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- Bruce Sterling
- bruces@well.com
- Literary Freeware -- Not For Commercial Use
- 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.
- Computer games are especially vulnerable to this
- because they live and breathe through the platform. But
- something rather similar is happening today to fiction as
- well.... What you see in science fiction nowadays is an
- amazing tonnage of product that is shuffled through the
- racks faster and faster.... If a science fiction
- paperback stays available for six weeks, it's a miracle.
- Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off...
- Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book
- form, when a science fiction *book* came out it would be
- in an edition of maybe five hundred copies and these
- weirdo Golden Age SF fans would cling on to every copy as
- if it were made of platinum.... But now they come out and
- they are made to vanish as soon as possible. In fact to a
- great extent they're designed by their lame hack authors
- to vanish as soon as possible. They're cliches because
- cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write a
- whole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one...
- Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print.
- They still have the cultural properties of print.
- Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a
- long time because they can be replicated faithfully in new
- editions that have all the same properties as the old
- ones. Books are independent of the machineries of book
- production, the platforms of publishing. Books don't lose
- anything by being reprinted by a new machine, books are
- stubborn, they remain the same work of art, they carry the
- same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill. MOBY DICK
- for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't until the
- 1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and
- then it got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't
- even publish books, she just wrote these demented little
- poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they
- still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and
- on and on. It's damned hard to get rid of Emily
- Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's ear. And
- everybody who writes from then on in some sense has to
- measure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing the
- classics are still living competition, they tend to
- elevate the entire art-form by their persistent presence.
- I've noticed though that computer game designers
- don't look much to the past. All their idealized classics
- tend to be in reverse, they're projected into the future.
- When you're a game designer and you're waxing very
- creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff
- that doesn't exist yet. Like now we only have floppies,
- but wait till we get CD-ROM. Like now we can't have
- compelling lifelike artificial characters in the game, but
- wait till we get AI. Like now we waste time porting games
- between platforms, but wait till there's just one
- standard. Like now we're just starting with huge
- multiplayer games, but wait till the modem networks are a
- happening thing. And I -- as a game designer artiste --
- it's my solemn duty to carry us that much farther forward
- toward the beckoning grail....
- For a novelist like myself this is a completely alien
- paradigm. I can see that it's very seductive, but at the
- same time I can't help but see that the ground is
- crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes
- it's like a little cultural apocalypse. And I can imagine
- a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and
- then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of
- expression? Alan Kay -- he's a heavy guy, Alan Kay --
- he says that computers may tend to shrink and vanish into
- the environment, into the walls and into clothing....
- Sounds pretty good.... But this also means that all the
- joysticks vanish, all the keyboards, all the repetitive
- strain injuries.
- I'm sure you could play some kind of computer
- game with very intelligent, very small, invisible
- computers.... You could have some entertaining way to
- play with them, or more likely they would have some
- entertaining way to play with you. But then imagine
- yourself growing up in that world, being born in that
- world. You could even be a computer game designer in that
- world, but how would you study the work of your
- predecessors? How would you physically *access* and
- *experience* the work of your predecessors? There's a
- razor-sharp cutting edge in this art-form, but what
- happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?
- As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that
- this is happening.... I don't think that as a culture
- today we're very interested in tradition or continuity.
- No, we're a lot more interested in being a New Age and a
- revolutionary epoch, we long to reinvent ourselves every
- morning before breakfast and never grow old. We have to
- run really fast to stay in the same place. We've become
- used to running, if we sit still for a while it makes us
- feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss those sixty-
- hour work weeks.
- And much the same thing is happening to books today
- too.... Not just technically, but ideologically. I
- don't know if you're familiar at all with literary theory
- nowadays, with terms like deconstructionism,
- postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talk very long
- about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff, and I
- don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields of
- study where it's sometimes wise to treasure your
- ignorance.... But the thing about the new literary theory
- that's remarkable, is that it makes a really violent break
- with the past.... These guys don't take the books of the
- past on their own cultural terms. When you're
- deconstructing a book it's like you're psychoanalyzing it,
- you're not studying it for what it says, you're studying
- it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural reasons
- for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is
- that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful
- not to let it get its message through or affect you deeply
- or emotionally in any way. You're in a position of
- complete psychological and technical superiority to the
- book and its author... This is a way for modern
- literateurs to handle this vast legacy of the past without
- actually getting any of the sticky stuff on you. It's
- like it's dead. It's like the next best thing to not
- having literature at all. For some reason this feels
- really good to people nowadays.
- But even that isn't enough, you know.... There's
- talk nowadays in publishing circles about a new device for
- books, called a ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it
- in your hands like this.... Has a very nice little
- graphics screen, theoretically, a high-definition thing,
- very legible.... And you play your books on it.... You
- buy the book as a floppy and you stick it in... And just
- think, wow you can even have graphics with your book...
- you can have music, you can have a soundtrack....
- Narration.... Animated illustrations... Multimedia... it
- can even be interactive.... It's the New Hollywood for
- Publisher's Row, and at last books can aspire to the
- exalted condition of movies and cartoons and TV and
- computer games.... And just think when the ReadMan goes
- obsolete, all the product that was written for it will be
- blessedly gone forever!!! Erased from the memory of
- mankind!
- Now I'm the farthest thing from a Luddite ladies and
- gentlemen, but when I contemplate this particular
- technical marvel my author's blood runs cold... It's
- really hard for books to compete with other multisensory
- media, with modern electronic media, and this is supposed
- to be the panacea for withering literature, but from the
- marrow of my bones I say get that fucking little
- sarcophagus away from me. For God's sake don't put my
- books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope. Don't put me
- into the stereograph, don't write me on the wax cylinder,
- don't tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece
- of hardware, because hardware is even more mortal than I
- am, and I'm a hell of a lot more mortal than I care to be.
- Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the
- first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with
- the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of
- keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking
- place.
- Okay.... Now I've sometimes heard it asked why
- computer game designers are deprived of the full artistic
- respect they deserve. God knows they work hard enough.
- They're really talented too, and by any objective measure
- of intelligence they rank in the top percentiles... I've
- heard it said that maybe this problem has something to do
- with the size of the author's name on the front of the
- game-box. Or it's lone wolves versus teams, and somehow
- the proper allotment of fame gets lost in the muddle.
- One factor I don't see mentioned much is the sheer lack of
- stability in your medium. A modern movie-maker could
- probably make a pretty good film with DW Griffith's
- equipment, but you folks are dwelling in the very
- maelstrom of Permanent Technological Revolution. And
- that's a really cool place, but man, it's just not a good
- place to build monuments.
- Okay. Now I live in the same world you live in, I
- hope I've demonstrated that I face a lot of the same
- problems you face... Believe me there are few things
- deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel
- that predicts the future when the future has passed it by.
- Science fiction is a pop medium and a very obsolescent
- medium. The fact that written science fiction is a prose
- medium gives us some advantages, but even science fiction
- has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle
- of literary excellence... we try to do this sometimes, but
- generally we have to be really drunk first. Still, if
- you want your work to survive (and some science fiction
- *does* survive, very successfully) then your work has to
- capture some quality that lasts. You have to capture
- something that people will search out over time, even
- though they have to fight their way upstream against the
- whole rushing current of obsolescence and innovation.
- And I've come up with a strategy for attempting this.
- Maybe it'll work -- probably it won't -- but I wouldn't be
- complaining so loudly if I didn't have some kind of
- strategy, right? And I think that my strategy may have
- some relevance to game designers so I presume to offer it
- tonight.
- This is the point at which your normal J. Random
- Author trots out the doctrine of the Wonderful Power of
- Storytelling. Yes, storytelling, the old myth around the
- campfire, blind Homer, universal Shakespeare, this is the
- art ladies and gentlemen that strikes to the eternal core
- of the human condition... This is high art and if you
- don't have it you are dust in the wind.... I can't tell
- you how many times I have heard this bullshit... This is
- known in my field as the "Me and My Pal Bill Shakespeare"
- argument. Since 1982 I have been at open war with people
- who promulgate this doctrine in science fiction and this
- is the primary reason why my colleagues in SF speak of me
- in fear and trembling as a big bad cyberpunk... This is
- the classic doctrine of Humanist SF.
- This is what it sounds like when it's translated into
- your jargon. Listen closely:
- "Movies and plays get much of their power from the
- resonances between the structural layers. The congruence
- between the theme, plot, setting and character layouts
- generates emotional power. Computer games will never have
- a significant theme level because the outcome is variable.
- The lack of theme alone will limit the storytelling power
- of computer games."
- Hard to refute. Impossible to refute. Ladies and
- gentlemen to hell with the marvellous power of
- storytelling. If the audience for science fiction wanted
- *storytelling*, they wouldn't read goddamned *science
- fiction,* they'd read Harpers and Redbook and Argosy. The
- pulp magazine (which is our genre's primary example of a
- dead platform) used to carry all kinds of storytelling.
- Western stories. Sailor stories. Prizefighting stories.
- G-8 and his battle aces. Spicy Garage Tales. Aryan
- Atrocity Adventures. These things are dead. Stories
- didn't save them. Stories won't save us. Stories won't
- save *you.*
- This is not the route to follow. We're not into
- science fiction because it's *good literature,* we're into
- it because it's *weird*. Follow your weird, ladies and
- gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your
- geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words
- of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose
- work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the
- muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a
- "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A
- good science fiction story is something that knows it is
- science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring
- out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not
- be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it
- should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE
- LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE
- LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!
- I don't think you can last by meeting the
- contemporary public taste, the taste from the last
- quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following
- demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't
- know many works of art that last that are condescending.
- I don't know many works of art that last that are
- deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek
- written all over you; you should aim to be one geek
- they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't
- hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of
- pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should
- fully realize what society has made of you and take a
- terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get
- dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird
- and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you
- have behind it. Have the artistic *courage* to recognize
- your own significance in culture!
- Okay. Those of you into SF may recognize the classic
- rhetoric of cyberpunk here. Alienated punks, picking up
- computers, menacing society.... That's the cliched press
- story, but they miss the best half. Punk into cyber is
- interesting, but cyber into punk is way dread. I'm into
- technical people who attack pop culture. I'm into techies
- gone dingo, techies gone rogue -- not street punks
- picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within
- their reach -- but disciplined people, intelligent
- people, people with some technical skills and some
- rational thought, who can break out of the arid prison
- that this society sets for its engineers. People who are,
- and I quote, "dismayed by nearly every aspect of the world
- situation and aware on some nightmare level that the
- solutions to our problems will not come from the breed of
- dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians." Thanks,
- Brenda!
- That still smells like hope to me....
- You don't get there by acculturating. Don't become a
- well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and
- dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from
- every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.
- If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don't read
- Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read
- Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off
- talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats.
- If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell,
- read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the
- Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are
- hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies
- of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will
- always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn
- who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn't come here
- from nowhere. There are reasons why you're here. Learn
- those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried
- because it was too experimental or embarrassing or
- inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.
- And when it comes to studying art, well, study it,
- but study it to your own purposes. If you're obsessively
- weird enough to be a good weird artist, you generally face
- a basic problem. The basic problem with weird art is not
- the height of the ceiling above it, it's the pitfalls
- under its feet. The worst problem is the blundering, the
- solecisms, the naivete of the poorly socialized, the
- rotten spots that you skid over because you're too freaked
- out and not paying proper attention. You may not need
- much characterization in computer entertainment.
- Delineating character may not be the point of your work.
- That's no excuse for making lame characters that are
- actively bad. You may not need a strong, supple,
- thoroughly worked-out storyline. That doesn't mean that
- you can get away with a stupid plot made of chickenwire
- and spit. Get a full repertoire of tools. Just make sure
- you use those tools to the proper end. Aim for the
- heights of professionalism. Just make sure you're a
- professional *game designer.*
- You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium
- just by knocking it off with the bullshit. Popular media
- always reek of bullshit, they reek of carelessness and
- self-taught clumsiness and charlatanry. To live outside
- the aesthetic laws you must be honest. Know what you're
- doing; don't settle for the way it looks just cause
- everybody's used to it. If you've got a palette of 2
- million colors, then don't settle for designs that look
- like a cheap four-color comic book. If you're gonna do
- graphic design, then learn what good graphic design looks
- like; don't screw around in amateur fashion out of sheer
- blithe ignorance. If you write a manual, don't write a
- semiliterate manual with bad grammar and misspellings.
- If you want to be taken seriously by your fellows and by
- the populace at large, then don't give people any excuse
- to dismiss you. Don't be your own worst enemy. Don't
- put yourself down.
- I have my own prejudices and probably more than my
- share, but I still think these are pretty good principles.
- There's nothing magic about 'em. They certainly don't
- guarantee success, but then there's "success" and then
- there's success. Working seriously, improving your
- taste and perception and understanding, knowing what you
- are and where you came from, not only improves your work
- in the present, but gives you a chance of influencing the
- future and links you to the best work of the past. It
- gives you a place to take a solid stand. I try to live up
- to these principles; I can't say I've mastered them, but
- they've certainly gotten me into some interesting places,
- and among some very interesting company. Like the people
- here tonight.
- I'm not really here by any accident. I'm here
- because I'm *paying attention.* I 'm here because I know
- you're significant. I'm here because I know you're
- important. It was a privilege to be here. Thanks very
- much for having me, and showing me what you do.
- That's all I have to say to you tonight. Thanks very
- much for listening.
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