"The whole...world is pretending the breakthrough is in the technology...the bottleneck is really in art."
- Penn Jillette
Some Day, Soon...
Your work day is done, you've just finished dinner and you're looking forward to a quiet evening at home. What should you do?
You could strap on the wet suit and harness and visit your friends in Virtual City. Once in VR, you have the option of spending time with people you know in a virtual bar, or taking on a character in any of two dozen interactive movies currently on offer. (You're tempted by Virtual Casablanca, which has gotten rave reviews in all of the news media. The problem is, everybody - men and women alike - wants to play Rick, the role created by Humphrey Bogart, which means that you will almost undoubtedly be playing against artificial characters. They're okay as long as you stick closely to the script, but, well, you know they've only progressed to the level of B actors...)
On second thought, that might nor be such a good idea. The last time you went virtual, you came out slightly nauseous. Your doctor diagnosed it as an equilibrium problem: although advances in technology had made the virtual experience very close to the real thing, there was a discrepancy between what your five senses told you was happening and what your inner ear sensed was happening. In short, VR made you motion sick. Advances in sub-sonics had alleviated this problem for many, but your body was one of the holdouts.
Well...you wanted a quiet night in, right? Checking out the TV Guide, you find that there is an interactive hockey game on - Leafs versus Canadiens, the classic match-up. Some kids like to watch from the point of view of the puck - it's better than a roller coaster (especially if you've had certain illicit substances beforehand). You'd rather watch from the coach's corner, but as soon as you think this, you realise that's not much better than the old, non-interactive version of the game; to get the most out of interactive hockey, you should freely wander from player to player, experiencing a body check from the point of the checker in real time and the person checked in the instant replay or watching yourself hook a player in real time and experiencing the referee miss the call in the replay. Let's face it - you never were very athletic.
You might try an interactive sitcom. But, you know, being able to see things from the point of view of any character in a scene doesn't make the jokes any funnier. Hmm...maybe tonight's just not a good night for television.
You could put the finishing touches on the chapter of the interactive novel you've been working on for the last couple of months. Unfortunately, you just learned the other day that somebody has already posted a continuation to the thread on which you were working. Worse, their ideas are better than the ones you were working on. You can't bring yourself to abandon all that effort; still...
Maybe this is the night you curl up with a good book!
* * *
Prognostication is a mug's game. You can try to predict the future by extrapolating from the trends which brought us to the present, but progress is usually not so easily charted. Most of the major technological advances of this century (particularly the personal computer, which made most of what I have discussed in this thesis possible) came from individuals or small groups pursuing their own agendas out of the limelight; when their inventions were made public, they came as a complete surprise to most people. They were, in short, unpredictable.
For this reason, I would not suggest that the future will definitely contain virtual reality systems in which the main interface is a plastic suit and harness, although of the current technologies available, this seems the most likely. Systems like Mandala, which use a camera and video screen, will always be limited by the fact that they cannot give tactile feedback, an important aspect of a virtual reality system. As well, I don't take the concept of "jacking in," plugging one's neural system directly into the computer, seriously because we know too little about the brain's processes to make it feasible. [241] However, research may overcome the limitations of either of these systems, putting them at the forefront of virtual reality systems, or it may give us a new technique for duplicating reality which cannot be imagined within the framework of our current technologies and discourses.
The more general a statement about the future, the more likely it is to prove accurate. So, although I wouldn't make a definitive prediction about the form virtual reality will take in the future, I think it's safe to say that some form of virtual reality is definitely going to exist. Too much interest has been created among the public (not to mention within the community doing the research), to believe that the concept won't reach some practical fruition.
In a similar vein, it is easy to see that interactivity will be a large part of the entertainment scene of the future (although it may not take the specific form of any of the media described above). Just as the direst predictions that television would make reading obsolete did not come to pass, interactive media are not likely to totally supplant traditional non-interactive media: billions of media consumers will generally want as wide a variety of media as possible to suit their individual tastes, income and levels of media sophistication. Thus, as interactive media take their place alongside traditional media, the potential number of artistic experiences is likely to explode. "The effect of this growing range of media will be an increasingly complex media environment in which individuals will have many choices depending on the kind of interaction they want to have or are constrained to having, the kind of message they want to deliver or receive, and the kind of audience they want to reach or be a part of." [242]
This chapter will look at some of the philosophical implications of the increasing interactivity of our media landscape.
But, Is It Art?
In his annual review of the worst films of the year, critic Roger Ebert chose Mr. Payback as the worst film of 1995. It was an odd choice, considering that few people had ever heard of the film, let alone had the opportunity to see it. Apparently, Mr. Payback was an interactive film: attached to each seat was an electronic device with three buttons. Periodically throughout the film, the audience was given the choice of three directions which a scene could take; a computer calculated the responses and, after the time allotted for making a choice, projected the sequence which had garnered the most votes.
The film was about a man who went around correcting minor social injustices in aggressive ways: the clip showed the man reacting to an able-bodied person parking in a handicapped space by ripping the fender off his car. In truth, the film didn't look especially well-crafted or entertaining. However, Ebert did not limit his criticism to the film's esthetics. He went on to say that, not only was Mr. Payback the worst film of the year, but it was "the worst idea for a film of the year." [243] Ebert argued that when we go to a film, we don't want to make choices which affect the story, we are going to see the particular vision of an artist. Fellow critic Gene Siskel heartily agreed when Ebert pronounced interactive film a poor idea for an art form which would never catch on.
Well...
Mr. Payback seems to have a cul-de-sac structure, a linear narrative which allows choices which do not affect the forward motion of the story. As such, the interactive film is very obvious in the way it does not allow for participant agency. I would suggest, therefore, that the film is a poor choice by which to judge the medium - it's like making sweeping statements about narrative film on the basis of a three stooges movie. If the choices offered to the audience had revolved around moral, or at least truly dramatic, dilemmas, and if those choices actually affected the direction of the story, if, in short, interactivity had been used more creatively, Ebert might have come away with a different opinion about the medium's potential.
Siskel and Ebert are not alone in claiming that people don't want interactive experiences. Penn Jillette, the talkative half of magical act Penn and Teller, is very eloquent on the subject. "Technology adds nothing to art," he says. "Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop and ask, 'Now, do you want to be kidnapped or not?' But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision." [244]
There is some evidence to support this idea. A Dataquest survey published in the May, 1995 issue of SmartMoney says 40% of people who own CD-ROM drives don't use them, while 54% say they don't plan to purchase any more discs in the future: "Could it be that storytelling doesn't work very well if the user can interfere with it? Or are consumers simply not interested in being interactive?" [245] Actually, other possible interpretations come to mind. Interactivity was being heavily promoted in the early to mid-1990s (according to Graeme Devine, co-founder of interactive CD-ROM developer Trilobyte, "...the problem is that there is so much hype." [246]); a lot of people bought the technology without a clear idea of what it could do for them. This quite naturally led to disillusionment. This was undoubtedly increased by the fact that most interactive products were rushed into the marketplace and, frankly, were not very good. As the current generation grows up with interactive media, it will have a better idea of what to expect from them; this will, in turn, drive the quality of interactive works up as the audience becomes more sophisticated and demanding. It will only be at this stage that true consumer interest can be determined.
While it may be too early to tell whether people want interactive experiences, there are indications that the public will accept them. Janet Murray, director of the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at MIT "points out that audiences already accept nonlinear storytelling in various forms. Marshall McLuhan, she says, 'talked a lot about mosaic structures, as in a daily newspaper. We take that for granted now; we also take it for granted that in a movie, when you see an army approaching followed by a shot of someone terrified, the two scenes are linked. We intuitively understand this kind of collaging.'" [247]
Anecdotal evidence suggests that people are more receptive to interactivity than its critics would have us believe. Both Platt and Wimberley and Samsel tell stories about children being told a bedtime story who interrupt and ask that changes be made in the story. If you remember your childhood, or have young children, you may recall such experiences yourself - it's common enough, which suggests that children are delighted by interactivity. This leads to the tentative conclusion that we are all born with an innate need to interact (this is, after all, how we learn about our environment), and growing up with non-interactive media is the major reason (some) adults learn to resist interactive media. When a generation has grown up with interactive media alongside all the other non-interactive media, we will get a better idea of how resistant people will be to it. My guess is that they won't be resistant. Not at all.
Another criticism of interactivity is that it cannot deliver an acceptable esthetic experience. "Do people really want interactive movies?" asked computer design expert Joy Mountford. "I mean, take Philadelphia Story [sic]. No one in an audience would want to pick the button that says, 'Yes, Tom Hanks dies.' Everybody would want him to live, but the important part of that film is it drags you through an emotional feeling. An awful lot of media have a sense of pulling you through ups and downs." [248]
By giving audience members a choice, Mountford argues, you potentially undermine the dramatic effect of the work. This is a common misperception of the potential of interactivity; in fact, an artist does not have to offer choices which violate the integrity of the work. In an interactive version of Philadelphia (1993), for instance, Tom Hanks' character would die, but the participant could choose between different kinds of medical treatments, leading him to live a longer or shorter life (and, as an additional benefit, giving the participant a lesson in AIDS research and treatment). Or there could be additional scenes of the family's anguish at the loss of their son, or Hanks' relationship to his lover (which was downplayed in the film for fear of offending middle American sensibilities), or of activities centred around the government's political delays in AIDS research. Employed creativity, interactivity could enrich the experience of the film while staying true to the intentions of its creators.
Penn Jillette makes a similar argument more forcefully: "The fact of the matter is, since the beginning of time, you could buy a Picasso and change the colors. That's trivial. But you don't because you're buying a piece of Picasso's...soul. That's the definition of art: Art is one person's ego trip." [249] Actually, the individual as artist is a relatively new phenomenon, dating from the Renaissance; from oral stories to cathedrals designed by anonymous architects and built by nameless peasants, from the works of Homer (who, it is now believed, was not a single historical person) to the Bible (whose authorship is a perennial academic riddle), art was not traditionally considered the domain of a single, identifiable artist.
Even if we take Jillette's argument at face value (after all, the individual artist is certainly exalted at this time in history), it doesn't follow that interactivity necessarily undermines the artist's intentions. As we have seen, with most forms of interactivity the author determines every path the participant can travel, circumscribes every choice the participant can make. In a very real sense, most interactive works are, therefore, the product of the unifying vision of a single artist. Even in works which cede a lot of control to the participant, such as simulations or MUDs, an argument can be made that, by setting the initial conditions of the work and the parameters within which the participant can manoeuvre, the artist remains the primary creative force, able to create a unified work, although here the assertion is more problematic.
Some critics of interactive media suggest that the need for the participant to make choices works against the esthetic value of interactive works. "Some viewers don't want a film's narrative flow interrupted by having to make a 'choice,'" Sawyer and Vourlis contend. [250] Such people are welcome to limit themselves to traditional media, for, just as film did not signal the end of radio and television did not mean the end of newspapers or film (although each medium was transformed by the challenges posed by its successor), interactive multimedia will not necessarily eliminate traditional media. Its existence will broaden the scope of potential esthetic experience, not limit it.
A more effective form of this argument is offered by Platt: "A finished movie relies on the highly evolved skills of a film editor to build a mood, create comedy, or bring action to a climax. This kind of precise timing (which may be measured in single frames) is essential to achieve maximum effect. But in [an interactive] movie, the action stops and starts depending on whether the user is looking in the right direction. As a result, timing becomes impossible, and even though the story line never varies, interactivity has still managed to interfere with the structure." [251] Platt's point is well taken: a participant in an interactive work can freeze the action at any point, go away for an hour and come back. Even having to take a moment to cue a choice can destroy the effect of the precise timing of an edit. Knowing this, an artist can take steps to minimize it (ensuring, for instance, that choices are only offered between images or elements of scenes which do not require precise timing, while images which must be closely linked in time are not separated by a decision branch). This problem may be impossible to eliminate entirely, though, and artists may have to give up some control over the way scenes and images are received as a trade-off for allowing greater participant involvement.
(You may wonder whether stopping the action in the middle of a scene, that is, before a choice is offered, would have the same effect of undermining the esthetic experience of the work. Quite possibly. But this problem is not a unique feature of interactive media. You can stop watching a film or television program by pausing your VCR or turning off your set; unless you have a lot of time on your hands, you have to put a book aside in the middle, often for more than an hour. Since people can be distracted in the middle of a work, an artist is required to make it as engaging as possible, regardless of the medium.)
Platt goes on to suggest that interactivity will only be esthetically pleasing at the furthest end of the scale, where the participant is completely free. He begins by quoting Walt Freitag, founder of Daedalus Arts:
'There's a conflict between interactivity and storytelling,' he says. 'Most people imagine there's a spectrum between conventional written stories on one side and total interactivity on the other. But I believe that what you really have are two safe havens separated by a pit of hell that can absorb endless amounts of time, skill and resources.'
"In other words, it may be impossible to find a workable compromise between the two extremes. A tight, satisfying story with plot twists, revelations, and a strong ending doesn't allow much room for the user to interfere. Conversely, the seductive freedom [of an interactive world] would be restricted if a storyline were imposed on it. [251]
As we have seen, each thread of an interactive story can have its own plot twists, revelations and strong ending, and storylines can develop in worlds structures (such as Myst) with all their seductive freedom. To be sure, there will always be tension between telling an effective, coherent story and allowing the participant to choose between different narrative paths, but it's far too early in the history of interactive media to say that there will be no satisfactory resolutions to that tension.
The disparagement of an emerging communications medium is not new. The early nickelodeons were dismissed as a novelty by many, including the people who were making a great amount of money from them. Even as late as 1935, after a richly creative silent era, after the introduction of sound, after the first wave of critical thinking about the medium, Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein could still complain about people who saw film as a "half-art" [254]
Criticism of emerging interactive media often comes from people with a stake in existing media: critics, writers and especially people in the film and television industries. Such critics tend to misjudge the impact of new technologies in a couple of easily identifiable ways: they ignore the parallels between existing media and emerging media, exaggerating the differences in order to obscure the fact that existing artistic principles can profitably be applied to the new media; and they discourage artists from exploring the esthetic potential of the new media, thus stunting its growth. It is understandable that people would want to protect their livelihoods; the nature of existing media will likely change with the emergence of interactive media. However, their criticisms should be weighed in light of their self-interest.
It is too early to tell if interactive media can achieve the status of art forms. Current arguments against this possibility, however, are less than convincing.
Authors of Our Own Fate?
Before the development of interactive media, indeed, back when computers were the size of a room and cost more than any but the largest corporations could afford, the authorship of works of art was already being questioned. Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and other French literary theorists were developing the idea of intertextuality, which, simply stated, means that every text (used in the broadest sense of the word) is connected to a large variety of other texts in the memory of a participant, who creates meaning through this web of connections. "[The] frontiers of a book are never clear-cut" Foucault claims, because "it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network...of references." [255]
This concept is easy to illustrate. Consider the sentence "The cat jumped on the hat." Depending upon your experience, you might associate cats with Dr. Suess' Cat in the Hat, the title character from the animated cartoon Fritz the Cat (1972), the main character in the National Film Board short The Cat Came Back, the Cure song "Love Cats," the Poe short story "The Black Cat," the folk legend that cats are the familiars of witches or any of a large number of other films, stories, songs or other works of art featuring cats. If you stretch the definition of text to include your life, you will also associate the term "cat" with all the cats you have owned or otherwise spent time with. This process of association will also happen with the words "jumped" and "hat." Because no two readers will have exactly the same texts to draw on, the French theorists argue that every reader creates the experience of a text for his or herself, an experience which is unique to him or her.
This theory has many ramifications for our experience of a work of art. As Barthes explains: "In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable...; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language." [256]
This ever-expanding, limitless network of meaning should be familiar to anybody who has followed a series of links on the World Wide Web. Modern hypertext theorist Stuart Moulthrop says that Theodore Nelson's Xanadu "in many respects literalizes Barthes' new understanding of 'the Text.' On a basic level at least, every hypertext is an instance of Barthes' text-as-network, and this convergence of French theory with American technology suggests an implementation of hypertext without absolute heirarchies." [257] George Landow observes the same thing happening more generally: "Statements by theorists concerned with literature, like those by theorists concerned with computing, show a remarkable convergence... [both] argue that we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, heirarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks." [258] Traditional literary criticism focused on the features of a work, the working of the plot and the techniques of the artist, in order to tease out the artist's intention (what he or she was trying to "say"); the French school of literary criticism, known as semiotics, now given concrete form in hypertext and hypermedia, claims, among other things, that the artist's intentions are almost entirely irrelevant, that each individual person experiencing a work of art creates his or her own meaning.
Whenever I think of this implication of semiotics, I am reminded of the story, possibly true, of the Hollywood writer who had to deal with the inflated ego of a director. The director, quoting the auteur theory, liked to claim that he was the only creative person on the set. Becoming tired of the director's hollow boasting, the writer handed him a piece of paper and said, "See what your individual creative vision can make of this!"
The death of the author seems, to me, to be overblown: if, instead of "The cat jumped on the hat," I had written "The dog lay on the couch" above, I would have been responsible for creating a sentence with a completely different meaning.
This caveat notwithstanding, hypertext and hypermedia clearly do alter the relationship between author, participant and work.
Most closed hypermedia systems, in which the participant can make choices which affect the direction of the narrative but cannot add original material, cede some control of the experience to the participant. However, the extent to which the author relinquishes control is a matter of serious debate: "As Bolter observes: 'The reader participates in the making of the text as a sequence of words.' If we equate 'text' to one particular traversal of the network, then indeed every reading session generates a new text, and the reader takes an active part in this writing... Alternatively, the concept of 'text' could be equated to the sum of possible readings, or rather to the written signs forming the common source of these readings. In the case of hypertext, this would mean that the text is the entire network of links and of textual nodes. According to this view, the interactivity of hypertext is not a power to change the environment, as is the case in VR systems, but merely a freedom to move the sensors for a personalized exploration. The reader may choose in which order she visits the nodes, but her choices do not affect the configuration of the network. No matter how the reader runs the maze, the maze remains the same. Far from relinquishing authority (as Bolter has claimed), the author remains the hidden master of the maze." [259]
While it is interesting as a concept, I'm not sure the term text should refer to the entire network of connections in practice; a participant in a work of art cannot, after all, extract meaning from parts of a work which he or she has not experienced. In addition, some closed forms of interactive narrative, such as simulations or works with random elements, are not structurally predetermined by their creator, who creates only a potential which is played out by the participant. Thus, while creators of hypermedia works retain more control of the direction of the narrative than is generally assumed, I do not believe that it is as complete as the control artists have in traditional media.
Marie-Laure Ryan, who made the previous argument, goes on to say that, "The difference between the experiences of hypertext and of traditional texts is mostly a matter of intensity, of awareness and of having no other source of pleasure than what Nabokov calls 'combinatorial delight...' In the absence of the distraction created by a dominating storyline, it is hoped the reader will devote all of his attention to the tracking of links." [260] While this may be true with a medium as new and novel as hypertext, in the long run it seems to me that tracking links will be an insufficient source of pleasure for participants in interactive works. General audiences, as a rule, aren't interested in technology (how many moviegoers know how the camera works?) - they want an esthetic experience. Although a story may not dominate a work of interactive fiction, it must ultimately emerge, with strong characters and the other manifestations of effective drama, or it won't be esthetically pleasing.
Another way of looking at the question of authorship is that, by making manifest connections readers usually make for themselves, interactive media may actually undermine the intertextual readings postmodern theorists write about: "A reader who chooses the yield word 'die' in [David Jay Bolter's interactive short story] afternoon may be dismayed to find that the connections running through her mind (the die is cast; Un coup de des; dies irae) are not realized at the point of arrival, which simply describes a car wreck. The link in this sense is usually - or always, at some level of abstraction - a detour." [261] In this way, hypermedia actually increases rather than decreases the authority of the creator of a work!
Open hypermedia structures, where the participant is allowed, and often encouraged to add his or her own creative elements, clearly makes the participant a collaborator in the creative process. Even here, however, the boundaries are not clear, as an anecdote related by Moulthrop makes evident:
The MUDs present many signs of the old authorial Adam. In a recent visit to PMC-MOO, a multi-user space set up by the on-line journal Postmodern Culture, one of my colleagues discovered how greatly the demise of authorship has been exaggerated. Within ten minutes of logging on (in a female persona), my informant had encountered sexism, bullying, and even terrorism. First she was accosted by another user who insisted on addressing her as 'lady.' Reminded that some women find this term objectionable, the user in question replied that 'there are only three kinds of females: ladies, babes, and bitches.' As this exchange devolved further, the garrulous user abruptly pulled rank, claiming to have 'wizard privileges' and then stormed off into cyberspace. My informant was initially puzzled by his last remark but soon discovered its meaning. Shortly after the encounter with the digital ladies man, she came across another user claiming to be a 'terrorist.' This person tossed her a 'bomb,' which was actually a subprogram that moved her character to an obscure room in the virtual space. She could not leave this room without invoking another subprogram which required special privileges on the system. These privileges are conferred only on 'wizards,' users who have access to the coding facilities that underlie the MUD.
There would seem to be no fundamental difference between a MUD wizard and the author of an exploratory hypertext. Both exert control over others' movements through a virtual symbolic space. Both exploit a power gradient within the textual construct. [262]
With new narrative forms, authority will have to find creative ways of asserting itself.
Should every participant in an artificial environment be considered an artist? Would they want to? By creating their own environments and interacting naturally within them, people are already able to create their own esthetic experiences with little prompting from "artists." However, once the novelty of virtual environments has worn off, I suspect that most people will likely want more structured experiences, opening the door for the return of artists.
The truth is that the cheap and easy accessibility of pen and paper has not made us all great poets or novelists. The development of inexpensive still cameras did not create a generation of Yusef Karshs, nor have relatively cheap video cameras unleashed a torrent of Martin Scorseses or Woody Allens. Artists with something to say and a sensitivity to the possibilities of the medium will always be in demand.
One thing which interactive media, especially networked media, will do, however, is allow anybody who wants to be an artist equal access to the public. In the past, filmmakers had to work with one of a small number of transnational media corporations if they wanted their work distributed as widely as possible, which usually lead to artistic compromise. Now, independent filmmakers can post notices of the availability of their work on the Internet, bypassing the international network of film distribution in order to connect directly with potential viewers. As bandwidth increases, we can expect that at some point in the future viewers will be able to download work by independent filmmakers directly from the Net. Now anybody can make a films; in the future, anybody will be able to sell their films to anybody else, an important advance for independent artists.
In a similar vein, visual artists (including still photographers) will be able to increase their potential audiences substantially. At the moment, visual artists must hold exhibitions of their work in order to interest the public and acquaint potential buyers with their work. Unfortunately, this limits the number of people who can see their work to those who live in the general area of the gallery (a further limitation being the number of people who belong to the subculture of gallery attendees). Already, many visual artists are placing their work for sale on virtual art galleries on the Internet, increasing the number of people who can see, and possibly become interested in buying, their work.
In this way, everybody who wants to create a work of art will have equal access to audiences - the works of the novice will be as accessible as those of the seasoned professional. (Another ramification is that the traditional artistic middlemen, the film distribution companies, television networks, publishers and art galleries, will have to adapt to the new media or disappear. At this point in time, I wouldn't count them out...) Whether or not interactive media change the relationship between creator and participant in any meaningful way, networked interactive media does by holding out the possibility of allowing every person who wants to be an artist to find an audience.
Conclusion: After the Novelty
Platt writes:
I began to see a parallel between the development of interactive media and the evolution of movie making. Early silent movies borrowed techniques from short stories and music-hall routines. Blocks of text appeared on the screen to explain the plot or convey fragments of dialog, while much of the filmic action was based on slapstick humor that had already been perfected in cheap theaters across the country.
Today, movie making has developed its own artistic vocabulary that owes little to other forms of fiction. If movies were still shackled to the style and methods of the printed word, they would be clumsy and limited, incapable of fulfilling their real promise.
Since interactive entertainment entails a much bigger leap away from traditional storytelling, it has even greater need to develop its own methods. Currently, it still relies on old conceptions of plot and character
for the same reason that silent movies relied on blocks of plain text - we don't have the experience or the tools, yet, to do better. To this extent, multimedia advocates are correct when they claim that the field is too new
to have developed its real promise. [263]
The first films shown commercially in theatres wouldn't seem like much to us today: workers walking out of the Lumiere brothers' factory; a couple sitting at a table in a garden, the man eventually leaning over for a very chaste kiss; a train coming into a station. You may have home movies which are more interesting. It's hard to imagine the electrifying effect which these snippets of film had on their original audience. The shot of a train coming into a station, in particular, caused audiences unused to watching films to flinch, as though a real train were coming at them.
A similar phenomenon happened with television. The original sets had a small black and white picture set in a huge cabinet, the picture was fuzzy and frequently faded in and out and the sound, which was also prone to fading in and out, was tinny and unrealistic. Yet, this was enough; people who were alive then vividly remember the first time they saw something on a television, eloquent evidence that they recognized that it would change their lives.
Every new medium seems to be given a grace period during which the novelty of it is enough to attract an audience. Interactive multimedia is currently at this stage. When the novelty wears off, what will happen to it? I see two possibilities. In the first, general interest in interactive multimedia fades and it becomes the plaything of adolescent boys and computer nerds, those who, in short, have been using it since the beginning. "We do have store shelves bulging with an increasingly sophisticated line-up of games and other entertainment that appeal to the lowest of human motivators (fear, lust, greed, for examples), most simply offering exercises to enhance the motor reflexes of pre-adolescent males." [264] In the second, the stories told in interactive media become as sophisticated as the technology used to deliver them, and it takes its place alongside film and television as a twentieth century art form.
What will determine which of these two scenarios will occur is not mysterious: it is whether or not writers and other artists will be allowed to create freely. In the literature on interactive media, you can frequently find writers expressing the sentiment that they are still looking for interactivity's D. W. Griffith, its Eisenstein, its Balzac, looking for an artist with the vision to combine theory and practice in order to create work which "broadens our experience and increases our knowledge of the possibilities of the self." [265]
Interactive media, as young as they are, have already developed a set of customs which, if interactivity is to be used to create more sophisticated narrative experiences, must be seriously questioned. I find David Wheeler's experience directing the CD-ROM Tender Loving Care instructive on this issue: "I thought, this being a psychological drama, we'd have a bunch of psychological puzzles and games. [Art director] Rob [Landeros] sprang 'why don't we do this with no puzzles, no games' on me. That was really appealing." [266] Despite the fact that he knew he was making a dramatic narrative, Wheeler had difficulty going beyond the mindset that if his work was interactive, it would have to have the features of a game. This sort of thinking stifles creativity, hindering the growth of interactive media as a place for self-expression.
There is a small, but growing number of voices within the community of creators of interactive works who recognize this limitation. As Robert Gelman writes, "We must formulate our product/content strategies based on inviting the user to engage their emotions and imaginations. To be emotionally engaging, the interactivity must do more than just allow selections, it must somehow synthesize real experience, regardless of its point of view." [267] Who knows? Perhaps a nascent interactive Eisenstein or Griffith is among these voices, or, more likely, will be inspired by them.
Artists in traditional media have little to fear from emerging media: MUDs and MOOs are not likely to supplant television in our lifetimes, virtual reality is not going to replace films for a long time and neither is likely to undermine the importance of literature to our culture or our individual lives. "The world of true interactive media will not be better than fiction, or inferior to fiction; it will be different from fiction in ways that we cannot imagine today." [268] What emerging interactive media do is offer artists from all disciplines a new forum for their creativity; how mature an art form they will become depends upon how enthusiastically artists explore the new possibilities for creative expression the interactivity of emerging electronic media offers them.
