Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

And then there's pornography, already present in the burgeoning CD- ROM market. If you're playing strip-poker with a virtual digitized Playboy- model, is that harmless fun-for-guys stuff, with nobody exploited, nobody hurt? Or is it some kind of (gulp) hideously oppressive dehumanized computer-assisted sex-objectification?

And then, of course, there's business. Biz. Brass tacks. Your average game designer makes rather more than your average SFWA member. It's still not a living wage. The gamers have to work harder, they have more specialized skills, they have less creative control, and the pace is murderous. Sixty-hour-weeks are standard in the industry, and there's no such thing as a "no-layoffs" policy in the software biz. Everybody wants to hire a hard-working, technically talented enthusiast; having found such a person, it is standard to put him on the "burnout track" and work him to collapse in five years flat, leaving the staggering husk to limp away from "entertainment" to try and find a straight job someplace, maintaining C code.

As "professionalism" spreads its pinstriped tentacles, the pioneers and the lone wolves are going to the wall. There is "consolidation" in the industry, that same sinister development that has led written SF deeper and deeper into the toils of gigantic multinational publishing cartels and malignant bookstore chains. "Software chains" have sprung up: Babbage's, Electronic Boutique, Walden Software, Soft Warehouse, Egghead. The big game publishers are getting bigger, the modes of publishing and distribution are calcifying and walling-out the individual entrepreneur.

"Sequelism" is incredibly common; computer gaming builds off established hits even more shamelessly than SF's nine-part trilogy-trilogies. And "games" in general are becoming more elaborate: larger teams of specialized workers tackling pixel animation, soundtrack, box design; more and more man-hours invested into the product, by companies that now look less like young Walt Disney drawing in a tabletop in Kansas, and much more like old Walt Disney smoking dollar cigars in Hollywood. It's harder and harder for a single creative individual, coming from outside, to impose his vision on the medium.

Some regard this development as a healthy step up the ladder to the Real Money: Lucasfilm Games, for instance, naturally wants to be more like its parent Lucasfilm, and the same goes for Walt Disney Computer.

But others suspect that computer-gaming may suffer artistically (and eventually financially) by trying to do too much for too many. Betty Boop cartoons were simple and cheap, but were tremendously popular at the time of their creation, and are still cherished today. Fleischer Studios came a cropper when they tried to go for full-animation feature films, releasing bloated, overproduced bombs like GULLIVER that tried and failed to appeal to a mass audience.

And then there is The Beast Men Call 'Prodigy.' Prodigy is a national computer network that has already absorbed nine hundred million dollars of start-up money from IBM and Sears. Prodigy is, in short, a Major Player. In the world of computer gaming, $900,000,000 is the functional equivalent of nuclear superpower status. And Prodigy is interested in serious big-time "computer entertainment." Prodigy must win major big-time participation by straight people, by computer illiterates. To survive, it must win an entirely new and unprecedently large popular audience.

And Prodigy was at the gaming conference to get the word out. Prodigy subscribers play twelve thousand games of "Chief Executive Officer" every day! What Prodigy wants is, well, the patronage of Normal People. Nothing offensive, nothing too wacky, nothing too weird. They want to be the Disney Channel of Cyberspace. They want entirely new kinds of computer games. Games that look and smell like primetime TV, basically. A crisply dressed Prodigy representative strongly urged game-designers present to "lose the Halloween costumes." Forget "the space stuff" and "the knights in armor." Prodigy wants games normal folks will play, something that reflects general American experience. Something like... hmmm... "a high school popularity contest."

The audience seemed stunned. Scarcely a human being among them, of either sex, could have ever won a high school popularity contest. If they'd ever been "popular," they would never have spent so much time in front of computers. They would have been out playing halfback, or getting laid, or doing other cool high-school things -- doing anything but learning how to program. Not only were they stunned, but they rather resented the suggestion; the notion that, after years of trying to be Frank Frazetta, they were suddenly to become Norman Rockwell. I heard sullen mutterings later about "Ozzie and Harriet Prodigy droids."

And yet -- this may well be The Future for "computer entertainment." Why the hell does prime-time TV look as bad and stupid as it does? There are very good reasons for this; it's not any kind of accident. And Prodigy understands those reasons as well or better than any wacko gamedesigner in a big purple hat.

Bleak as this future prospect may seem, there was no lack of optimism, the usual ecstatic vaporware common to any business meeting of "computer people." Computer game designers have their faces turned resolutely to the future; they have little in the way of "classics." Their grails are all to come, on the vast resistless wings of technological advance. At the moment, "interactive characters" in games, characters that behave realistically, without scripts, and challenge or befriend the player, are primitive and scarcely workable constructs. But wait till we get Artificial Intelligence! Then we'll build characters who can carry out dramas all by themselves!!

And games are becoming fatter and more elaborate; so much so that the standard money-making target machine, the cheap IBM-PC clone with the 16-bit 8088 chip running at five megahertz, is almost unable to hold them. Origin's state-of-the-art "Wing Commander" game can take up half a hard disk. But bigger machines are coming soon. Faster, with much better graphics. Digital sound as good as stereos, and screens better than TV! Cheap, too!

And then there's CD-ROM. Software, recorded on a shiny compact disk, instead of bloated floppies and clunking hard disks. You can put fifteen hundred (1500!) Nintendo cartridge games onto one compact disk -- and it costs only a dollar to make! Holy Cow!

The industry is tough and hardened now. It survived the Great Crash of 1984, which had once seemed the end of everything. It's crewed by hardy veterans. And just look at that history! Why, twenty years ago there was nothing here at all; now computer entertainment's worth millions! Kids with computers don't do anything much with them at all, except play games -- and their parents would admit the same thing, if they told the truth. And in the future -- huge games, involving thousands of people, on vast modem- linked networks! Of course, those networks may look much like, well, Prodigy....

But even without networks, the next generation of PCs will be a thing of dazzlement. Of course, most everything written for the old PC's, and for Macs and Amigas and such, will be unceremoniously junked, along with the old PC's themselves. Thousands of games... thousands of man-hours of labor and design... erased from human memory, a kind of cultural apocalypse... Everything simply gone, flung out in huge beige plastic heaps like junked cars. Dead tech.

But perhaps "cultural apocalypse" is overstating matters. Who cares if people throw away a bunch of obsolete computers? After all, they're obsolete. So what if you lose all the software, too? After all, it's just outdated software. They're just games. It's not like they're real art.

And there's the sting.

A sting one should remember, and mull upon, when one hears of proposals to digitize the novel. The Sony reader, for instance. A little hand- held jobby, much like its kissing cousin the Nintendo Game Boy, but with a print-legible screen.