Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

rose above the plant life of the planet, and I

imagined my flesh,

being inside the pool!, being warm, and protected, feeling, but able to mock it as I floated. Would you float with me now, if I asked you, would you jump in the pool and not even bother to swim? Could I strip you down, remove your clothing and we would fall inside the water together?

It scares me.

I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again.

This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you.

You stole my loneliness

No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my Windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.

Michael made us attend: "Interactive Multimedia, Product Design, and the Year 2000." It was at a Hyatt or something down in San Jose. Michael wanted us to have "a good overview of the industry." We barely made it through the event.

The day after the seminar, I might add, Michael bought us all San Jose Sharks inflatable toys as penance. (The Sharks are *huge* here. I think I'm already beginning to bond with them.) If my ship comes in this year, I'm going to buy season's tickets for next year's games. Can't wait for the season.

I e-mailed my notes to Abe.

"29 Steps: My Trip to the Interactive Multimedia Seminar"

by Daniel Underwood

1) Some people believe, that the suspension of disbelief is destroyed by interactivity.

2) The people who attend "Multimedia Seminars" aren't the same people who design games. Their shirts are ironed, they carry unscuffed leather attache cases, they're infinitely earnest and they look like they work for Prudential-Bache and Kidder-Peabody. These suits are all bluffing now, but soon enough they'll "get it" and they will become "visionaries."

3) Narratives (stories) traditionally come to a definite end (unlike life); that's why we like movies and literature – for that sense of closure – because they end.

4) The stakes for multimedia may actually turn out to be embarrassingly small in the short run – like Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, or Hasbro cranking out board game versions of The Partridge Family, The Banana Splits, and Zoom.

5) With interactivity, one tries to give "the illusion of authorship" to people who couldn't otherwise author.

Thought: maybe the need to be told stories is like the need to have sex. If you want to hear a story, you want to hear a story – you want to be passive and sit back around the fire and listen. You don't want to write the story yourself.

6) This sick thing just happened: I had this moment when I looked up and everyone had been picking at the baby zits on their foreheads and everybody's forehead was bleeding! It was like stigmata. So gross. Even Karla.

7) "There's an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project." (TRUE*!)

8) Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don't have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

9) The 8 Models of Interactivity( as far as I can see)

i) The Arcade model

Like Terminator: kill or be killed.

ii) The Coffee Table Book model

Enter anywhere/leave anywhere; pointless in the end; zero replayability factor.

iii) The Universe Creation model

I built you and I can crush you.

iv) The Binary Tree model

Limited number of options; reads from left to right; tightly controlled mini-dramas.

v) The Pick-a-Path model

Does our hero smooch with Heather Locklear, or not – you decide! Expensive. Unproven entertainment value. Audiences don't pay money to work.

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)

For adolescents: half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

vii) The Agatha Christie model

A puzzle is to be solved using levels, clues, chases, and exploration.

viii) Experience Simulation models

Flight simulators, sport games.

10) I wonder if we oversentimentalize the power of books.

11) Studios in Hollywood are trying to sucker in writers by burying multimedia rights into the boilerplate of contracts. It's intellectual gill-netting. They say they've "always been doing it historically" ... assuming "since July" means historically.

12) The extraordinary cost of producing multimedia games theoretically is supposed to exclude little companies from entering the market, but it's the little companies, I'm noticing, that are coming up with all of the "hits." Hope for Oop!.

13) Karla and I met this cool-looking woman at lunch, Irene, and so we had coffee with her before the afternoon session began. It turns out she's a makeup artist for multimedia movies, and she wants to get into production herself. Karla said, "Gee, you look really tired," and she said, "Oh – I've been working double shifts every day for two weeks."

So I asked her, "What kind of things are people filming for multimedia games?" and she said, "It's always the same ... Sir Lancelot, Knights of the Round Table, thrones, chalices, damsels. Can't somebody come up with something new? My Prince Arthur wig is getting all tired-looking."

I suggested she use a Marilyn Monroe wig.

14) Ideally in a game you have hardheaded adventures, but at the end you get a glimpse of the supernatural.

15) In Los Angeles everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product.

16) There's a different mental construction in operation when you're playing tennis as opposed to when you're reading a book. With adrenaline-based competitive sports, the thought mode is: "I want to kill this fucker. " It's the spirit of testing yourself; accomplishment. You are gripped. Suspension of disbelief is not an issue.

17) A multimedia product has to deliver $1 per hour's worth of entertainment or you'll get slagged by word-of-mouth.

18) The great Atari gaming collapse of 1982 (*sigh* I remember it well).

19) Games are about providing control for nine year olds ... "the bigger and neater the entity I can control, the better."

20) Multimedia has become a "packaged goods" industry now. The box copy is more important than the experience. But how do you write cool sexy box copy for a game like Tetris? You can't.

21) Cool term: "Manseconds": (Ergonomic unit of measurement applied to keyboards, joysticks).

22) "Embedded intelligence": (Intelligence buried in the nooks and crannies of code and storyboard design).

23) Last year at a Christmas party up in Seattle, there were all these little kids – all highly sugared and on the brink of hysteria – but instead of screaming, they sat complacently by the TV playing SEGA games. The games were like "Child Sedation Devices." It was spooky.

Susan was there. She said, "Just think, in 50 years these same kids will be sitting at the switches of our life-support systems figuring out a way to play a game by biofeedbacking our failing EKGs. Me, I seem to remember that when I was younger, overly sugared brats were sent down into the basement to fend for themselves, like Lord of the Flies."

24) How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? ("Cardigan: The Adventure")