfiction, isn't it. Tell us about Mpreg and Harry Styles.

Laura Miller: Yes, it's not really a huge part of fan fiction, it's like a subset of Slash fiction, but in it male characters are able to get pregnant. I think that one of the things that you have in fan fiction is female writers and female readers imagining what it's like to be a man and then sort of grafting their own experiences onto these male characters so that these male characters are going through experiences they have either had or are thinking about having. It's a really very freewheeling, wild, imaginative space where almost anything can happen.

Antony Funnell: So it's creative. Would it be right to say there is a political dimension to it then?

Laura Miller: I think a lot of the members of the fan fiction community do see themselves that way, they see themselves as co-opting the stories in order to tell different kinds of stories with characters that they really like, but the kinds of stories that don't get told that often or don't get told in the way that most of popular culture isn't really created for women or for young women, and so therefore they are just going to seize the imaginative means of production and do it for themselves.

Antony Funnell: I guess the big question is what do the authors think about this? Some authors I imagine would think this is kind of funny, perhaps embrace it. But I understand there are some who really haven't taken to this idea of the fans taking over and rewriting the ending, if you like.

Laura Miller: Yes, some are very famous authors, probably the most famous is George RR Martin who wrote the Game of Thrones series, have been very, very adamant that they don't really like this and they've asked their fans not to do it. They feel like these characters are theirs and there's a way that their story is supposed to go, and they probably feel slightly violated by this.

Others don't mind it so much but they don't want to see it because if they are writing a story that is in the process of unfolding, like a series, as George RR Martin is, fans who send them fan fiction with certain ideas in it, if they wind up having those same ideas themselves they feel like 'I could be sued for this'.

It's sort of a complex thing. It's more of a problem for television show runners than for, say, novelists because people are watching and writing fan fiction about television series that are not completed yet. And so if they decide, oh, let's send these characters to Paris and then the characters go to Paris and they have a particular kind of experience, every once in a while someone will decide that they've been ripped off and try to sue the actual original creators for stealing their ideas, or at least that the anxiety that some of the creators have.

Antony Funnell: Laura Miller from Slate.com.

Now, at this point in the program we need to travel back in time briefly to the 16th century. Back when Shakespeare was at his peak, the fans could be remarkably brutal. But the Bard, as we know, had a thick hide and was famous for testing his plays with the audience and then using their engagement to rewrite the bits that didn't go down well. A very early exercise in creative co-creation, you might say. Unfortunately, due to the fact that he's been dead for five centuries, William Shakespeare wasn't available to be interviewed for this program.

But one contemporary writer/producer who knows what it feels like to get the fans involved is Mike Jones.

Mike Jones: I think we have developed a culture…when you've got a lot of gatekeepers between the artist and the audience, approvals of broadcasters or publishers or film distributors and all those things that get between, which are very valuable and important, but it also means you end up as an artist very often falling into the trap of writing it for that intermediary, so you are writing it for the publisher, not for the audience, or you are making the television show for the broadcaster, not for the audience. And very often there can be a big gap between that intermediary and the audience. When you are working directly to your audience and you are trying to engage them, you are working in a difficult way. It's not easy, audiences can be very fickle and they can be very vocal, but they can also be very authentic, and you are getting very authentic responses to what is resonant in your work.

I can give you a good example. A project I worked on a couple of years ago called Wastelander Panda, it's a post-apocalyptic adventure story. If you try and pitch that idea to a traditional broadcaster, you're going to have a hard sell. So it's a post-apocalyptic landscape with a giant panda who wields machetes and goes on an adventure. But is it a comedy, is it animated, what is it?

For a show like that that otherwise wouldn't get through a gatekeeper of a traditional broadcaster, would find it very hard, but in a global online space you know there is an audience for that, there is a kind of cult audience for that but because it's a global online world the cult niche audience has a scale to it, then suddenly you have a chance to go, you know what, I don't need you to approve it, I'm going to go directly to the audience and I'm going to prove this has got legs, I'm going to prove this has got the kind of gravitas with the audience I want.

Then you come back to the broadcasters later, and in this case of Wastelander Panda it was very successful as an early prologue and as a test with the audience, and it went viral, to use a bad term. And then we were able to go back to the broadcaster and say, look, we've got the numbers to back it up, at which point they are not going to impose a creative 'we don't think it will work', they go 'well, you've proved it can work, what do you want to go to next, what's the next step for that project?'

Antony Funnell: Because it's a challenging proposition, isn't it, to somebody who is creative, who has an idea, who wants to see that idea brought to fruition, to then accept the will of the crowd, in a sense, to give over some of that control of the creativity to others.

Mike Jones: Yes, it really flies in the face of a very modern sense of what an artist is, what a writer is or what a creator is, but I would argue it's actually only a very modern sense. I think the traditional notion of the minstrel who wanders from town to town singing songs or the play actors who move their theatre production or even telling the stories around the campfire, these were acts of storytelling and creative production that were entirely responsive to their audience, that lived and died by the oxygen of what the audience was giving back to them. And the story would adapt and flow based on how that audience was responding. I think it's only a really contemporary idea that the artist works alone, solitary and forms something inside their heads that is completely valuable and worthwhile, and hopes that an audience will like it.

Antony Funnell: All of us who are involved in some form of storytelling in the modern world operate in a multimedia environment. How does that multimedia aspect to storytelling, how does it affect somebody like you who is a writer/producer, and what are the expectations of the fans around that multimedia dimension?

Mike Jones: I think what's important is traditionally writers have defined themselves by the medium. So I'm a playwright, I'm a novelist, I'm a screenwriter. I think in a contemporary world where we have added new media forms but we haven't lost any of the traditional ones…here we are on radio and radio is still very much alive and kicking, in fact in many ways having a resurgence…what we are doing is spreading our audience further over more and more platforms.

So what that means for a writer is to say if I define my skill set by a specific and particular platform, I've kind of got a problem because my audience don't define themselves by a platform, and I think that's very true of contemporary audiences, they don't think of themselves as TV audiences, they think of themselves as story audiences. And I'd go further to say they see themselves as audiences of particular story worlds, which is a mix of genre and form and place and tone and style and kinds of stories and they gravitate to those worlds.

And so a fan of horror or a fan of science fiction or a fan of romance will consume those stories on all kinds of platforms very willingly, and increasingly will assume or expect that the story worlds they want will be delivered to them in more than one platform. And so I think that the challenge for writers then or any creative media is to say how can I define my skill set by the experiences I want to create and my flexibility to deliver them rather than on a specific and individual platform. That's not easy, that's far easier said than done. But if your audience is not defining themselves by a platform then it's very difficult and problematic for the artist to do so.

Antony Funnell: And these are issues that you have to deal with on a personal basis, aren't they, because you've got a new project underway at the moment. Tell us about that and the thinking process I guess that went into understanding what your audience would want and how you could deliver that product to them.

Mike Jones: My new project is a Gothic supernatural horror experience, and I sort of use that word 'experience' to define it holistically, and I had an idea for not just one story but a collection of stories that all deal with classic Gothic themes and ideas but with a sort of contemporary cinematic sensibility. So the result was something I call the Transgressions Cycle. And so when I defined this project, I didn't set out to write a book or a television series or a video game, but to define the story world that would contain all those stories and had the potential to generate ongoing stories. And so I framed the rules of that story world, how it worked, how are the forces of the supernatural worked, their parameters, and I started to generate story ideas, different types of characters, different types of events, different types of settings that all were consistent within that world.

And then when I looked at it I went, okay, if I was going to make this as a TV series it's going to be maybe $1 million to do an episode, this is quite expensive. If I do it as a feature film it's going to have these parameters, and my end result was I'm going to do it as a book first, I'm going to do it as a book first which in many ways is the most cost effective way to do it. And I went to my publisher and they said, well, let's do it as three, we will put the three books out together as a collection and we will see how the audience responds.

And so it was a case of scoping large first and in many ways working in a platform agnostic way or a platform neutral way. I didn't predetermine the medium, I didn't set out to write a book, I created a world that identified that certain stories would naturally lend themselves to books, and the books become the first test of the larger world. And I actually wrote the books, the screenplay or the TV pilot and the interactive game experience simultaneously. The books came out earlier this year and they represent the first test to my audience of that story world's potential.

And the three books in the collection are deliberately different. How my audience respond to them and which of those three different stories they resonate with may well shape where I go to next and which themes and ideas dominate in the next stories to come.

Antony Funnell: So have you got to be careful with something like the Transgressions Cycle, then, in taking this multimedia approach that you don't dilute your creative focus, in a sense, that you don't become in one way I guess a jack of trades and master of none?

Mike Jones: It's one of the real issues and it's a long-standing debate in the arts around the idea of the specialist as opposed to the generalist. And I think there is another way to think about it. I would say that my skills as a writer are not specialist to the platform but they are specialist to the genre or to the form or to the underlying experience that I want the audience to have, and that's something that is consistent across all platforms.

So I often find it's interesting, because I work across our lot of different media, what I find most useful is to look first for what's consistent between story platforms, between, say, an audio-only audiobook platform, a print publishing platform, a television or cinematic or an interactive, and say actually what is consistent, what is it that is consistent across all these platforms rather than straight to what's different. Because it's only when you really understand what an audience is looking for, in my case in a Gothic horror experience, that is consistent across platforms that you will be able to fully exploit what's unique about a sound-only medium or a print medium or a cinematic one. And so it is a challenge.

I don't think it's a case of the death of the specialist, all those mediums require specialist skills, but I think if you're going to be a writer in the 21st century where your audience are spread across multiple platforms, you have to be flexible, and for me that was story world design, how can I design this world holistically first and then find the best mediums for that story to be told on?

Antony Funnell: Mike Jones, writer and producer, thank you very much for chatting with us.

Mike Jones: Always a pleasure.

Antony Funnell: The nuances of fan culture and co-creation.

Also on today's edition of Future Tense we heard from Slate.com's Laura Miller, John Banks from the Queensland University of Technology, and also Scott Knight from Bond University.

If you want to listen to the program again, you can download it from our website or iTunes or use the new ABC radio app.

Karin Zsivanovits is my co-producer. Technical assistance this week from Peter McMurray.

I'm Antony Funnell, until next time, cheers!