Game conference speech: "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling"
From the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991, San Jose CA
Thank you very much for that introduction. I'd like to thank the
conference committee for their hospitality and kindness -- all the cola
you can drink -- and mind you those were genuine twinkies too, none of
those newfangled "Twinkies Lite" we've been seeing too much of lately.
So anyway my name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction writer
from Austin Texas, and I'm here to deliver my speech now, which I like to call "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling." I like to call it that, because I plan to make brutal fun of that whole idea... In fact I plan to flame on just any moment now, I plan to cut loose, I plan to wound and scald tonight.... Because why not, right? I mean, we're all adults, we're all professionals here... I mean, professionals in totally different arts, but you know, I can sense a certain simpatico vibe....
Actually I feel kind of like a mosasaur talking to dolphins here.... We have a lot in common, we both swim, we both have big sharp teeth, we both eat fish... But you look like a broadminded crowd, so I'm sure you won't mind that I'm basically, like, *reptilian*....
So anyway, you're probably wondering why I'm here tonight, some hopeless dipshit literary author... and when am I going to get started on the virtues and merits of the prose medium and its goddamned wonderful storytelling. I mean, what else can I talk about? What the hell do I know about game design? I don't even know that the most lucrative target machine today is an IBM PC clone with a 16 bit 8088 running at 5 MHZ. If you start talking about depth of play versus presentation, I'm just gonna to stare at you with blank incomprehension....
I'll tell you straight out why I'm here tonight. Why should I even try to hide the sordid truth from a crowd this perspicacious.... You see, six months ago I was in Austria at this Electronic Arts Festival, which was a situation almost as unlikely as this one, and my wife Nancy and I are sitting there with William Gibson and Deb Gibson feeling very cool and rather jetlagged and crispy around the edges, and in walks this *woman.* Out of nowhere. Like J. Random Attractive Redhead, right. And she sits down with her coffeecup right at our table. And we peer at each other's namebadges, right, like, *who is this person.* And her name is Brenda Laurel.
So what do I say? I say to this total stranger, I say. "Hey. Are you the Brenda Laurel who did that book on *the art of the computer-human interface*? You *are*? Wow, I loved that book." And yes -- that's why I'm here as your guest speaker tonight, ladies and gentleman. It's because I can think fast on my feet. It's because I'm the kind of author who likes to hang out in Adolf Hitler's home town with the High Priestess of Weird.
So ladies and gentlemen unfortunately I can't successfully pretend that I know much about your profession. I mean actually I do know a *few* things about your profession.... For instance, I was on the far side of the Great Crash of 1984. I was one of the civilian crashees, meaning that was about when I gave up twitch games. That was when I gave up my Atari 800. As to why my Atari 800 became a boat-anchor I'm still not sure.... It was quite mysterious when it happened, it was inexplicable, kind of like the passing of a pestilence or the waning of the moon. If I understood this phenomenon I think I would really have my teeth set into something profound and vitally interesting... Like, my Atari still works today, I still own it. Why don't I get it out of its box and fire up a few cartridges? Nothing physical preventing me. Just some subtle but intense sense of revulsion. Almost like a Sartrean nausea. Why this should be attached to a piece of computer hardware is difficult to say.
My favorite games nowadays are Sim City, Sim Earth and Hidden Agenda... I had Balance of the Planet on my hard disk, but I was so stricken with guilt by the digitized photo of the author and his spouse that I deleted the game, long before I could figure out how to keep everybody on the Earth from starving.... Including myself and the author....
I'm especially fond of SimEarth. SimEarth is like a goldfish bowl. I also have the actual goldfish bowl in the *After Dark* Macintosh screen saver, but its charms waned for me, possibly because the fish don't drive one another into extinction. I theorize that this has something to do with a breakdown of the old dichotomy of twitch games versus adventure, you know, arcade zombie versus Mensa pinhead...
I can dimly see a kind of transcendance in electronic entertainment coming with things like SimEarth, they seem like a foreshadowing of what Alvin Toffler called the "intelligent environment"... Not "games" in a classic sense, but things that are just going on in the background somewhere, in an attractive and elegant fashion, kind of like a pet cat... I think this kind of digital toy might really go somewhere interesting.
What computer entertainment lacks most I think is a sense of mystery. It's too left-brain.... I think there might be real promise in game designs that offer less of a sense of nitpicking mastery and control, and more of a sense of sleaziness and bluesiness and smokiness. Not neat tinkertoy puzzles to be decoded, not "treasure-hunts for assets," but creations with some deeper sense of genuine artistic mystery.
I don't know if you've seen the work of a guy called William Latham.... I got his work on a demo reel from Media Magic. I never buy movies on video, but I really live for raw computer-graphic demo reels. This William Latham is a heavy dude... His tech isn't that impressive, he's got some kind of fairly crude IBM mainframe cad-cam program in Winchester England.... The thing that's most immediately striking about Latham's computer artworks -- *ghost sculptures* he calls them -- is that the guy really possesses a sense of taste. Fractal art tends to be quite garish. Latham's stuff is very fractally and organic, it's utterly weird, but at the same time it's very accomplished and subtle. There's a quality of ecstasy and dread to it... there's a sense of genuine enchantment there. A lot of computer games are stuffed to the gunwales with enchanters and wizards and so-called magic, but that kind of sci-fi cod mysticism seems very dime-store stuff by comparison with Latham.
I like to imagine the future of computer games as being something like the Steve Jackson Games bust by the Secret Service, only in this case what they were busting wouldn't have been a mistake, it would have been something actually quite seriously inexplicable and possibly even a genuine cultural threat.... Something of the sort may come from virtual reality. I rather imagine something like an LSD backlash occuring there; something along the lines of: "Hey we have something here that can really seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, Mr Developer, I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and Software Administration don't really approve of that." That could happen. I think there are some visionary computer police around who are seriously interested in that prospect, they see it as a very promising growing market for law enforcement, it's kind of their version of a golden vaporware.
I now want to talk some about the differences between your art and my art. My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren't in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It's a terrible kind of curse really.
This is a lesson about cultural expression nowadays that has applications to everybody. This is part of living in the Information Society. Here we are in the 90s, we have these tremendous information-handling, information-producing technologies. We think it's really great that we can have groovy unleashed access to all these different kinds of data, we can own books, we can own movies on tape, we can access databanks, we can buy computer-games, records, music, art.... A lot of our art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to be digital... But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks.
Compact disks aren't really all that much better than vinyl records. What they make up in fidelity they lose in groovy cover art. What they gain in playability they lose in presentation. The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a culture nut.
But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all those records and put them in attic boxes without so much guilt. You can pretend that you've stepped up a level, that now you're even more intensely into music than you ever were; but on a practical level what you're really doing is weeding this junk out of your life. By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head.
