Exchange of Realities

The story I am about to tell you begins with a project. I had spent the day working on my attempt to create a centralized collection of characterization posts from all over the Internet, mentioned it on Twitter, and Linnaeus link-of-a-linked me to a lovely little post on Kung Fu Monkey that fit perfectly. Then, figuring that where there was one good piece there would be others, I started working my way through the archives. This continued, with me getting more and more impressed by the blog itself, until September 2006 or so, when I hit three posts that rather distracted me from my project.

He did devwork on Eureka. I’m seeing part of the process behind one of my favorite episodes. Oh. My. God. [Insert further fangirling here.]

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This is the trick behind company blogs and writer webpages, behind developers’ journals and artists’ DeviantArt accounts. This is why the DVD comes with a director’s cut, and Planet Earth episodes end with a behind the scenes segment. People like knowing how the stuff that they’re interested in was created. But why?

• Curiosity. “I know something you don’t know” has been a schoolyard taunt for longer than there have been schoolyards because people are by nature curious. If there’s something they don’t know, a hole in their knowledge, they want to find it and fill it—and then go tease someone else with the same information. Why do we want to know the secret? Because it’s there! Do we need another reason?
• Belonging. In-group and out-group are very important concepts to people. What better way to establish being in a fandom in-group than knowing a bunch of things not just about the object of the fandom, but how the object of the fandom works, was created, or became fan-worthy?
• Stability. Every world has rules. This doesn’t just mean overarching natural principles like “Light travels faster than sound”, or magical parameters like “Without special training, most spells require both words and gestures”. It’s also little constants throughout a series, like “The bad guys never attack a magical girl in mid-transformation sequence” or “All mysteries put in front of Sherlock Holmes will be solved by the end of the story.” While most people will intuit the basic rules of a given world, it’s easy to be unsure; hearing from the creator herself that this is how the world works will reassure the audience member that everything’s going as it should and the only unwelcome surprises will be the properly dramatic ones.
• Proximity. It’s easy to forget that the really good stuff doesn’t spring fully-formed from its creators’ heads, or that said creators aren’t in their own way human. Even bloggers still squeal over being commented on by bigger names, or read by published authors. Getting to look behind the curtain shows us that these people aren’t too different from us; that it’s not impossible for us to do the same things they’ve done. (Improbable, maybe, but that’s another story.) Which brings us to…
• Applicability. Reading about people’s mistakes may be good for our daily dose of schadenfreude, or for seeing the object of our interest as not so untouchable after all, but the greatest value in them comes from learning from them. We’ve got a vast wealth of mistakes that have already been made, and processes that have been discovered through trial and error; we can skip the making the mistake step, cut both the trial and the error out of our own processes. It’s like taking the path people have already cut through the brambles rather than stomping down the silly things yourselves.
• Connection. Every book, every show or movie, every game—they’re all someone’s brainchild. Seeing the process allows us to connect with the creator, and in connecting with the creator, we better connect with the world.
• Amusement. These people have senses of humor, and it leaks its way into the additional material as well. Besides, who doesn’t laugh at a good blooper reel?

More on this over the course of the week; I’m just getting warmed up.

Do you get excited over getting to look behind the scenes on your books, visual media or games? Did I miss a reason why it might be intriguing? Let’s hear it!

(My monitor tells me that this is my 300th post.  Sweet!  *celebrates*)