Introduction to the conference

I'd like to start off this conference by talking a little bit about games, particularly video games, because I think there's a lot of instructive lessons to learn from the state of the video game world right now when it comes to convergence and the collision between different media. There's an old adage that some of you probably know, which is that early technologies are first explored and adopted by the porn industry, whatever state it's in, from the printing press, all the way to the VCR. And I think that in the case of interactive design that there might be a slight twist to it, which is that the game world tends to be the area that embraces the most far-reaching or adventurous or experimental interfaces. And there's a lot to be learned by literally looking at what the kids are doing-although, of course, it's not just kids anymore playing these things.

I'm trying to make the argument here that interactive design often follows the lead of the gaming world-and the gaming world is, in fact, where the collision that we're going to be talking about this week is most apparent and most real. So my question is really-what does it look like? What are the forms that have developed to deal with this collision and deal with it in a way that's compelling and interesting? One of the ways to think about this is to ask: what are the distinctive icons in a given moment of time, of cultural or technological history? Any time that cultures and technologies collide, you'll find things popping up that really stand for that particular moment in time that have a kind of historical stamp to them.

One example of this, I think, would be just the sound of guitar feedback in the 60's-a particularly interesting collision of technology and culture. And so are, in a certain sense, the MTV video style of the 80's and early 90's and all of the things that came out of that. Both of those technologies and cultural artifacts really represent those moments in time. So, I guess my question is really, are there comparable things that have come out of the video game world that we can look at and learn from? Already, I think we've had a few over the last twenty or thirty years or so, dating back to the old Space Invaders. And I've actually found that there's a startling subculture out there of classic video games that are running on emulators-basically, the entire of the prehistory, or the early history of the genre is there on the web.

So we started kind of with Space Invaders and the inexorable march downward, and about in about twelve or thirteen years we've moved to something like this, which is a shot from the first version of Myst. Now Myst was a very interesting moment, and I wrote about it a little bit in my book, Interface Culture. I think it's a good example of something that we've moved beyond-but it's worth pausing for a second to stop and look at what its implications were.

Myst and the videogame space
Myst, I think, defined the last generation and the last paradigm of video game culture in that it placed a huge amount of emphasis on environments rather than storytelling. In my book I talk a little about this review of Myst that came out in the Washington Post that was written by one of their book critics, who had basically heard about Myst as being the Ulysses of CD-ROM, which was a little bit of an overstatement. He'd gone out to play the game, but to play it and evaluate it as a literary critic and not as a game player. What he came back with was basically arguing that there's no real story here, the characters are two-dimensional-they barely show up at all. There really aren't that many people in this world, and when they do show up, they're little grainy images speaking inexplicably with that fake British accent of all video game acting. He said that this was nothing like Ulysses; Ulysses has tremendous psychological depth and emotional intricate-and this thing is incredibly flat.

It was a very interesting thing, because I think that he precisely missed the point of what these new forms were all about. When you talk to kids playing Myst or something like Mario 64, there is a kind of vestigial storyline there that they are technically following-most of them involve some kind of princess who's been taken away somewhere and who they have to rescue. But nobody interacts with these games thinking about narratives. Nobody sits there thinking-"Oh, I have to get to the next chapter so that I can find out what happens to the evil wizard." They think, "Oh, I need to get to the next level because the next level is going to be a very interesting space to explore. There's going to be an interesting environment there that I'll be able to walk around in and run through." And there's something in that immersive experience that is very fascinating and pulls you in.

So Myst, even though it wasn't real-time rendered, was one of the first places where we had an immersive world that was very vivid and was as interesting to explore as anything else we'd really seen on the screen. So, in that sense, the art of this culture is really closer to architecture than it is to traditional storytelling or novel-writing. You're not asking an office building to have interesting psychological depth-the same kinds of questions probably shouldn't be asked of games. The question is: is the space interesting? Does it do something new?

The new generation
That was the old iconography. The question that I want to throw out is: what are the icons and the shorthand symbols of the new culture, circa 2000? I think that, particularly when you listen to a lot of people talk about the game world in its current state, who would think that the answer to that question is this: [Quake 3].

You enter into this strange, fiery mouth and show up out here and find your gun. This is presumably what most people will say is the first-person shooter genre, roaming at high-speed through some kind of cavernous space and shooting at things. This has been (since Doom and a few games before that) one of the genres that has gotten a tremendous amount of attention. I would argue that we are moving beyond that; in fact, Quake is really a kind of high-speed super-violent version of Myst's exploratory, immersive spaces. Something new, and really interesting and profound, is coming to take its place. So I would argue (and this is technically not a video game) that the icon of the current video game culture, and increasingly the interactive culture, looks like this.

This is a program called Starlogo. This is a very basic program-a variation of the classic programming language Logo. It's a program that allows you to model decentralized, self-organizing systems-systems in which you have many little agents scurrying around doing very basic things and interacting with other agents that they encounter in the landscape. This is all done in very basic ways, but there are many of them at the same time. A great example of this is an ant colony in which you have ten thousand ants, all of them relatively stupid, all of them communicating with each other using relatively simple languages, but who are somehow able to-given the tremendous number of them-to solve immense and very nuanced problems on the level of the colony itself. It's what's called swarm logic: the ability of lots of little agents to collectively come up with solutions to problems, whether it's foraging, or figuring out how to build a food assembly line or a nest. This is a program that simulates how bees form honeycombs. So, these little red guys are all bees moving around and following a very basic set of rules, and out of that process, a honeycomb emerges.

Emergent software
This is an example of what I'm calling emergent software. The intelligence for a system like this comes from feedback networks linking thousands of individual agents; an individual unit looks around at what its neighbors are doing and changes its behavior accordingly. It creates an environment where you're growing things rather than exploring or shooting. It's closer to the way that neighborhoods form in cities. It's a system that learns and evolves-it's not programmed, in a sense, from above, but slowly, from the bottom up, develops personality and shape and structure. It happens that the very software that powers something like Starlogo (and there are thousands of other versions of Starlogo out there that simulate ant colonies, the way slime molds form, the way that cities form, the way that traffic patterns form), the underlying technology behind that is the same technology that powers things like SimCity.

SimCity is, in fact, the most popular example of emergence software pushed in the direction of entertainment. In SimCity, you're given a cell, which is a block. The cell looks at the other cells around it and evaluates their state in terms of their crime rate, or land value, or pollution levels-and changes its state accordingly. It's a very basic set of rules, but if you have enough cells, if you have enough blocks in the system, very lifelike, organic behavior starts to ripple out. You start developing cities that seem to have a life of their own.

More recently, we've seen the same type of technology, the same kind of emergent, bottom-up growing rather than exploring, explored in a very successful game right now: The Sims. You have a bird's eye view of some characters, and you look in through their rooftops. You can see them fighting and interacting. They will go to the bathroom and take showers, although you get pixilated out when people are naked. They're very adorable and a tremendous waste of time.

If you'd gone back ten or fifteen years and said, "We're going to have a video game that will simulate the growing up of a suburban neighborhood, family life in a house with kids, and interaction with neighbors," we would have imagined it in first person, much closer to a sitcom. We would have said that the technology was going to advance, that we would have multimedia and real-time streaming video, and we would build a game around a suburban family. I guarantee that we would have seen it in terms of having a single character and getting to choose that character's actions, because we were still in an interactive paradigm that was building off of what we'd known from television up until that point.

But these games-called god games, because you're looking down from above and controlling the city or the people-are something very different. You're not really playing a character and you're not existing on the same level as the other characters; you're looking down on this entire system and letting it grow and evolve in various different ways.

Incomplete control
What's interesting about this, I think, is that this control over the system is very indirect. If you could just make all of your characters happy instantly, if you could just turn every city into a thriving metropolis that looks exactly how you want it to look, the games wouldn't be fun. The fun comes from the resistance, from the lack of total control, and from the fact that you have to try things out. In The Sims, you send people off to get educated, or you have them try a new job, or you have them work out so that they can get that career as a football star. But you can't just immediately will them into a certain existence, you have to let the whole process evolve. In a way, this is the opposite of something like Quake, which is about total command, where you're going around killing things and the best players are the ones that control the entire space. SimCity and The Sims and other god games are much more oblique, kind of like growing a garden. You can set up the right conditions, the right environment for something to happen, but you have to wait and watch.

The most telling thing in The Sims is that there's a little control panel that comes up that includes a bunch a basic routines for changing the graphics, and whether the screens scrolls automatically in you move the cursor to the far right or the far left, but there's also a little control that you can toggle on and off called free will. If you don't have free will toggled, your Sims will just wait there for you to tell them what to do. Literally. They won't do anything, they won't go to the bathroom-they'll just stand there in increasing amounts of pain until you direct them and tell them where the toilet is. And the game just isn't fun that way; what makes it fun is that the characters are autonomous to some extent, and you are a semi-impotent god and you can push them in different directions, but you aren't completely in control.

The rise of the god game
Now, what's striking about this is that this is fundamentally unlike any other kinds of narratives that we've grown up with through media, although it is a little like a dollhouse to some extent, so maybe it's getting back to things that predate contemporary media. But these things, despite what you would hear any time you pick up Time or Newsweek and they have a big story about violence in video games, these games are not the critical successes that are sitting out there having a modest run and that all of the game critics and technology commentators love but nobody actually plays. In fact, if you look at the top ten list right now, as of last month The Sims was number one. Then there was: Roller Coaster Tycoon, which is slightly younger, but also a god game; Age of Empires, which is a larger, more ambitious god game; and SimCity 3000. All of those games are in the top ten. There was only one violent first-person shooter game, Quake 3, and that was at eight, or something like that. So these are the games that are both incredibly interesting as formal devices in terms of the way that they've pushed the genre in a completely new direction, and they're also huge commercial successes. Anytime you have a confluence of critical innovation and commercial success, it's time to take notice and to think about how this has come about.

So, what I'd like to leave you with is this idea of a three-way collision that's going on right now in the world of interactivity. There's user-interactivity, which is the user participating. This is something we've seen for a long time, we've seen more and more involvement where people can click and drag and point and get involved with what's going on on the screen. That's a huge advance, but we've been living with it for a while. We have much more advanced multi-media, with full-screen images and sound, much more immersive environments. But at the same time, these kind of learning networks, these emergent software programs that can grow and evolve and behave in much more lifelike and organic ways. That, I think, is the third component here, and the collision of all three of these things is going to be something to behold.