Explore create, p.1
Explore/Create, page 1
Dedication
It’s easy to believe that I have simply been very lucky.
But I also believe the adage that luck is the intersection
of opportunity and preparation.
This book is dedicated to all those who helped me with
either on this journey.
This book is also dedicated to my dear wife, Laetitia,
and to our children, Kinga Shuilong and Ronin Phi.
Sharing adventures as a family brings me more joy than
I had imagined.
A great man once said, “Oh the places you’ll go!” I can’t
wait to see where.
And Kinga and Ronin—I look forward to listening to
YOUR tales and visions for the future . . .
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. Titanic Mistakes
2. I Was a Teenage Dungeon Master
3. The Origin of Origin
4. The Wonders of Wondering
5. Minding My Own Business
6. A Universal Language
7. IV-Play, or The New Rules of Engagement
8. Making Enemies
9. The Haunted Beginnings of Themed Interactive Events
10. The Magic of Science
11. The Discovery of the Piña Colada
12. The End of the Beginning of the World
13. Nothing for Money
14. We Created a World and Never Got a Day of Rest
15. Finder’s Leavers: A-Geocaching We Will Go
16. Playing for Keeps
17. He’s Got a Ticket to Пοкататься
18. Packing (and Smuggling) for Space: The Space Kielbasa
19. Taking Up Space
20. Don’t Kill Stephen Hawking!
21. Oh! The Places We’ll Go
Photo Section
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Explore and Create. These words are inextricable from each other in my life. They feed each other. My dual-sided business card has my exploration street cred listed on one side and my creation credentials on the other.
We are fortunate to live in such a remarkable era for exploration and creation, and I often reflect on my own luck. I was lucky to be born at the dawn of personal computers. I was lucky to be the son of a scientist and explorer—my father was a NASA astronaut—while my mother is an extraordinarily creative artist. I was lucky to have a childhood filled with exploration, a celebration of the reality in which we live. I was lucky to learn early on that a deep understanding of the world around you makes you its master.
So admittedly I’ve had my fair share of lucky breaks. But I do buy into the adage that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past all of us all the time. The key is that you must be paying attention to see them, you must be willing to take risks, you must expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure—and you must believe in what you are doing so much that you do it anyway.
This attitude has enabled me to help create and build two world-impacting industries: computer games and commercial spaceflight. On the surface, these two areas would seem to have nothing to do with one another. But both are about exploring new frontiers, creatively envisioning ways to go places no one has before. And a key element of this creative vision is interactive storytelling.
Interactive stories are where creativity and exploration meet. It’s a new art form, one I’ve had the pleasure of helping shape by writing interactive games that go far beyond fighting monsters, games that can probe the depth of human experience as surely as a novel or painting or other “traditional” work of art. In an interactive environment, players are free to explore, but they can explore only what the developers have placed there for them, which compels the developer to consider all possible explorations of the reality they are crafting. On my own, I created some of the first virtual worlds. I did it with little to go on, largely through trial and error. Like a good artist in any other medium, I became a polymath. I studied subjects from philosophy and religious history to architecture, languages, physics, and fashion. Because creating an interactive world that is engaging and satisfying requires a knowledge of all of its many facets.
Games have become much more than pleasant diversions. They have a huge opportunity to become the media form of the twenty-first century. Because games, especially role-playing games, can teach players at a deep level: invite them to examine their values and morals, not just in text or images but in realistic cause–effect scenarios that transcend linear narrative. Much as children “role-play” to learn about the world around them, through interactive games adults can capture that same sense of wonder.
That wonder has driven my career, and I hope to impart it to you here. How you explore this book is up to you. You will see that each chapter fits into one of the dual narratives of my life, either “Explore” or “Create.” You can, of course, read this book straight through, but if you prefer to jump around, to follow your own passions and interests, I encourage you to do so. I hope by reading . . . no, exploring . . . the pages that follow, and taking on the challenges I offer within them, thinking about what you would do in many of these same situations, you will feel as though you have embarked on your own adventure.
Carpe futurum!
1
Titanic Mistakes
We were sitting inside a twenty-ton submarine 12,600 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, trapped under the crumbling stern of RMS Titanic. All around us a blinding silt storm raged. Visibility through our three small windows was zero. Our submersible, equipped with numerous and redundant survival and communication systems, had been meticulously engineered to survive anything. We had telephones, antennas, signal balloons; we had enough power, food, and oxygen to last for several days. Just about the only situation no one had imagined was the one we were in.
We had no way of communicating with our mother ship on the surface, and even if they had known about our situation, there was nothing they could do to help us. If the damage to our sub was not too great, we could carefully rise out of the trench; but if our engine was damaged, we would slowly run out of oxygen. And it would be several hours until the debris settled sufficiently for us to find out if we were going to live or die.
In my life I’ve made numerous small and easily correctable mistakes—and several cataclysmic ones that have jeopardized my business and even my life. But nothing had prepared me for this. The three of us sat there mostly in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Our submersible was the most high-tech undersea craft ever built. For all practical purposes it was considered indestructible. So as we sat below the Titanic waiting, it was impossible not to appreciate the irony.
When it was launched in 1912, the Titanic was the largest and most technologically advanced ocean liner in history. Because White Star Line believed their own boast that the ship was unsinkable, they had failed to equip it with sufficient lifeboats, so when it struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage, more than fifteen hundred people died within hours in the freezing sea. For decades the wreckage had been lost on the ocean floor, but in 1985, with the assistance of the U.S. Navy, oceanographer Robert Ballard discovered it two and a half miles below the surface. For several years Ballard and his team were the only people to explore this remarkable site. So when my friend and business partner Mike McDowell, through his company Deep Oceans Expeditions, offered me the opportunity to dive to it, I immediately accepted. Ours was to be the first completely private expedition to go there, and truthfully we weren’t sure what we would find.
I have an almost desperate need for adventure. Reaching remote, inhospitable locations has attracted me since I was a child when I crept into small caves carrying only matches taken from hotel rooms. Being told I couldn’t go, or shouldn’t go, or was not allowed to go has always piqued my desire to do so. If I feel stuck in a rut, I try to escape from it through an extraordinary experience.
My heroes are people who took epic journeys into the unknown, often at substantial personal risk. I am simply following the path that they carved into history. I fancy myself an admirer of men like polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, though my expeditions do not rise to that level of danger. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; before I begin a journey I do a tremendous amount of research about where I’m going and the equipment I’ll be using, because danger isn’t especially appealing to me. And I didn’t actually believe the Titanic trip was dangerous.
But the dive had seemed cursed from the start, when legal reasons almost prevented it from happening. Ballard had returned to the site several times since his initial discovery, and was actively trying to prevent anyone else from going there. When Deep Oceans Expeditions also found the wreckage, using publicly available data, Ballard obtained a preliminary injunction from an American court that, basically, prohibited other people from trespassing on the site.
During the court hearing Ballard had displayed a piece of plastic he had found on the wreckage that had fallen off the motor of one of the Deep Ocean Expeditions submersibles, claiming it was evidence that visitors would be disrespectful to the Titanic grave site. While Deep Ocean Expeditions did fail to notice this one piece of plastic, we were of the view that Ballard’s expeditions had done considerably more damage. We ultimately prevailed in court for a diffe
So we were finally legally cleared, though much preparation still lay ahead. This is not the kind of expedition for which you just pack a bag and go. I wanted to understand every facet of our incredible machine. By the time we made our voyage, I was such an expert that if my sub commander died, I could literally have guided us back home. I knew this wouldn’t be a luxurious experience. The submarine’s hull is about six feet in diameter and it seats three people, though not especially comfortably, and is built for functionality: its inch-thick nickel steel can withstand the enormous pressure five thousand meters—more than three miles—below the surface. Subs are regularly pressure tested to well beyond the depth we would be traveling. And if it did implode, well, at least it would be a quick death!
But we knew that engineers had considered the long list of hazards that might be encountered on a deep dive. After being crushed, the next greatest fear most people have is that the sub will get stuck on the ocean floor, and eventually the crew will suffocate. To manage this risk, Deep Ocean Expeditions’ Mir had three independent power systems and carried several days’ worth of oxygen. But if for some reason its motors failed, then the first thing you wanted to do was make it buoyant so it would float to the surface. The easiest way to accomplish that was to pump water out of the ballast tanks. If that failed, two massive external battery trays could be dropped. If that still wasn’t sufficient, pressing a button opened an electromagnet that dumped nickel shot weights on the seafloor, further increasing buoyancy. That system was designed to work even if the batteries died. So if something went terribly wrong inside this vehicle and everyone lost consciousness, the batteries would run out, the weights would be dropped, and the sub would pop up to the surface.
Perhaps the greatest danger we faced was becoming entangled in nets or ropes or the wreckage itself. To try to avoid this, every external object on this submersible was designed to be easily ejected. Its two large light booms, two grasping arms, two sample trays, and three external thrusters all can be jettisoned if they get caught on something. Another safety mechanism is a hatch on top that releases a balloon attached to a very, very long rope that rises to the surface, alerting the surface crew that the submersible is in trouble and pinpointing its location. The submarine also carries two line-of-sight acoustic radios, providing primary and backup communications capabilities.
It is an extraordinarily safe machine, and as we descended into the North Atlantic I felt complete confidence in it. The dive itself took almost three hours, and there was little conversation during that time. I was running on adrenaline. Occasionally I would ask a question and one of the crew members would respond. The trickiest maneuver took place at the very beginning, when we were hoisted off the deck of our ship by a crane and rocked back and forth until we dropped into the water. Unlike boats made to float upright and drive through the waves, the Mir is a capsule, considerably heavier on its bottom, so when it hits the water, it rolls. Anything not strapped down, including the crew, gets thrown around. If you’re prone to seasickness, it’s terrible. But within seconds it starts to descend, then stabilizes, and the ride becomes very smooth.
For several minutes after launch, light from the surface still reached through the depths, so we could look through our windows and watch the sea life and our air bubbles rising. After that, the sea grows darker and darker until it becomes black. Only objects in our lights, which extended twenty meters, were visible. Eventually we turned them off to conserve power, and we had descended into the darkest night I had ever seen.
When our instruments told us we were nearing the bottom, we turned our lights back on. Each of us stayed glued to a window, waiting for our first glimpse of the bottom. Suddenly, we were there, raising a cloud of silt, within range of the wreck. In my imagination I saw the remains of the Titanic emerging out of it, but even as the sediment finally dissipated I didn’t see the ship. We rose a few feet and started moving slowly. The first debris we saw were lumps of coal that more than a century ago had been shoveled onboard with the expectation of powering the great ship to its triumphant arrival in New York. Instead this fuel had ended up on the ocean floor. Then we saw end caps from a deck bench, the skeletons of deck chairs, and some porcelain fixtures that probably came from a toilet. As we moved closer to the wreck, the debris became thicker and the stuff of daily life had been strewn wildly about: broken plates, timber, flooring. Rather than the hallowed, respected, almost pristine site Ballard wanted us to believe we would find, the ocean floor around the wreck was a mess. And then we saw the ship itself.
I had spent many hours looking at film and photographs in anticipation of this moment, but still wasn’t prepared for it. Almost four hours after launching, we finally began exploring the wreckage. We glided in respectful silence around the entire hull. We put down on the deck and ate lunch. We descended slowly through the deck into the main staircase and were able to look down one long corridor, watching in awe as the crystal chandeliers, hanging mostly by their power cords, swayed slowly with the currents. Bacteria had eaten away some of the metal hull, which enabled us to look into the crew quarters and even some bathrooms.
Imagine if your own home was flooded from floor to ceiling. It would be much like you had known it; there would be identifiable reference points, but in fact it would be a completely different, almost ethereal environment. Anything that floats would move, but everything attached would remain in place. That was the Titanic. For many people it would have been very easy to look at it and hear the orchestra playing somewhere in the distance. But not for me; I had never been caught up in the romance of the great ship on its voyage. Instead, my interest was in the artifact as we found it. I was far more intrigued by seeing remains that had sat on the ocean bottom for almost a century than imagining a party in progress.
We explored the wreckage by sections. Finally we went to see the screws at the stern, the giant propellers that powered the Titanic through the ocean. The engineering was state of the art at the time, but it has become clear that among the few things that might have saved the ship that night were bigger screws and/or a larger rudder that might have enabled them to turn the ship to safety. Both of them were undersized for a ship of this stature.
When the Titanic sank the stern was the last part to go underwater. When it crashed into the ocean floor and slid, it cut a fairly long channel, a depression with raised “dunes” on either side of it. This channel allowed us to get under the stern by going over a little hump, or berm, and into the depression. We stayed there for a while, looking at the three main screws; it was incredible that they alone had powered this great ship. Finally we prepared to return to the surface.
The Mir has an extremely limited field of vision, with just three tiny windows facing forward and downward. There was no way of seeing above or behind us. We lifted off the ground slowly and reversed the main thruster—and suddenly hit the dirt berm directly behind us. In spite of the fact that we were moving slowly, we hit it with enough force to break off our titanium rear bumper. To avoid hitting the berm again, we raised the sub a bit higher—and crashed into the Titanic’s stern.
In my memory I can still hear the deep, resonating thud as we hit the hull. The world suddenly turned an ugly gray and black. Debris from the stern rained down on us as we sank back down to the seafloor. Our visibility was reduced to zero. As we settled on the ocean floor, shocked and incredibly surprised, the realization hit us—we were stuck beneath the Titanic. We had no way of knowing how much damage had been done to our sub, or how much debris now lay on top of us. It was possible the entire weight of the Titanic was now resting on our vehicle.
In other circumstances I might have laughed at the irony: Maybe like so many of those people who built and perished on the Titanic, I had been lulled into a sense of security by my confidence in human technology.
My nature in a situation like this is not to panic. Panicking would have been the opposite of useful. Of course, we were concerned; very, very concerned.
