Future Shocks

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Stately, plump Cyberswine gazes out across a cartoon world, ready to kick some serious toon butt. Cyberswine is both the name and the protagonist of a full-length animated movie, "Part machine. Part cop. Full boar," according to the trailer. You won't find it (him) on film, though--the movie is 100% digital bits, burned onto CD-ROMS and downloadable from the Net, and now showing at a computer near you.

This is not just old pork cooked up in a new kitchen, however. Cyberswine, produced by Los Angeles-based Brilliant Digital Entertainment, is one of the first "Multipath Movies"--animated stories that let the viewer direct the action. You get to stroll down a narrative path of your choosing: stick with Cyberswine, or peel off and follow the action from the perspective of one of his pals. Don't dig the pig's vibes? Click on an icon in the corner of the screen, and tweak his character to make him more clever, anxious, aggressive or caring. You can also change the camera angle. Or not--one of the options in a Multipath Movie is to just say no to interactivity: you can sit back and watch.

But just watching...that's s-o-o Bi-Millennial, don't you think? We're about to close a century in which two of the biggest advancements in entertainment--movies and television--defined the passive, couch-potato experience. The future promises to liberate us from the tyranny of artists who would suck us into the swirling maw of their moving pictures, music and books. If we can extrapolate from cybercave-wall stuff like Cyberswine, the next thousand years of storytelling will put us in the director's seat. The descendants of video games, interactive TV, online environments like MUDs and MOOs (where Net folks cavort in text-based worlds) and hypertext will vest the power to create in the viewers' hands.

It's already happening, albeit in the crudest of ways. Boot up a computer program called the Axe, for instance, and you can jam along with Stevie Wonder's hit song Superstition. "Anyone can play music and have a really satisfying experience," says Eran Egozy, co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., software company specializing in "jamware." By moving your mouse around on a compass-like grid, you can play faster, slower, higher and lower notes--but never out of tune. "You're always in time, in key and playing the right notes," says Egozy, who admits that, mellifluous as it is, "it's not John Coltrane." Still, like flight simulators that let you pilot a jumbo jet, Harmonix's music simulator, he says, "takes the hard part away from music, the mechanical part. We're giving you the fun of it without having to work for it." Who says you have to suffer if you want to sing the blues?

Or consider the completely nonlinear narrative of your average shoot-'em-up "twitch" game, such as Quake II or Tomb Raider. (Twitch games test reflexes rather than brains.) Players are dropped down in a game and proceed, level by level, learning the skills they need to survive in this new place and acquiring knowledge that leads them to the end, to closure that is as satisfying and complete as the epilogue to a 500-page thriller. Why watch The Terminator when you can be the Terminator, tapping into your own fight-or-flight feedback loop and blasting and stun-gunning your way to the happily ever after? Imagine when more cerebral entertainments such as Riven (the sequel to the best-selling CD-ROM game Myst) are the program equals of TV. Instead of sitting back and watching the Seinfeld characters interact with one another, you could hang out with them. Follow Kramer around until you get bored, then hook up with George.

Artists too will emerge stronger and better in the 2K Millennium. Entertainment in this century has been mass-produced and broadcast, rigidly controlled and protected. Media have centralized into the hands of the few; Hollywood studios, television networks and recording companies carefully distribute the stuff, cranking out a relatively modest amount of material that will be seen by everyone on the globe. But in the next century anyone will be able to create a movie, music, literature, a magazine or a video game and distribute it as bits over the network to billions. At least in theory. Brilliant Digital is marketing a developers' tool kit that makes it relatively simple to cobble together your own interactive cartoons. "You don't need any programming experience," insists Cheri Grand, a company spokeswoman. "I could create a Heather Locklear character, animate her and do whatever I want with her." Traditional Hollywood studios, she notes, have lots of overhead and immense production costs. "Not us. Everything is done inside the computer." Deus ex machina. Amen.

For people who have one, the computer has already shown itself to be the great equalizer, the final flattener, making all of us the creator and the created. With every advance in technology, art and entertainment--its cuter, more popular sister--change in radical, unpredictable ways. And at each turn they become more democratic, more accessible. The printing press starts with Bibles and ends up with pulp fiction. Radio popularizes rock 'n' roll. TV spawns the sitcom. Now consider the possibilities that will open up as the computer meets the Net--not the network of today, with piddly, slow connections that are mainly good for relaying e-mail. But the Net of a hundred years from now, when media can move at the speed of light.

Perhaps all the newfound interactivity will work on our brains in more salutary ways. This is your brain on TV. And this is your brain on "Very Distributed Storytelling," as one futuristic project is called at M.I.T.'s Media Lab. Any questions?

Plenty. Lots of people like just watching. The road to interactive entertainment has been rockier than a walk in a quarry, and with good reason. Who wants to cook when you can eat at a four-star restaurant? Entertainment should be...entertaining! Not work. And who wants to wade through all the awful stuff that's certain to crowd out the brilliance? Attempts at forging serious art from random accessibility have been interesting in an experimental way. But not accessible in a random kind of way.

"There is no popular need right now for multimedia. That's obvious," sighs Michael Joyce, the father of hypertext fiction--nonlinear storytelling in which plot lines unfold in different ways upon subsequent readings. Joyce, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, wrote the "classic" hypertext novel, afternoon, a story. The piece is told one screenful of text at a time; by clicking on adjectives and verbs, readers veer off in far-flung narrative directions. While this may sound like the same experience as following hypertext links around the World Wide Web, afternoon was written in 1987 and distributed on floppy disks--well before the Web opened its portals.

Curiously, rather than being a boon to the nascent hypertext-fiction movement, the Web is seen as a spoiler: "The regrettable rump faction says we lost the hypertext movement when the Web came along," says Joyce. "No one knows yet how to make this a popular medium." Why? "The Web is all edges and without much depth, and for a writer that is trouble," he says.

But Joyce, who nevertheless created his own Web-based novel, Twelve Blue, is not discouraged. He believes the forking paths of computer narrative will help some artist somewhere create a new medium that is truer to life than anything that's come before: "People have a complex sense of their own lives, which isn't often accounted for in popular art--they're capable of very complex relationships. New media have to be faulted--ironically!--for the failure to express that complexity."

Joyce believes, though, that the artistic failures that litter the cybserscape are good, a hopeful sign. Art, after all, is not produced easily or without struggle, even in the digital age. "We're very close to some shared moment, a transformative medium," he insists. In other words, something big is happening. We'll know it when we see it.

Senior writer Joshua Quittner is editor of TIME Daily, the on-line news service