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Conversation_with_Thomas_Spies

Key themes: video games for critical discourse, experimental formats in book presentations/eventization of publishing, interdisciplinary approaches to publishing, democratization of access through transmedia approach, beta-testing model for books

2 July 2024, 5:30 PM

Introductions

Thomas (00:03:59)

My name is Thomas. I’m living in Cologne now and working from here. I am a lecturer, a publisher. I’m a researcher. My specialty is game studies. So this is like my focus in media studies, but I did my PhD in this area at the University of Cologne about the representation of trauma. I’m also working on this panels which are dealing with video games from a critical perspective. I’m inviting experts from different fields to play live in front of an audience. To try to get some different angles on the medium. Because of that, I was also publishing an anthology together with Holger Pötzsch from the University of Tromso and Sheyda Kurt. He is an author, who wrote two bestsellers and also is a journalist and moderator of different panels. He is an activist and we together created or hosted this idea for an anthology and gathered different contributors for that. The anthology is called (Spiel*Kritik) [https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839467978/html?lang=de], which translates to game critique, you could say. We focus on different perspectives on video games and capitalism.

Why: Politics of Publishing

Marta (00:05:59)

Maybe if you could get a bit into the whys behind your work or your politics of publishing in a sense. If you have theories, references that you work with that inspire your work. Could you put together a sort of syllabus on publishing practices that inform your own?

Thomas (00:06:26)

Okay, maybe I could start with the theories which are sharpening our understanding of dealing with video games and then see how they translate into our practice, because they are intertwined, I think, in many ways. For our anthology, we relied on a range of critical theories, beginning with the Frankfurt School, and also drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas about power, knowledge, and resistance, and government, of course. We incorporated Edward Said’s postcolonial theories, highlighting how knowledge production can reinforce colonial power structures and perpetuating stereotypes. We had Judith Butler, her insights into subjectivity and resistance. And this is maybe where this connection I already mentioned comes in. We tried to have a connection between acting and thinking. Often in universities, you’re only thinking about some topics that the world does not deal with. So we tried to close this gap and think about things we can actually put into practice. What can this be and how can this be translated? We thought we can’t do this by ourselves. So we invited not only academic people, but also people from arts or from journalism to gather and think about how we can translate these theories into a practical thing? Which also then can be positive for our world or understanding of the world and of media and video games.

Marta (00:08:47)

Gaming has become part of our understanding of publishing, or maybe more as a competitor of the traditional publishing field. So how would you place gaming in this media and publishing environment?

Thomas (00:09:18)

I would say video games are a very special medium because they especially need an active player or a person being active. If you have a movie, you can watch it passively, but of course, it can have active things it can do with you. However, when you play video games, you have to be part of the experience, you have to be part of playing. Playing itself for us is like a social experience, also a very historical one. So there were always people playing games and now of course we have these digital games in the capitalist environment. So play is not for itself anymore. So of course it can have rules, but you create the rules by yourself or they’re created by the playing participants. Now we have rules from a capitalist system intervening in what a game can or should be. So we have a very different product now and this is especially interesting to research because it is the biggest entertainment industry now. It has more income than film and music combined and I think also sports. So it’s very big industrial complex and this is why we have or thought we have to look closer at it.

How: Infrastructures of Publishing

Marta (00:11:05)

If you could speak a bit about your personal workflow when it comes to producing knowledge, the tools, operations and models that are at play here. The neoliberal model of gaming production probably influences it a lot. Also the distribution and promotion and how those operate.

Thomas (00:11:53)

It was clear to us that we needed to reflect the diversity of content at the editorial level. So the three of us connected, or we are like three generations and also three fields of work.

So Holger Pötzsch is working in Norway, as I already said, and he’s the oldest among us. He

has numerous publications in media studies. Şeyda Kurt is the author of these two books I mentioned. So she was coming in as someone writing in a very different style than academia would do it. I myself sit somewhere between the chairs of maybe writing academically and also organizing those panels, the let’s play critical panels. So we regularly exchanged ideas, via Zoom, due to Holger being in Norway. We also met in person several times. For us, it was very important to give the authors a sense of working together on a project, which is why we set up a joint meeting before everyone started writing. For this, we specifically asked experts to cover various areas. And fortunately, no one declined. We allowed them relative freedom, including the format of the text, resulting in both classic academic and essayistic texts in the final volume. Then we found a publisher, Transcript. It’s a German publisher from Bielefeld, willing to support the entire project and also finance it. This is not common as publishers usually are not prepared for such volumes. As you know, they either focus on academic publications or non-academic literature. So, normally academic volumes are funded by universities, but we were not based on any university for this volume, even if we worked on them or at universities. So we had to find a way to finance the whole project. As I said, Transcript has this funding from, I think, different universities from Germany. They have a pool of money and they can split it into different projects. So this was very good for us, and they also funded Open Access, which was also great. Besides that, we also had this thinking and acting thing, so we have also changed how our anthology is produced and thought about the authors that are freelancers. In academic works or volumes for them, you don’t get paid. So we had the problem there. We someh

ow had to get money to fund them and this was also not part of transcripts funding, because they never thought about the idea to pay the authors. Very interesting. So we had crowdfunding, we ran a campaign, had a video for that, we put it on social media and it came to be very successful. So in this way, we could really pay all the people involved. Now, after the volume was published, we send out some copies and promote it through classic channels.

Marta (00:15:42)

Have you ever been more closely involved with game houses, game publishers, people who produce gaming? Do you interact with them? Have they ever been interested in your work and maybe financing research relating to their games?

Thomas (00:16:07)

So I tried to reach out to them and wrote to a few game companies, especially some in Cologne and Berlin, because I live there. I thought that this could work. Some of them responded. I think one paid us 400 euros. But also we had to think about this so that this doesn’t look like we get financed by the industry we are criticizing. So this was very important, but we thought this is a small indie company. It’s not Electronic Arts, one of the biggest ones or Activision, which are highly problematic when it comes to production structures. So this was fine for us. Many of them didn’t respond, because I think it’s not fitting into their concept of things they are financing. So we didn’t rely very much on them. And also there’s a big gap between production and researching or working on a theoretical level with games. This gap is closed somehow in some areas where game design and game studies connect. But usually they go separate ways. So there was no big cooperation or anything like that.

**Marta (00:17:33) **

On these more problematic aspects of production, how can you ensure that your work practice is sustainable financially? We’ve been talking to other people about the personal toll or personal involvement, ideas of caring for each other or helping each other. How does that play into your work?

Thomas (00:18:05)

Especially with the freelancers, we had a few problems to work out, because they are often underpaid or overworked. So we couldn’t make the deadlines or there were problems on the way to the final text. I think it is very important not to see them as production values, but as a person and also see that you have to do care work if you are publishing. I think this is very important, because you are dealing with individuals and you have to find individual ways to make it work. This also included talking on Zoom for some hours about different things in the text. This is what we think is important as a practice, along with paying them and not having crunch time. So this is a term coined by the game industry, where people are in four weeks in the room and just programming stuff when the deadline is coming. We try to avoid that with deadlines that are reasonable and also we have this, maybe a Spielraum, it’s called in German. So we could somehow give them more time and not have a very fixed date.

Who: Community of Publishing

**Marta (00:19:48) **

In terms of collaborations and the professional network. The community and industry of gaming is quite different from that of traditional publishing, both in terms of audience and producers. So how does your work fit into that network and how do you create and maintain collaborators, allies?

Thomas (00:20:24)

I think this also applies to other areas. If you’re like a biologist of course you have an interest in biology and are talking to other people interested in that topic. This is also true for games, I’m a gamer myself so there’s this gaming community and I hesitate to call myself gamer because this can be a very toxic expression or toxic term for something the community can also be. So on the one side I’m part of it and on the other side I’m criticizing it, but this gives me a room to really see tendencies and to explore where the direction of the community goes and also they take me seriously. So I have talked to gamers and I reached out to them for panels, for example, to a store owner who sells these classic game consoles, and if they see me as not some academic person just trying to deal with the next hot topic then they’re much more likely to open up to you. Of course, it’s important for me to think about them when I publish something. I do not want to only write for an academic bubble. Community work was present on the panels but they are, as I tried to explain, part of our publishing. So this is like acting out what we are writing about. I would say this was the one community I was part of. For us it’s not only researchers, it’s also, as I said, other people writing text. So people who produce text in some way, we are the other community and we were also of course dealing with them, reaching out to them. A special thing for our anthology was that we were handpicking them: we had some topics we thought were important and reached out to experts to write about them. This was also very good because they all responded very positively to that.

Marta (00:23:02)

I guess the gaming community is not necessarily well seen. I mean, there’s a lot of negative connotations, rightfully so, with some of its aspects. But the sort of collective experience of gaming and of becoming or being part of that is very interesting. I guess quite different from the more traditional formats of publishing. So how do you see bringing a vantage point? Or do you also see more positive aspects of speaking to that audience or working with that audience? Or what can that level of connection bring to your work?

Thomas (00:23:58)

I think there’s a very big transformational potential in it, because I can always see, and maybe you heard from Ljubljana from (Total Refusal) [https://totalrefusal.com/], how people react to some other people playing games in front of them. It’s very nice to see that it works every time. They’re very interested and can’t get enough of it. You can use this to tell something or leave a message and make an impression. Maybe it’s like this cathartic thing where you watch something and realize something else about how society works or how society is structured. I think there’s a big potential in that. So you rely on experiences nearly everyone has because we all play games in some way, even if it’s not digital, but also many people do play digital nowadays. So there’s a big potential to gather an audience from very different backgrounds. There are also some games that are diverse or dealing with topics from a different angle. You can spot them and of course show them to people who didn’t know about them before that. So I think there’s a potential to see what the medium can also be besides the mainstream titles and games you already know.

Marta (00:25:41)

What do you make of this obsession with watching other people play? Does it bring entertainment value or a community connection? Are there any critical aspects in that? Because of course, gaming is big, but what seems to be even bigger is streaming. That’s evident and it’s one of the newest forms of publishing in a sense of knowledge and entertainment production.

Thomas (00:26:26)

Yeah, that’s interesting to see it as a way of publishing.

Marta (00:26:30)

Very expanded idea of publishing here.

Thomas (00:26:34)

It’s cool to think about this, really. It’s like an interactive publishing somehow because you get instant feedback and you can also integrate this feedback in a live play. So I think Twitch is a very interesting format now because you are very close to the community and the community aspects are central to the experience on Twitch. So if you play a game and say something critical, another person can respond instantly in the chat and you can have a discussion around that topic. But also it’s not just because there’s a community, it doesn’t have to be progressive. Of course, there are also right-wing or other communities as well. Although, there’s a chance to use that as a publisher. With streaming, you can reach a different audience or bigger audience. I think what’s interesting for people is to maybe be a part of it, but also why is it interesting to watch? Maybe because it somehow works when you watch someone doing a social thing. Maybe this is another medium, it could be like a reality soap or something like that. So you have the feeling something real is going on and something which is authentic and also reliable. So you are having a close connection to the person doing something, in this case, playing a game. Maybe you also know the game, so it’s like you are thinking about what would I do or what would I say? And you ask about the critical aspects when doing this. I think there are two opportunities. You can play critical games and look at what they bring up, or you can play a mainstream game and criticize it, but you have to make this your focus. I think this focus is not often present in the moment when you look at what kind of people play Fortnite or something like that for fun, which is also fine, but if you ask about critical aspects, you have to bring those into your stream.

Discussion

Lorenzo (00:29:30)

I’m Lorenzo from Nero. I’m really intrigued by play critical. I participated in Total Refusal performance in Ljubljana and I was really astonished by that practice. I’m curious to know more about it, more about this practice, when did you start? Did the community exist already? How did you encounter this practice? Is it more like a theory that then transforms into a practice? I’m curious to understand the genealogy of it.

Thomas (00:31:26)

There are so many layers to it. I was also always interested in playing games and just playing for fun. At some time I discovered, I can also apply film study critique on the games I was playing. Of course, there were critical games I was playing too. So maybe it was my first epiphany when I saw that I can now dive into a realm where not many people were working.

Then I discovered a small community gathering around game studies and doing practical or theoretical things in this area. It all started with my PhD, I think. So I discovered there are some institutes now having room for dealing with games or researching games. Especially in Cologne, there’s like this big bubble of researchers. I think I wrote an introduction and also a paper for Benjamin Beil, and he’s one of the professors here at University of Cologne. I was looking at trauma, as I said. Yet now I would say that one has to go beyond that.

This also reflected how I saw games in a capitalist context. For me, it was important to see what other people are thinking about video games in that way. Soon I discovered it’s not only researchers, but also artists. There are many artists doing short movies and video games, the Machinimas. Maybe this was the next step, to discover Machinimas and their community.

Because I’m more used to taking photographs, I was then diving into virtual photography and photographing in game. There’s also a big community for that, especially in Italy. It’s very interesting. I was meeting Matteo Bittanti a few weeks ago in Lenzburg in Switzerland. He was doing an (exhibition there) [https://www.mattscape.com/2024/06/its-not-a-game-over-its-a-finissage-june-22-lenzburg-switzerland.html]. I reached out to different people. On the way, I discovered Total Refusal. They were here for a short film festival. And we instantly connected. And this was the step to do something more practical. They were part of the first two panels. I organized them with some other people, of course. This synergy was the starting point for many projects since then. So maybe it was really discovering peoples and areas and possibilities which are somehow not present in the mainstream till now. I hope this answers your question. I don’t know exactly if you meant that.

Lorenzo (00:35:03)

**Yeah, I was curious thinking about Total Refusal, to understand this new way of playing a game looking for glitches, looking for alternative options that the mainstream scope of a video game proposed to you. I’m asking this because I was trying to see if this kind of practice is somehow the mainstream narrative part in a critical way, together with other people as we experienced with Total Refusal performance. **

Thomas (00:36:11)

So, in classical publishing areas, where can you add the element of play? Can you have room for playful ideas? Somehow, I know, there’s always this capitalist structure, it’s very hard to do that. But can you somehow create a space where everyone can be creative. You can’t be creative if you are forced to have text ready in two weeks, or underpaid for that, or other areas, or you have to take care of your family, and so on. So we have to see where there could be a room for the people you’re working with. This would be one thing I would translate to other publishing methods or areas. I think sometimes we fall into the trap of writing something about people, but not working with them. This would be another thing you can maybe get from my experiences.

Marta (00:37:35)

I had a question, building on this idea of gaming and streaming as forms of instant interactive publishing. Are there people, writers, artists, editors that you see doing this more playful and participatory, or using this participatory aspect of gaming in their practice? Or do you see that being a possible horizon of the “future” of publishing? Or is there something already happening in this direction? Of course, your work is in between and this more playful, critical aspect.

Thomas (00:38:29)

It’s hard to say, because of my special place in this whole structure. I’m not very experienced in dealing with other publishers, for example. So I was in contact with not only Transcript, but also some other publishers last time. What I always liked was when we met in person and or we came together for events. We had this thing in Vienna. There was the network of critical communication science. This was coming together not only because of the things we talked about, but also because of shared ideologies or views on the world. I think this is also important to maybe have a focus on the things which are important to you, and then to translate them into a product and not come up with an abstract idea, but to really think. I share with a community and then see how this community can work together. I know this is not very broad. I don’t have specific names I can mention, I think, but more often I discovered that there is not enough space to do these kinds of projects that we did. So often you just have typical ways of doing an anthology or something like that.

Marta (00:40:46) - That’s interesting in itself, that there’s this sort of gap, because we’ve been seeing the expansion of the gaming industry for the last 10-15 years. So it’s interesting maybe that that space is not fully yet occupied by projects.

Janez (00:42:47)

You have been in Ljubljana and you have assisted live to the Let’s Play, let’s call it like this, that was the format between Total Refusal and (Valentina Tanni) [https://www.valentinatanni.com/], where Valentina took the chance to present her book or at least some of the topics, the aesthetics that she’s discussing in her book that we did in collaboration with Aksioma and Nero. And we took that chance to kind of experiment a new format of delivering in front of an audience in a performative way, a book presentation, so to say. Now we are in the final phase of editing this material to then launch it again online, where people can really consume it as a Let’s Play, in a sense of watching the game and the protagonist talking like in the bottom right corner. So I have two questions: how would you define that format that you saw live? How would you define the objects in terms of publishing that we are going to upload on YouTube or whatever online?

Lorenzo (00:44:08) - And if you can imagine this material online, you as a gamer, perhaps you consume some Let’s Play or stuff like that. Who could be the audience who can consume a talk between Valentina Tanni about her book and Total Refusal on their big screen in their living room?

Thomas (00:44:38)

Even if you are trying to find the term fitting for what Total Refusal is doing there, we often discuss that it’s not that easy, because there is no term yet. So we thought about different expressions, like public gaming was one. I’m not a fan of that. It sounds like public viewing, which is also a German thing. I don’t know if it’s a thing in Italy, public viewing. I don’t know if it’s a coined term. Because I think in English-speaking areas, it’s for going to a funeral with a public viewing. So it’s very strange that we have this term. So public gaming also sounds like a football stadium. It’s not fitting for what we are doing there. So also, I think I called it live playing at some point. As a German expression of that, maybe this is more near that. But also, live playing could also be you just play Mario Kart. And it’s without this critical perspective, or even this Let’s Play aspect of it.

And this is why my panels are called Let’s Play Critical. This is what we are doing, maybe. But I don’t know if this term is good for being used in a broader field for a longer time. I don’t know if it’s fitting for all audiences. I’m so sorry, but I have no term for that, which is the fixed term we work with yet.

Lorenzo (00:46:24)

Can I interrupt you for a second? I guess there was no term. Maybe what I would like to know is you probably are more familiar with the format that Total Refusal are doing, and you even try to find the terminology for it, whatever. But if we change the perspective, and we look from the angle of a writer, or somebody who published a book, and then did that presentation in that format, when you were looking at it, what did actually open up, if anything happened in your head? Did you just perceive it as a promotional kind of thing? Or maybe as an attempt of, I don’t know, in a similar way as Total Refusal are using the game to vehiculate the critical discourse, did you perhaps perceive in this experiment an attempt of generating a new discourse? Did you see an attempt to expand the publishing? Or it was just, OK, they did a promo thing. Cool.

Thomas (00:47:48)

Of course, for me it was like, or it could be viewed as an in-game presentation of a book. And so I was watching it from that perspective. And also I saw the similarities between what Valentina’s writing and Total Refusal is doing. But I was interested in how they can bring these two fields together. Of course, they are writing about video game culture in the broadest sense of the term.

I think there’s a very good opportunity there to expand on the book you are presenting in the video game. But you have to be very specific about what you want to represent or present from the book and if it’s fitting to the game. It has not always been that they found this connection in the presentation. So there was like a small gap between what Total Refusal was showing in the game and Valentina’s comments. Of course, they tried to find those similarities. But for me, it was two worlds sometimes colliding, but not melting together as a whole. So this is maybe because you have to look at what your ideology of the book you are presenting is, and the ideology of the people playing the games. I think there were also some similarities, but also some differences. So for Valentina, it was to explain this nostalgic view on games and game culture, both memes and other limited spaces and other internet phenomenons. For Total Refusal, it’s always this political standing point where they try to have an anti-capitalist and even Marxist critique of society. Of course, Valentina is a person, I think, sharing this ideology, but not in her book especially. It was about other topics. So, for me, there maybe was a gap in presenting those two together. But as a format, there’s a big potential to have your book presented in a video game.

Lorenzo (00:50:22)

But I’m thinking that, like, maybe video games, especially multiplayer video games, could also be perceived as a new space for traditional narratives or discourses produced in books. For example, in that case in Ljubljana, I really perceived that environment as a new space to inhabit with certain discourses. I don’t know, Thomas, what do you think? Multiplayer games, especially multiplayer games, give you this common space to create new narratives and even to challenge the rules of the video game itself. So, I’m really intrigued by this aspect that it’s more difficult to find this in traditional publishing. When I mention traditional publishing, I refer to printed books. Of course, you can have book clubs in which you find other people, you can read collectively. For video games, it looks like an expanded version of that with a lot of people. Like Travis Scott’s concert in Fortnite, all these kinds of experiences are, like, quite disruptive in a way.

Thomas (00:51:49)

Yeah, totally. I want to ask if you know from the Fortnite concert, and also there are many exhibitions in multiplayer games in last times, especially in Fallout, for example, or in Roblox, this kids game, there were also demonstrations for Palestine and other topics where there’s big opportunity for society to really express something not maybe allowed in your society, or if you said just to reach another audience or broader audience. As for publishing books, it’s also super interesting because, as I know, no one has done it yet. But if you can imagine having a reading event in the game. So you have this area and maybe also make advertising for it in the game. So you can talk to other people in the game or just write a sign. In some games, you can be very creative about the aesthetics or the graphics. So maybe you can have an area where you point out that there will be an event later, and then you can have the author or someone else sitting there and reading from the book. Could be an event also for the people already knowing of the book or being readers themselves. So you can just have this as another version of a premiere of a book. But maybe there are some people randomly coming in and also gathering around, and you can reach out to people who not usually come to a library or something like that, but in a classic way, there’s, like, a book presentation. So I think this is a good idea. Yeah, good work.

Tommaso (00:53:41)

**I think what we have been discussing at the moment here with you, but also more in general, is trying to understand this concept of expanded publishing as coming from the traditional publishing, trying to understand that in all these years, a lot of tools have been developed to change the way in which books are produced, but also in changing the way in which books are read and consumed. To stretch this, then we decided, OK, let’s stretch it the old way and open up the possibility that a book is not only a paper book. But it’s, you know, when you have to deal with publishing, you deal with a set of media that can be very broad. In that sense, I think we were thinking with the experience of total refusal, I was not there, so I also have a partial understanding of that. There was a moment of writing, there was a moment of publishing, and there was a moment of reflection on the book. **

But I’m thinking about examples that try to do the opposite, or try to conceive, for example, gaming as a form of book or reading. I am not much into gaming, but I recently started playing Kentucky Route Zero. I am playing it right now, actually. It’s more like a book than a game, it’s a game where you cannot lose or win. It’s interactive and a narrative that actually has a very long history from the first DOS system, etc. So I think I went all over the place. My question is, very sincerely, again, if a game can be a form of publishing? Is it something that makes sense to you? Of course, I understand, that producing a game and producing a book require completely different skills, but then how can these two very different words try to combine each other because multidisciplinarity is something that we cannot avoid at the moment?

Thomas (00:57:16)

There’s a game called Citizen Sleeper. And it’s, as I said, more a book than a game with very nice graphics, but not moving graphics. It’s like standing still all the time. It’s on only one view, you could say, and you see the characters that are talking. Other games did this as well, while thinking about how to present text in a modern way. So maybe there’s a connection. I think there were experiments in books, trying to look like Instagram or something like that, which doesn’t work very well most times, I think, but it’s more your expertise. Maybe you can think about if there’s a chance to somehow copy back games present text into the books, or the book cover or the marketing of the book. Also, if you have the resources to do a game around your book. But this could fail because people are used to good quality now. So even if you are doing a graphic novel, which is like this classic book where you can choose your own way. There’s a lot of expertise in the field and the presentation is very good and coming from people who know games. I think this is very important. If you want to publish in game or with games, you have to have people really knowing what the game is about or how games work. It’s like with school, everyone was in school and everyone thinks they can talk about school. But of course, you can talk about the game or have some opinions on that. Though if you want to appeal to the audience playing games, you have to have people experienced with games or assisting you in that, I think. Does this somehow answer your or is this your train of thoughts?

Tommaso (00:59:32)

Yes, it does. But then, just to go even more direct, do you think it makes sense to open up publishing into this different context, or is it basically defining that everything is publishing?

Thomas (00:59:53)

I think if you, the format that Total Refusal does is very promising, in a way to think about how we can present a book in that way, and also invite people to a cinema to watch a book premiere. So like a transmedial presentation. The second one is going into games which are already there. This is also promising, that you find games, and people knowing these games, and finding ways to put your books somehow into them, or to present them at least. I think it’s not that promising, as I said, to make my own games or something like that. This is very difficult to do. I think this can’t be the first step. But think about how you can be in games or present games with your book. This is a good way to go.

What: Future of Publishing

Marta (01:00:45)

So if you have any sort of ideas on urgent aspects of publishing, what are some things that already exist and that you see developing further or that you would like to be developed further? Maybe some that instead, which should reflect upon and abandon? And if you had a five year vision of the future, 10 year vision, what would you see?

Thomas (01:01:48)

Maybe firstly, I would discover the value in positions that are not present yet or mostly not present. What I also mean is to see whether there are new ways of thinking about things such as video games, for example, and expanding on those areas. When it comes to the publishing itself, find ways to get rid of the stand that there’s maybe like one person expert for a whole area, try to have a broader or a pool of people working on books, and to see if the books themselves, I know there’s always a problem, but how can you make them public for everyone? To have them online and in some way digitize them is very important, but maybe there would be a way to have this book presentations you can record for YouTube or something else. So people can have a summary of it and even an interactive one in some way. Or you can do an event where you have a chat function and people can react to parts of your books, maybe this could be before it is published. So maybe if you look at video game companies, they do this better testing where they have the mostly final version of the game, but it’s not finished yet. Then people can openly play it and you can see how they react to it and how they work with it, with your game. Of course what their opinions are. Maybe this could be something in publishing a book that not only the publisher gets the text beforehand, but also some people can read it and give their impressions about it would be another thing which comes to my mind. But I think the important part is get it published in some way that all people can have it for free in some way. I know this is very difficult to do with the financing system nowadays, I know.