Enter, from stage left, Hollywood. With scary buzzwords like Information Super-highway and Digital Convergence descending on Tinseltown like a cloud of locusts, there’s a frantic incentive for studios to join forces with Silicon Valley. So the courtship is now in full swing between La La Land and Nerdville. Some have called the alliance a shotgun marriage, but it bears more resemblance to an arranged match between two wealthy dynasties, where each legacy coldly evaluates its potential gains and suffers through the wedding night. The elan from southern California considers itself the worldlier party. It is, after all, the serf-anointed keeper of the nation’s dreams. Hollywood looks at the relatively nickel-and-dime operations of Silicon Valley, where a production budget in the low seven figures requires a deep breath and a dispensation from the venture capitalists, and rolls its eyes. You stick to the propeller-head stuff, says Hollywood to its new mate, and we’ll figure out how to make ’em laugh and cry.
Hollywood even has an answer to the rejoinder that while interactive content can be addictive for engaging in virtual massacres (Doom) or intricate puzzle solving (Myst), no one has figured out yet how to hit the cultural jackpot, the equivalent of Forrest Gump Interactive or even Beverly Hills CD-ROM. It goes like this: interactive entertainment is just like film in its early days. And then along came Eisenstein, who created a grammar that allowed movies to mature. All we need is a genius–a digital messiah– who will do the same for interactive. Since the word “genius” in Hollywood is synonymous with one person, this theory can be dubbed Waiting for Spielberg.
It’s not going to be that easy. The problem lies with the essential nature of interactive entertainment. For centuries people have been entertained by listening to stories-some psychologists even think our brains are hard-wired to appreciate narrative. But interactive eschews narrative. “We’re all about engaging the player, saying that he or she has as much to contribute as anything else,” explains Tom Zito, head of Digital Pictures. “That’s nothing that Hollywood wants to hear.” No wonder–it’s like asking Homer to pause during the Odyssey to ask the audience what they think Ulysses should find upon his home-coming. How can you believe in a character when his or her fateis contingent on your ability to shoot down a lot of hostile aliens?
Another difference is that “interactivity dilutes your point of view,” says Michael Backes, a screenwriter/videogame exec who understands both cultures. Backes cites the Tyrannosaurus rex sequence in “Jurassic Park.” Spielberg carefully orchestrates every shot for maximum terror, controlling where the viewer looks at every instant. But in an interactive, virtual-reality-type environment, he or she probably wouldn’t be looking at the dinosaur at all–just running.
I got a glimpse at how dismally Hollywood handles the problem by visiting a theater showing “Ride for Your Life,” a much-touted “interactive” movie. (I had plenty of time, to experiment, since I was the only one in the theater.) At certain points in the movie the audience is asked to push buttons to vote on the direction the film will take. You were never really sure which path might be the most entertaining one. Worse yet, the movie actually kept score of the audience’s response; in several eases I was penalized because my choice didn’t show proper “loyalty” to the protagonist.
This is the kind of idiocy that Silicon Valley long ago learned to avoid. The interactive companies pursue a two-pronged effort: on one hand they work feverishly to devise techniques to eliminate technical barriers to enjoyment (like the pauses as the CD-ROM disc grabs the next scene). But more important, the design of their products builds in interactivity from the start. Instead of competing directly with movielike experiences, where character and plot are king, the most successful games treat the environment itself as the star. “The idea is to make an interesting world,” says Mike Backes, “You can’t just plunge the person into the third act of ‘King Lear’.”
Will this be enough? For the short term, there’s still plenty of mileage left in simulations that place people in challenging roles. But I see interactive worlds really taking off when people can network them together. Then people can compensate for the lack of strong fictional characters by acting out their own personae in multiplayer environments. The advance guard of this movement right now is the online Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), virtual communities of game players whose deeply personal interactions can have profound effects on the participants. (They have even been known to make people cry.) Significantly, the MUD phenomenon is deeply entrenched in the realm of the technoid–far, far off Hollywood’s radar screen.
Does this mean we can count the studios out? Not exactly. Guess who showed up last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo? Spielberg. It turns out that His Stevenhood has invested in a game company and has already begun shooting footage for his first made-for-computer production. Whether or not the program breaks new ground, it does represent a wake-up call from Hollywood to Silicon Valley: “He’s heee-re.”
