QUIET ON THE SET:INTERACTION!

OMNI LOOKS AT EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, THE POTENTIAL OFFERED BY
INCREASINGLY AMBITIOUS GAME DESIGNS, AND THE FUTURE OF INTERACTIVE
ELECTRONIC ENTERTAINMENT

Over the past decade we have seen interactive electronic entertainment evolve
from simple black-and-white video games to full-color, stereo-sound, nearly
full-motion participatory "movies." More than ever before, the player becomes a
part of the game she or he plays.

And more than ever, "interactive" becomes an accurate description of the
process, rather than an item of marketing jargon.

How far can "electronic games" go? In a series of "snapshots from the future,"
Omni looks at emerging technologies, the potential offered by increasingly
ambitious game designs, the future of interactive electronic entertainment.

It's a bright future. A case can be made for entertainment designers and
programmers being the most talented of all software artists. Certainly in the
best games, there's an ease of use, a simplicity and elegance of design, that
our word processing and spreadsheet designers would do well to emulate.

More than that, there's a gathering sense in the entertainment software industry
of whole new horizons are being opened for development, electronic frontiers
being readied for exploration. The great success enjoyed by both personal
computer and video game console manufacturers has served to liberate the
software industry.

Software is what sells computers and video games; software is what appeals to
consumers.

The hardware manufacturers understand this, and each new generation of equipment
makes possible more convincing illusions, more satisfying entertainments, more
fulfilling diversions. And software designers love nothing better than pushing
the edges of a technology. Depth of play-a game design's ability to continue
delivering entertainment after the initial excitement subsides-is a hot area
among designers.

How do we enhance the illusion? How much can we do? How far can we go? Answers
are beginning to emerge: Long-perceived limitations are tumbling. The walls
between television and computers, movies and software, fiction on paper and
electronic storytelling, are coming down.

And if it can't be done today, it will tomorrow. As the hardware side of the
business focuses on the development of true multimedia products that merge
television, high-quality audio, and sophisticated computer technologies into a
seamless whole, the boundaries of what constitutes an entertainment "reality"
will virtually disappear. Participatory entertainments will emerge on a level
unimaginable a decade ago. Individuals will be able to choose their own
preferred realities, their own electronic worlds of entertainment.

You will be able to visit these worlds on your own, playing solo, or you can
travel in groups. Those groups may be as small as two people vying against each
other over a video game deck. Or as large as many thousands of on-line gamers
playing through a telecommunications net. "Have it your way" will take on whole
new levels of meaning.

Information itself will become a vital aspect of game design. We will see a
blurring of the lines between entertainment and education: You'll be able to
learn while you play, and play while you learn. There will be no "royal road"
to learning, but the electronic road to education may be a little less steep.

What does all of this mean? Where are our interactive playthings taking us?

That's what this special section of Omni is all about. Call it a look ahead, a
glance at what might be possible just a few years from now.

Welcome to the World of Electronic Games.



GRAND ILLUSIONS

HAVE WE DISCOVERED NOW TO MAKE INTERACTIVE FICTION INTO INTERACTIVE WORKS
OF ART?

*
We are a bit more than a decade into the interactive entertainment revolution.
Has it become an art form yet? Let's quibble and say: yes and no.

*
Yes, emphatically so, in that we're seeing increasing numbers of games that
represent a specific point of view, that encapsulate a vision of the world
particular to an individual creator.

*
To achieve a true interactive art requires the creation of new tools, new
grammars, new approaches to entertainment aesthetics. Interface design-the
search for "transparency," for a breaking down of the barriers between
electronic worlds and flesh-andblood players-is the focus of constant research,
refinement, and innovation. When we forget we have a joystick, mouse, or
keyboard at hand, we are closer to entering a work of art than playing a video
game,

*
The best contemporary interactive game designers are seeking to enhance their
illusions by deepening the relationship between player and game. On a simple
level, this involves options such as the ability to select gender and appearance
for interactive characters. More sophisticated interactive dramas give players
the opportunity to create whole detailed biographies for themselves and their
point-of-view character. Those biographies in turn affect the interactive
character's relationship with other characters, and with the electronic world of
the story. The dilemma in this approach lies in the fact that when we read a
traditional novel or watch a play or movie, we are able to step outside
ourselves, to see and learn from the example and responses of others.
Interactive fiction reflects, of necessity, our own choices, our own responses.
We play out our electronic dramas before an interactive mirror.

*
Resolving this dilemma is perhaps the most significant challenge facing our
electronic artists and storytellers. We will soon begin seeing some different
types of interactive storytelling.

*
Is it art yet? The answer is no, ambiguously so.

*
Some of the ambiguity is technological. Graphics, sound, motion: All must come
together to create a believable illusion. The goal, some feel, is interactive
fiction as striking in image and sound as motion pictures. Achievement of that
level of technology, at prices mass audiences can afford, lies no more than a
decade in the future.

*
But ambiguity flows from the creators as well. Too often game designers
undermine their accomplishment by inserting unnecessary and distracting asides
into their work, "winking" at the audience and reminding them that, after all,
it's only an electronic game. Imagine Scarlett O'Hara saying, "After all,
tomorrow is another fictional day," and you get an idea of the dimensions of the
problem.

*
Even more grotesque, we encounter too many games in which the player is
teased-or insulted-for making the wrong decision, for losing the game. It
that's the payoff, then the stakes are cheapened in retrospect. Respect for
audience is another essential aspect of art that more game designers could
acquire.

*
What's needed above all is an infusion of aesthetic inspiration from more
traditional art forms: the painting, the novel, the opera, the play, the motion
picture. Too many of our games betray the fact that their creators are schooled
primarily in other games. There are still more programmers than storytellers
making inter-active fiction. Most characters are blips on the screen rather
than fully realized beings. Until that changes, we're unlikely to see
interactive stories as memorable as their non-interactive predecessors. This is
not to say that interactive art should mimic traditional forms. Far from it.
What we're looking for is a new art form, one that learns from the past while
inventing its own future. Motion pictures, still in their first century, have
become the dominant art form of our age. Perhaps interactive art can go as far.
Perhaps, coupling the rapidly increasing power of the computer with the insights
and abilities of the artist, it can go farther.

*
Even if interactivity doesn't become our dominant art form, it can become a full
member of the artistic community. To do so, though, we must have interactive
entertainments that can be judged by the very same standards as other forms of
entertainment. Not the same criteria necessarily-times, not to mention art
forms and aesthetic expectations, do change.

*
Plot, character, insight, story ... art. These are the real worlds for our
interactive creators to explore. These are the aspects of artistic creation
that will finally propel interactive entertainment out of its infancy and into
adulthood.



VIDEO JUNKET JUNKIES

INTERACTIVE PLOT LINES ALLOW YOU TO WATCH TALES ON TV THAT YOU CAN CHANGE TO
SUIT YOURSELF

*
You whisper "Don't go in there " under your breath as the movie's main character
peers around a corner into a dark, and utterly dangerous, place. "Don't be so
stupid, " you add as insurance, as if she could hear you from the couch and
through the VCR.

*
We're stuck with what filmmakers give us. There's no way to change the action,
force the players to strike out in new directions, or alter the ending to make
it more realistic and palatable, or even more maudlin. Linear plot lines take us
from start to finish; if the director, actors, and cinematographer are good we
may forget about the real world for a couple of hours. If they're not, we can't
do much about it but walk out.

*
Home entertainment of the late Nineties may change all that and motion picture
storytelling in the process. Courtesy of the enormous storage capacity possible
by the end of the decade, we'll watch tales on the television that we can change
to suit ourselves.

*
The key doesn't lie in silicon but in crystal. New methods to store immense
amounts of digital information are now working their way through research labs,
heading for commercial and even consumer applications by the turn of the
century. By shining laser light through a photoreactive crystal, these memory
makers can record data in three-dimensional patterns of light and darkness. Such
holographic storage crystals may hold as many as a trillion bytes, enough to
fill a stack of computer discs four miles high, enough to store a feature film
in HDTV format.

*
Stuck in a cartridge no bigger than the video game cartridges that you now slide
into a game deck, holographic memory crystals are also blazing fast, retrieving
data in huge chunks, fast enough for full-motion video and film. With that much
elbowroom, innovative directors could create the first interactive films, with
multiple-and certainly intertwiningthreads of plot. Like their role-playing and
adventure computer game forebears, interactive videos will let you pick and
choose the direction, if not the outcome, of the story. At crucial plot
junctions-you never know where they are, but part of the fun is in finding
them-you can turn your character from one plot direction and into another, or
even change points of view, Shoot now or run away. Say farewell or stay.
Switch to the villain's role, or is he a villain after all? When you think
there's a diversion ahead, press the controller. Up pops a list of choices, or
a narrator's voice gives you the options.

*
This style of moviemaking demands a revolutionary change in storytelling.
Simple plots will mark the first efforts, if only because the footage needed for
the alternative tracks eats up space that might ordinarily go to complicating
the tale. Taking their cue from interactive game designers, directors and
screenwriters will build adventures that make viewers eager to assume a primary
role. Stories of suspense, mystery, crime, and fantasy will likely lead off.

*
Pornography won't be far behind.

*
Interactive videos may still have a single ending-most computer role-playing
games do now, after allbut the route you take to that ending may differ wildly
from your neighbor's.

*
Even such peripheral issues as video rentals would be affected. Since it might
take half a dozen rentals to puzzle out the entire story, you might simply buy
the thing instead. That makes sense in economic terms, too, since such films
are strictly for the home. No one will sit in a theater and put up with someone
else's choices when he can head home and watch his own mov i e.

*
In some ways, the digitization of America will let all of us become film
directors, ordering story changes and altering actors' movements. Not all movies
will be in such form-few will at first-but enough to give us a taste of the
power that people like John Huston, Orson Welles, and Steven Spielberg have
enjoyed.

*
Once we've sampled that wine, it may be a long time before we sit passively in a
darkened theater aga in.



RACK 'EM UP IN YOUR REC ROOM

BASH HEADS, BOP THROUGH MAZES, AND BARREL DOWNRACE TRACKS WITH YOUR REMOTE
CONTROL

*
The cocoon is nearly complete. Add another component or two to the rack, and
your home entertainment center will provide fantastic worlds where all rules are
off, where you decide how the story turns, where music and sound and pictures
combine to amuse you in millions of new ways. All in the comfort and safety of
your family room. No lines, no long drive, no dark corners.

*
The missing element? A computer in disguise. By the middle of the decade, no
home rec room will be finished without a black box that's part computer, part
video game machine, part compact disc player, and part telephone. Set among a
stereo receiver, high-definition television, speakers, and VCR, this box is the
brains behind home electronics.

*
Nearly a third of American homes already have its ancestor cabled to their
television sets. Nintendo, Sega, NEC, and SNK are the names on boxes today.
Tomorrow those names may be joined by Sony, Tandy, Philips, Zenith, Matsushita,
IBM, Commodore, and Apple. What seems sophisticated today-hundreds of colors,
fast-moving images, and cartridges jammed with silicon chips-will look
primordial in four years.

*
The core of tomorrow's home theater and arcade is a multimedia personal computer
that looks nothing like a PC: It's a pizza-sized box two inches thick, with no
keyboard in sight. Though it may have cut the technological edge four years
earlier, now it's simply inexpensive. Equipped with stereo sound and 256-color
graphics, this faux PC not only plays your high-end simulation-style games but
manages the entire center at the same time. It also doubles as your home PC,
linking small terminals throughout the house for office work, personal finance,
and the kids' schoolwork.

*
Touch a switch and a CD drawer slides out. No albums in here, though, but video
games on compact discs instead. Full-length sagas that set you role-playing
through dungeons or on alien planets. Murder mysteries where you're the star
detective, with unknown actors in supporting roles. Or time travel to Custer's
Little Bighorn, Nero's Rome, and Henry's Agincourt. All feature video snippets
nearly as smooth as a motion picture. You change the story at critical
junctures by pressing a few buttons on a pad that looks like a television remote
control.

*
By the late Nineties, a few daring filmmakers have ventured into interactive
cinema for the home, producing brief video CDs that can be played half a dozen
times before alternatives are exhausted. Their works sell briskly, if only
because game publishers still haven't discovered the story subtleties that
movies have honed for half a century. Your center plays these films, too, and
lets you switch viewpoints and shunt the story toward a new ending.

*
Arcade games play in the home, too. Specialized video game machines connect to
the system's central brain to play the descendants of today's driving, shooting,
and jumping games. Shove the slender credit card-sized cartridges in the video
machine, grab the same controller that you use to play CD games, and you're
bashing heads, bopping through mazes, and barreling down racetracks. Nearly all
are retreads of popular standup arcade games. In fact, you can take the flat
cartridge to the mall, play a few rounds, save your game, and then finish at
home.

*
But you don't have to play against just the computer. Your home arcade dials up
opponents by telephone. Several electronic game networks sport thousands of
subscribers, who visit waiting areas and challenge others to one-on-one or
multi-player bouts. In a matter of moments you can assemble enough on-line
players to outfit a flight of jets or link up with a friend down the block or
across town for some two-player football. In some cities you can even dial an
arcade and play head-to-head against almost any machine. Your opponent may be
dropping in dollars, but you're only paying for the call.

*
The home amusement cocoon of 1995 can compete against most outside
entertainment, whether movies or music, because nothing stacks up against the
make-believe un iverse you can create with computer and video games. The
fastest-growing art form of the decade-one that attracts emigrants from film,
animation, and fiction-games are ready to take on the twenty-first century. Are
you?



THE ELECTRIC BODY POLITIC

YOU AND YOUR TELEVISION BECOME STRANGE BEDFELLOWS IN THE DIPLOMATIC GAMES
PEOPLE PLAY

*
If politics makes strange bedfellows, then computers are drawing up the sheets.
Already used by pundits and pollsters, politicians and their parties, computers
tell us who's on first, point out the crucial issues, and call elections long
before the last vote's cast. Why not put them to some good use and have them
turn politics into a real entertainment form?

*
Re-creating politics on your home amusement system won't be easy. Distilling
political science to a set of computer algorithms is notoriously difficult,
especially if you expect everyone to agree with your assumptions.

*
But game designers have probed the body politic with works that reduced detente
to a dangerous two-step and shrank banana republic machinations to a three-way
toss-up between left, moderate, and right. By the middle of the decade,
political simulations will be more sophisticated, if no less opinionated.

*
Few things match the feeding frenzy of American presidential elections for
comedy, drama, and deceit. Putting that on your home television screen-with you
able to decide the next step or plan the next campaign-may reduce our politics
to a simplified version of reality, but then, isn't that what television does
already? By the 1996 election, you'll be able to play along at home, courtesy of
some smart game designer. You'll get the basics, from fund-raising to buying TV
time, but you'll also have the freedom to make it up as you go along. Want to
smear the opposition with a timely leak about an extramarital affair? Want to
hit back with allegations of draft dodging? Go ahead, it's just a game. A great
roleplaying game.

*
Or you can fry larger fish and take on the New World Order electronic
construction set. The Soviet Union may have dissolved like so much Wicked
Witch, but you've still got foreign aid to hand out, Third World wars to fight,
and natural resources to retain. Before you set your home entertainment
center's CD spinning, you pull down the latest game stats and formulas from the
publisher's computer so that you start playing from today, not yesterday. You
can even save the game, post your positions and predictions for all to see, and
hope the real news matches yours in a month or two. Imagine-millions of
political experts prognosticating about future turns of events. We might
discover that we know as much as the talking heads on CNN.

*
We may even turn into a country of peacemakers. Tranquillity in the Middle East
may have eluded nine presidents, but maybe you can do a better job. Using
advanced artificial intelligence, a computer game could put you in the shoes of
the secretary-general of the United Nations, bargaining and negotiating with the
computerized rulers of Israel, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and every other player
in the world's worst flash point. Threaten sanctions and Saddam's evil
electronic twin may laugh in your face. Offer land for peace at the right price
and the computer Israelis may give you the nod.

*
Coups and revolutions can come home, too. Video and computer games will
recreate the dissolution of the USSR and its eventual reconstruction as the
Soviet Republic. Everything from the 1991 coup and economic rebirth to possible
civil war and anarchy will chart a course on your TV screen. It may not be
history, but it'll be grand entertainment.

*
Future politics would work just as well. What if the United States fractures
along Balkanized lines? Does the federal government go to war a second time to
hold the Union together? In a computer re-creation you can find out without
harming a soul. Space civics can be just as enlightening. In a solar system
where Mars and the moon have been colonized and Jupiter's satellites explored
and exploited, what will be the burning political issues? At your home
entertainment center, you can dabble in treaties, boycotts, and blockades on an
interplanetary scale. But why stop there? Most science-fiction games are simple
excuses for arcade shoot-'em-ups. Why not make real aliens with cultures so ...
so alien ... that just communicating is a chore? Add conflict and you've got the
perfect mix for stellar diplomacy.

*
Games like these have the potential for entertainment as well as education. If
we find it hard to w in in a computer or video political game, we may develop
sympathy for the real politicos. Or pay a bit more attention to what they're
really doing.

*
It may be the best thing that ever happened to politics.



WORLDS OF WONDER

SPEND THE DAY SAILING WITH COLUMBUS, FROLICKING WITH A TYRANNOSAUR, OR CHASING
AMERICA'S MOST WANTED

*
You're never too old to play pretend. Everyone likes to lose himself, and a few
hours, in the imagination of a moviemaker or writer. Pretend play lets us step
outside the mundane and practical into the exciting and impossible. No little
surprise, then, that one of the most popular ways to play with a computer is
through worlds of make-believe.

*
Simulations, as these recreations are often called, already reproduce the
intricate workings of an ant colony, a city, even the entire planet. But as
computer and video game machines power up in the next few years, expect
simulations to follow suit, bringing even more impressive realities to your
television screen.

*
Historical replicas, long a mainstay of computer simulations, will take on new
dimensions. Though military simulations will continue to draw an audience,
those with more direct learning connections will find a place on more home
entertainment systems. You and your kids will be able to retrace the steps of
the most famous explorers. Retouched video returns the scenery to its pristine
state, while period maps and professional narrators provide color and
commentary. The experience-whether you're alongside Lewis and Clark, Sir
Richard Burton, Columbus, or Cortes-puts you in charge, lets you make the
decisions from start to finish, and makes you live with the consequences. Can
you take MagelIan's place and still circumnavigate the globe? What would it take
for you, as Robert Scott, to beat Amundsen to the South Pole?

*
Nature, too, can be confined to the safety of the home arcade of the
mid-Nineties. First to appear will be sophisticated weather models. Just as
current simulations let you mess around with cities, these programs will let you
play with the climate. Create cold fronts and send them barreling out of
Canada. Mix air masses over the Mississippi and watch tornadoes form over the
Plains. Hurricanes, too, are just a key press away. Form them from tropical
depressions, and by adding just a touch more heat to the ocean waters, turn them
into raging monsters that eat up the Atlantic seaboard.

*
Astrophysics is beyond most of us, but we'd love to build black holes, make
stars go nova, or put two galaxies on a collision course. Super space
simulations make it possible. Simulating science fiction may seem like a
contradiction-after all, SF isn't even real-but it'll draw players, too.
Imagine an in-depth treatment of planetary exploration, with extras from sensor
scan interpretations and orbital observations to landfall and the inevitable
search for life. Each new planet or system in the series would be released on a
new compact disc or cartridge for a neverending simulation.

*
Why stop at alien worlds? Why not mimic life with your computerized amusement
park? Some programs will take the broad approach and let you guide life as it
develops from single-cell creatures to intelligence. Others put you in the
shoes-or paws or claws-of specific creatures to see if you can survive the laws
of the jungle.

*
Try out a tyrannosaur for size, for instance, to see what it took to keep the
tyrant lizard on his feet.

*
More simulations-all as much fun as educational-will follow. Medicine won't be
as mysterious once you have piloted a white blood cell through the bloodstream.
Enhanced by actual footage from fiberoptic probes through arteries, veins, and
the heart, your home arcade will add monstrous microscopic invaders, herds of
corpuscles, and enough current to really toss you around the body.

*
Criminology is within the grasp of even the rankest detective when the computer
or video machine lends a hand. Crimes-some based on real-life cases-are up for
grabs. Using the homicide squad's tools of fiber matching, fingerprinting, DNA
examination, witness reports, and the like, you have a chance to crack the case.
It's even possible to put unsolved crimes on disc to turn millions into amateur
investigators.

*
Scores of other worlds may turn up on your home entertainment system. Almost
anything can be condensed to the size of a compact disc or cartridge, though
lots may get lost in the translation. Nuclear power plant management, empire
building from Caesar to Victor ia and even archaeology can be distilled to the
small screen. Add a bit of drama and render the re-creation in near
photographic fashion with lots of sound effects, voice-overs, and period music,
and you have an interactive experience that's impossible to really live through.

*
But you'll want to try.