Collected Essays (39 page)

Will—somehow you can’t call this guy by his last name—gives a great talk. First thought on seeing him come out: what a geek. Hawaiian shirt, a Charlie Chaplin mustache, skin so bad you can tell from thirty rows back, lank dirty hair. There’s a big screen behind him that shows his head and screens on either side showing slides of his Power Point slides. I should mention that everyone but everyone uses Power Point nowadays, slides that are inside their portable computer and which come out on the video projector.

Will talks about Christopher Alexander’s book,
A Pattern Language
, a chunky old $60 tome from Oxford University Press. Everyone keeps hyping this book to me, I gotta check it out. It’s one of the inspirations for the biggest new buzz in the software engineering community: Software Patterns. Will talks about the patterns of Hierarchy, Network, Landscape. He has a good line about makes a good user interface. “A user interface isn’t done until there’s nothing left to remove.”

As a complete non-sequitur he throws in a slide of some woolly animal and says, “The Vicuna is a relative of the Llama.” Inside joke: Wright’s business card calls him “High Llama,” as in Dali Lama.

He starts showing some of the “stories” people have made up with their Sims. Like kids having stories about their Barbies or G. I. Joes, except now they’re in computer form. There are sites where you can get “skins” to make your Sims look however you like, e.g. you can dress them in bondage outfits or in spring break ski vacation outfits. Will shows a story where some kids are in a ski lodge and one of them dies and they hide the body inside a snowman. He dreams of having computer software to recognize a developing story and help along by, perhaps, putting in obstacles to the goal so that the story gets more complex.

It’s all good, but after awhile I can’t listen to any more talks. I go to see a demo reel of some of the best visuals from this year’s games. A Chinese girl in a grotty tenement. It’s high time for the Chinese to be cyberpunk like the Japanese. Forget about all the historical stuff, get with the Western program, yes! It’ll come. Now the reel shows gothic devils by a lake of lava. A man in a top hat, ah, the wonderful sinister quality of a top hat. Creatures with three legs, I notice a number of these in different people’s games. “I dare to dream of three legs!” Laser beams with hoops of emphasis around the beam. A cartoon world with a woman who gets out of a coffin, like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, and she has the biggest, pointiest breasts I’ve ever seen, bigger even than Jessica Rabbit’s. Man, I’d like to see
her
triangle! For the rest of the conference I’m looking for this game, but I can’t find it. Then the reel shows a hooded man in the rain, it’s a Japanese game with long credit sequence like a Noir movie. The game is called Metal Gear Solid, terrific Japanese-style name, the way they always get the words in slightly the wrong order. The reel shows a world called Exmachina with cool funky dirigibles and a screaming fat woman with blue pig-tails. “I dare to dream of blue pig-tails!”

There’s also a reel of demos from a European movement called the Demo Scene. These are small executables that produce images and sounds. They try for 64K exe size. Seem to be written in BASIC, my dear. Shocking. They’re like loops you’d see in a European disco. The programmers have names like KKowboy, The Popsy Team, and Byter. The demos are weak, but it’s always great to see high-tech stuff get out on the street.

Time to hit the Expo Hall. First thing I notice is that most booths are giving away toys. The developers call it “schwag.” There’s Slinkies, clackers, Hacky Sacks and, ah, Silly Putty. I get five green Silly Putties from Nvidia. I’ve always wanted enough Silly Putties to completely fill up the plastic egg it comes in. My egg is so full it bounces when I drop it. Tactile feed-back.

There’s some pretty odd game add-on equipment in the lesser-frequented booths. Plastic sheets to lay over your keyboard in case you can’t remember the fifty or a hundred possible key commands. A quarter-dome of white cloth with colored lights inside it; the lights supposedly flash in synch with the events of your game, like red for an explosion or yellow when you shoot your gun. I’m already overloading on the shooting all around me. Your gun, your gun, your gun.

There’s virtual tactile-feed-back to be had. A company has a joystick with a motor in its base so it can push back. The screen shows a ball on a trampoline. As you wiggle the stick you feel the trampoline sag, give, then pitch the ball up. And the stick slams back when the ball comes down.

The worst product of all is from digiSCENTS(TM) with the iSmell(TM) technology, a little humidifier-like thing that sits by your computer and pulses out a waft of scent in synch with your game. They have the most impressive booth-bunnies in the whole hall, women in skunk suits with big implanted boobs. But it’s not enough to make any rational developer or gamer want to touch this product. So far as I can tell, the product hasn’t actually been synched to any real game, I think they’re still looking for more funding. A guy gives me a demo where you’re playing Doom. The shot-gun blasts smell like, he claims, daffodil, the extra bullets like wintergreen, the enemies like butterscotch, but really all you feel is the wind of the puffs of air. Surely this guy must know that his company is doomed.

I have a momentary wave of revulsion. Virtual Reality is alive and well here, but it’s being used for such crappy purposes. It’s like having a million dollar synthesizer and playing Whitney Houston songs. One guy is demoing a design program in which he’s produced a best called Bubba. Bubba has eighteen thousand triangles and has surfaces made up of these very cool mathematical functions called NURBs. But Bubba’s a completely shitty and moronic looking monster, like Disney at his generic worst. NURBs and eighteen thousand triangles to be just as stupid as ever.

I calm down by watching a Microsoft demo of the software compiler they’re calling VisualStudio.NET, also known as Visual Studio 7.0. To the palpable relief of the programmers around me, version 7.0 looks very much like the version 6.0 that we’ve all been using for the last two years. One never knows when Microsoft is going to choose to fuck one over with their latest Brave New World of compatibility issues.

Above the Microsoft demo area is a giant poster, a banner really, of a guy with a nose ring and a Maltese Cross piercing in his tongue, his mouth open screaming, this is for their DirectX software library. How odd to think that this is how one of the world’s largest companies sells tools to serious programmers! How far we’ve come from the suit-and-tie company-men of the 1950s.

I cruise the Expo Hall a lot more over the coming days and I begin to have more and more fun. I watch some developers playing the demo games set up. One is a Japanese game called Jet Grind Radio about skater painting graffiti. Amazingly antisocial. I talk to the guy playing with it. “I like how they make it look like cels,” he says. “Each figure has a thick dark line around it like in a cartoon.” Another game being played is Samba Amigo, with an interface that is, yes, a pair of maracas. “That’s the most brain-dead game I’ve ever seen,” I say to a developer. “Yeah, but it’s awesome,” he said. “I’ve been playing it a lot.” The game is to shake the maracas in patterns indicated by circles that have dots appearing in them, you follow the dots. In the background is an endless procession of colorful shapes, like a three-day ecstasy trip or something, hot-dogs in serapes, grinning amigos, cute computer-graphics girls with huge spherical boobs.

I meet some Irish guys from a company called Havok who have a physics package for games, it basically solves spring equations and the like in real-time so that you can have bouncing hair, flapping cloth, and spinning rocks with accurate collisions. This used to be supercomputer Virtual Reality, and now it’s a plug-in package for game developers. They’re asking a pretty penny, though, $75K for the full game developer’s kit. Oddly enough, Havok’s biggest competitor is a company called Karma out of Oxford University. Back in the Old World, they really teach students something.

Sony is there with a pen full of Aibos, their robot dog. I reach in and snap my fingers, an Aibo comes over and sniffs me, I pet its head, it sits back on its haunches and whines, I’m in love. A Japanese programmer shows me something that looks like a videocassette with little levers in its sides. In his broken English he is giving me to understand that this cassette-sized box is the inner hardware of the Aibo, and that I could develop my own shell to put onto the box, Sony is looking to license to developers. I have a flash of a world in which all the creatures and people I interact with are in fact armatures of triangle meshes tacked onto these Sony boxes. Someday the meshes disappear, and my office-mate at school is revealed to be a black box with levers sticking out of it. The triangles are scattered across our office floor. “Are you Jon Pearce?” I say to the box, and the lever in front goes up and down nodding yes.

I keep walking around the Expo hall, more and more into it. I’m better able to see things now, with familiarity it’s less of an overwhelming jangle. One thing I totally notice is that they have some women dressed in black up on stages dancing, two different stages. Each women has reflective beads attached to her cat-suit, maybe fifty of them. Around the stage are computer monitors showing realtime moving wireframe models of the girls. The almost-all-male developers are interested in this, both in the dancing women and in the moving wireframe models. We hardly know which to stare at the most.

I listen to the presentation at the Vicom Motion Capture stage. Around the stage are eighteen megapixel digital video cameras shooting 25 frames per second. The dancer is Megan. She has dark lips, a perky smile, a messy pinned-up ponytail that’s in the wireframe models as well. She yawns, dances, poses while the pitchman talks. She’s as ceaselessly active as the tendrils of a sea anemone. She leans, the epitome of grace, on the partition separating the stage from the pit where two programmers sit running programs to clothe her wireframe bod in rendered triangles. She has one arm akimbo. What a gulf between this live California girl and the programmers thinking about how best to “spend their triangles” on her rendering. She disappears off-stage for a few minutes and when she comes back, she holds out her arms to be recalibrated because, the British-accented announcer brays, “Megan’s just gone to the bathroom.” She makes cute, outraged protests. The developers are keenly interested in this information about the presumed state of Megan’s triangle.

At the tail end of the conference, I catch a talk by Michael Abrash, who’s working on the Microsoft Xbox, a ballyhooed new gaming platform on the horizon. It has Nvidia graphics hardware. Abrash has been testing it for a year. He’s a super-programmer, the co-author of the classic first-person shooter game Quake. The hall is filled shoulder-to-shoulder with hardcore techie game developers, maybe a thousand of them, there’s not a single woman in view, not so much one single triangle of femininity as far as I can see. Abrash lets loose like a fire hose. A complete geek info-spew. The Xbox is to deliver 125 million triangles per second! All this to draw Megan’s arm akimbo. After his talk Abrash is besieged by questioners, they’re like dogs fighting over a piece of meat, which is Abrash’s brain. Being under a Microsoft Non-Disclosure Agreement—and you can imagine what
that
must be like—he can’t give them as much as he’d like to.

As it turns out, I’m having dinner with Abrash, along with two of his Microsoft cohorts. They want to pick
my
brain about wild computer-science ideas for video games.

On the way to meet them at the restaurant I stop in at St. Joseph’s cathedral. A humble party of working-class San Jose locals is gathered there, one of the church officials is prepping them for a wedding they’re going to have at noon tomorrow. The richness of this space, the murals, the dimensionality. The grains of the wood and the marble. The humanity of the people in the wedding party. Will the geeks of a hundred years from now be volumetrically modeling wood and character animating better sims of people? Why, why, why?

At dinner, Abrash is brilliant and intense, a man looking for another big score. I make some suggestions about videogame things I’d like to see. Having just finished writing a novel about the fourth dimension, I’m particularly eager to see a four-dimensional videogame. The glass screen of your computer could as easily look onto a simulation of hyperspace as onto a simulation of regular space. Abrash is resisting this, though, he’s more attracted by the siren song of Cellular Automata, which are a wondrously gnarly precursor of Artificial Life. I happen to have some opinions about this too; it’s great to be talking to someone who might actually do something with them. An undulating surfscape made of continuous-valued Cellular Automata—now
that
would be worth spending your triangles on!

All in all, the Game Developers Conference was a vastly energizing experience, like a brief immersion in a floating university. These guys totally get the old-time hot-rodding aspect of what computers are for. They’re not for delivering groceries, for God’s sake. They’re for speeding like hell to places nobody’s ever seen.

Note on “Spending Your Triangles”

Written September, 2001.

Appeared in a zine called
Ylem
.

At this time I was teaching a Software Engineering class at San Jose State where I had my students to large projects where they’d create computer games using a software framework that I’d created. My notes and for this class eventually became a textbook,
Software Engineering and Computer Games
(Addison-Wesley, 2002).

The annual Game Developers Conference was often held in the San Jose, and I enjoyed going to it to pick up ideas for my class. I’d hoped to sell this article to
Wired
, but it didn’t make the cut, so I ended up giving it to a nice guy called Loren Means to put in his art/science zine
Ylem
.

The Rudy Set Fractal