Meet Tim Kring, Creator of Heroes and Conspiracy For Good

At Nokia World in London, I’ve been given the fantastic chance to interview Tim Kring, the creator of Heroes and, most importantly of Conspiracy For Good, his exciting collaboration with Nokia that was a blend of online and real-world tasks including exciting games from Store.

The purpose of the CFG initiative was to effect social change through audience participation and it included, among other things, a massive ‘scavenger’ hunt in the streets of London! You can read all our Conspiracy For Good stories here and also hear what Mr. Kring himself has to say about the project on the CFG website:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was really easy to interview him, because he’s very talkative. I was also very excited because I’m a huge Heroes fan (I also have a save-the-cheerleader-save-the-world-t-shirt) and I was following the adventures of Conspiracy For Good with passion.

At the end of the interview I even managed to get a picture with him, obviously shot with my precious Nokia N8.
Btw, what smartphone do you think Tim Kring is using?

Mr. Kring, what did you learn from this experience?
During the Conspiracy For Good experience we’ve been learning a lot. In fact this was the first experiment of this kind and several questions were completely open – Where do we start? How do we approach the concept?.
We were revolutionizing the way to tell a story, we were innovating from scratch.

So where did you get the inspiration to start such a project?
The idea Conspiracy For Good started way before Nokia was involved, when I was experiencing my personal transition from the standard Hollywood writer role to a more interactive one.
It was perfectly clear that we wanted more participation from the audience and that we wanted to use trans-media. An idea that we started with Heroes Evolutions.
We were allowing audience to generate content without losing control of the story.

If Conspiracy For Good was your first experience of this kind, you are probably working on extending it to the next level, aren’t you?
We’ve learned that the experience was most successful when all the parts were close together, in this case London. However, our goal is now to create a larger, more pervasive and scalable experience.
Nokia is a great partner because they completely understand this is about a larger ecosystem.

When you are talking about a larger ecosystem, are you referring to the causes supported by the project?
Yes, we definitively wanted to connect causes and do good. On Facebook we all get invitations to support some causes, but there is no way to aggregate them.

Why do you think that a game is the right way to connect causes?
Gamers do good because they think they’re… heroes
And a game in which you think you are being watched is quite sticky, you feel very easily part of it: when you walk around and you see people with headsets you start thinking they are spying on you…

And how was working with Nokia people?
Nokia is BIG Working with a company of such a size was a dream coming true. I love working with such offbeat people: Mark, Riku, Timo and Kasey to mention a few. It was a great collaboration.
The relationship was also unique because we were given the highest technology and we provided feedback to improve it, to adapt it for our scenario.
And you have this fantastic slogan, Connecting People, which was perfect for Conspiracy For Good: connecting people to do good.

Thanks, Mr. Kring What role is playing Ovi in this and your future projects?
I think we only touched the surface. In Conspiracy For Good, we’ve been extensively using Ovi: Maps, Music and Store, where one application is powered by the Point & Find technology.
I definitively see a great role for Maps going forward. In fact, geolocation is going to be huge: in a game, this might mean defining good vs bad territories. I think it’s just great!

Thank you Mr. Kring, we can’t wait to see more Ovi in next projects!

-Pino (@haikus)