Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com
Literary Freeware -- Not For Commercial Use
Game conference speech: "The Wonderful Power of
Storytelling"
From the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991,
San Jose CA
Thank you very much for that introduction. I'd like
to thank the conference committee for their hospitality
and kindness -- all the cola you can drink -- and mind
you those were genuine twinkies too, none of those
newfangled "Twinkies Lite" we've been seeing too much of
lately.
So anyway my name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science
fiction writer from Austin Texas, and I'm here to deliver
my speech now, which I like to call "The Wonderful Power
of Storytelling." I like to call it that, because I plan
to make brutal fun of that whole idea... In fact I plan
to flame on just any moment now, I plan to cut loose, I
plan to wound and scald tonight.... Because why not,
right? I mean, we're all adults, we're all professionals
here... I mean, professionals in totally different arts,
but you know, I can sense a certain simpatico vibe....
Actually I feel kind of like a mosasaur talking to
dolphins here.... We have a lot in common, we both swim,
we both have big sharp teeth, we both eat fish... But you
look like a broadminded crowd, so I'm sure you won't mind
that I'm basically, like, *reptilian*....
So anyway, you're probably wondering why I'm here
tonight, some hopeless dipshit literary author... and
when am I going to get started on the virtues and merits
of the prose medium and its goddamned wonderful
storytelling. I mean, what else can I talk about? What
the hell do I know about game design? I don't even know
that the most lucrative target machine today is an IBM PC
clone with a 16 bit 8088 running at 5 MHZ. If you start
talking about depth of play versus presentation, I'm just
gonna to stare at you with blank incomprehension....
I'll tell you straight out why I'm here tonight.
Why should I even try to hide the sordid truth from a
crowd this perspicacious.... You see, six months ago I
was in Austria at this Electronic Arts Festival, which was
a situation almost as unlikely as this one, and my wife
Nancy and I are sitting there with William Gibson and Deb
Gibson feeling very cool and rather jetlagged and crispy
around the edges, and in walks this *woman.* Out of
nowhere. Like J. Random Attractive Redhead, right. And
she sits down with her coffeecup right at our table. And
we peer at each other's namebadges, right, like, *who is
this person.* And her name is Brenda Laurel.
So what do I say? I say to this total stranger, I
say. "Hey. Are you the Brenda Laurel who did that book
on *the art of the computer-human interface*? You
*are*? Wow, I loved that book." And yes -- that's why
I'm here as your guest speaker tonight, ladies and
gentleman. It's because I can think fast on my feet.
It's because I'm the kind of author who likes to hang out
in Adolf Hitler's home town with the High Priestess of
Weird.
So ladies and gentlemen unfortunately I can't
successfully pretend that I know much about your
profession. I mean actually I do know a *few* things
about your profession.... For instance, I was on the far
side of the Great Crash of 1984. I was one of the
civilian crashees, meaning that was about when I gave up
twitch games. That was when I gave up my Atari 800. As
to why my Atari 800 became a boat-anchor I'm still not
sure.... It was quite mysterious when it happened, it was
inexplicable, kind of like the passing of a pestilence or
the waning of the moon. If I understood this phenomenon I
think I would really have my teeth set into something
profound and vitally interesting... Like, my Atari still
works today, I still own it. Why don't I get it out of
its box and fire up a few cartridges? Nothing physical
preventing me. Just some subtle but intense sense of
revulsion. Almost like a Sartrean nausea. Why this
should be attached to a piece of computer hardware is
difficult to say.
My favorite games nowadays are Sim City, Sim Earth
and Hidden Agenda... I had Balance of the Planet on my
hard disk, but I was so stricken with guilt by the
digitized photo of the author and his spouse that I
deleted the game, long before I could figure out how to
keep everybody on the Earth from starving.... Including
myself and the author....
I'm especially fond of SimEarth. SimEarth is like a
goldfish bowl. I also have the actual goldfish bowl in
the *After Dark* Macintosh screen saver, but its charms
waned for me, possibly because the fish don't drive one
another into extinction. I theorize that this has
something to do with a breakdown of the old dichotomy of
twitch games versus adventure, you know, arcade zombie
versus Mensa pinhead...
I can dimly see a kind of transcendance in electronic
entertainment coming with things like SimEarth, they seem
like a foreshadowing of what Alvin Toffler called the
"intelligent environment"... Not "games" in a classic
sense, but things that are just going on in the background
somewhere, in an attractive and elegant fashion, kind of
like a pet cat... I think this kind of digital toy might
really go somewhere interesting.
What computer entertainment lacks most I think is a
sense of mystery. It's too left-brain.... I think there
might be real promise in game designs that offer less of a
sense of nitpicking mastery and control, and more of a
sense of sleaziness and bluesiness and smokiness. Not
neat tinkertoy puzzles to be decoded, not "treasure-hunts
for assets," but creations with some deeper sense of
genuine artistic mystery.
I don't know if you've seen the work of a guy called
William Latham.... I got his work on a demo reel from
Media Magic. I never buy movies on video, but I really
live for raw computer-graphic demo reels. This William
Latham is a heavy dude... His tech isn't that impressive,
he's got some kind of fairly crude IBM mainframe cad-cam
program in Winchester England.... The thing that's most
immediately striking about Latham's computer artworks --
*ghost sculptures* he calls them -- is that the guy really
possesses a sense of taste. Fractal art tends to be
quite garish. Latham's stuff is very fractally and
organic, it's utterly weird, but at the same time it's
very accomplished and subtle. There's a quality of
ecstasy and dread to it... there's a sense of genuine
enchantment there. A lot of computer games are stuffed to
the gunwales with enchanters and wizards and so-called
magic, but that kind of sci-fi cod mysticism seems very
dime-store stuff by comparison with Latham.
I like to imagine the future of computer games as
being something like the Steve Jackson Games bust by the
Secret Service, only in this case what they were busting
wouldn't have been a mistake, it would have been something
actually quite seriously inexplicable and possibly even a
genuine cultural threat.... Something of the sort may
come from virtual reality. I rather imagine something
like an LSD backlash occuring there; something along the
lines of: "Hey we have something here that can really
seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, Mr Developer,
I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and Software
Administration don't really approve of that." That could
happen. I think there are some visionary computer police
around who are seriously interested in that prospect, they
see it as a very promising growing market for law
enforcement, it's kind of their version of a golden
vaporware.
I now want to talk some about the differences between
your art and my art. My art, science fiction writing, is
pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the
curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird
sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides.
I mean, these guys aren't in the SFWA, but their product
is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the
other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new
platform takes over the field. This is your advantage and
your glory. This is also your curse. It's a terrible
kind of curse really.
This is a lesson about cultural expression nowadays
that has applications to everybody. This is part of
living in the Information Society. Here we are in the
90s, we have these tremendous information-handling,
information-producing technologies. We think it's really
great that we can have groovy unleashed access to all
these different kinds of data, we can own books, we can
own movies on tape, we can access databanks, we can buy
computer-games, records, music, art.... A lot of our art
aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants
to be digital... But our riches of information are in
some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us.
They're like a cognitive load. As a digitized
information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially
invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real
explanation for the triumph of compact disks.
Compact disks aren't really all that much better than
vinyl records. What they make up in fidelity they lose in
groovy cover art. What they gain in playability they lose
in presentation. The real advantage of CDs is that they
allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think
you love this record collection that you've amassed over
the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the
load of memory there is secretly weighing you down.
You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums
again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're
a culture nut.
But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all
those records and put them in attic boxes without so much
guilt. You can pretend that you've stepped up a level,
that now you're even more intensely into music than you
ever were; but on a practical level what you're really
doing is weeding this junk out of your life. By dumping
the platform you dump everything attached to the platform
and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief
not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it
take up disk-space in your head.
Computer games are especially vulnerable to this
because they live and breathe through the platform. But
something rather similar is happening today to fiction as
well.... What you see in science fiction nowadays is an
amazing tonnage of product that is shuffled through the
racks faster and faster.... If a science fiction
paperback stays available for six weeks, it's a miracle.
Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off...
Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book
form, when a science fiction *book* came out it would be
in an edition of maybe five hundred copies and these
weirdo Golden Age SF fans would cling on to every copy as
if it were made of platinum.... But now they come out and
they are made to vanish as soon as possible. In fact to a
great extent they're designed by their lame hack authors
to vanish as soon as possible. They're cliches because
cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write a
whole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one...
Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print.
They still have the cultural properties of print.
Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a
long time because they can be replicated faithfully in new
editions that have all the same properties as the old
ones. Books are independent of the machineries of book
production, the platforms of publishing. Books don't lose
anything by being reprinted by a new machine, books are
stubborn, they remain the same work of art, they carry the
same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill. MOBY DICK
for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't until the
1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and
then it got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't
even publish books, she just wrote these demented little
poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they
still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and
on and on. It's damned hard to get rid of Emily
Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's ear. And
everybody who writes from then on in some sense has to
measure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing the
classics are still living competition, they tend to
elevate the entire art-form by their persistent presence.
I've noticed though that computer game designers
don't look much to the past. All their idealized classics
tend to be in reverse, they're projected into the future.
When you're a game designer and you're waxing very
creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff
that doesn't exist yet. Like now we only have floppies,
but wait till we get CD-ROM. Like now we can't have
compelling lifelike artificial characters in the game, but
wait till we get AI. Like now we waste time porting games
between platforms, but wait till there's just one
standard. Like now we're just starting with huge
multiplayer games, but wait till the modem networks are a
happening thing. And I -- as a game designer artiste --
it's my solemn duty to carry us that much farther forward
toward the beckoning grail....
For a novelist like myself this is a completely alien
paradigm. I can see that it's very seductive, but at the
same time I can't help but see that the ground is
crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes
it's like a little cultural apocalypse. And I can imagine
a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and
then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of
expression? Alan Kay -- he's a heavy guy, Alan Kay --
he says that computers may tend to shrink and vanish into
the environment, into the walls and into clothing....
Sounds pretty good.... But this also means that all the
joysticks vanish, all the keyboards, all the repetitive
strain injuries.
I'm sure you could play some kind of computer
game with very intelligent, very small, invisible
computers.... You could have some entertaining way to
play with them, or more likely they would have some
entertaining way to play with you. But then imagine
yourself growing up in that world, being born in that
world. You could even be a computer game designer in that
world, but how would you study the work of your
predecessors? How would you physically *access* and
*experience* the work of your predecessors? There's a
razor-sharp cutting edge in this art-form, but what
happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?
As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that
this is happening.... I don't think that as a culture
today we're very interested in tradition or continuity.
No, we're a lot more interested in being a New Age and a
revolutionary epoch, we long to reinvent ourselves every
morning before breakfast and never grow old. We have to
run really fast to stay in the same place. We've become
used to running, if we sit still for a while it makes us
feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss those sixty-
hour work weeks.
And much the same thing is happening to books today
too.... Not just technically, but ideologically. I
don't know if you're familiar at all with literary theory
nowadays, with terms like deconstructionism,
postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talk very long
about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff, and I
don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields of
study where it's sometimes wise to treasure your
ignorance.... But the thing about the new literary theory
that's remarkable, is that it makes a really violent break
with the past.... These guys don't take the books of the
past on their own cultural terms. When you're
deconstructing a book it's like you're psychoanalyzing it,
you're not studying it for what it says, you're studying
it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural reasons
for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is
that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful
not to let it get its message through or affect you deeply
or emotionally in any way. You're in a position of
complete psychological and technical superiority to the
book and its author... This is a way for modern
literateurs to handle this vast legacy of the past without
actually getting any of the sticky stuff on you. It's
like it's dead. It's like the next best thing to not
having literature at all. For some reason this feels
really good to people nowadays.
But even that isn't enough, you know.... There's
talk nowadays in publishing circles about a new device for
books, called a ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it
in your hands like this.... Has a very nice little
graphics screen, theoretically, a high-definition thing,
very legible.... And you play your books on it.... You
buy the book as a floppy and you stick it in... And just
think, wow you can even have graphics with your book...
you can have music, you can have a soundtrack....
Narration.... Animated illustrations... Multimedia... it
can even be interactive.... It's the New Hollywood for
Publisher's Row, and at last books can aspire to the
exalted condition of movies and cartoons and TV and
computer games.... And just think when the ReadMan goes
obsolete, all the product that was written for it will be
blessedly gone forever!!! Erased from the memory of
mankind!
Now I'm the farthest thing from a Luddite ladies and
gentlemen, but when I contemplate this particular
technical marvel my author's blood runs cold... It's
really hard for books to compete with other multisensory
media, with modern electronic media, and this is supposed
to be the panacea for withering literature, but from the
marrow of my bones I say get that fucking little
sarcophagus away from me. For God's sake don't put my
books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope. Don't put me
into the stereograph, don't write me on the wax cylinder,
don't tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece
of hardware, because hardware is even more mortal than I
am, and I'm a hell of a lot more mortal than I care to be.
Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the
first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with
the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of
keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking
place.
Okay.... Now I've sometimes heard it asked why
computer game designers are deprived of the full artistic
respect they deserve. God knows they work hard enough.
They're really talented too, and by any objective measure
of intelligence they rank in the top percentiles... I've
heard it said that maybe this problem has something to do
with the size of the author's name on the front of the
game-box. Or it's lone wolves versus teams, and somehow
the proper allotment of fame gets lost in the muddle.
One factor I don't see mentioned much is the sheer lack of
stability in your medium. A modern movie-maker could
probably make a pretty good film with DW Griffith's
equipment, but you folks are dwelling in the very
maelstrom of Permanent Technological Revolution. And
that's a really cool place, but man, it's just not a good
place to build monuments.
Okay. Now I live in the same world you live in, I
hope I've demonstrated that I face a lot of the same
problems you face... Believe me there are few things
deader or more obsolescent than a science fiction novel
that predicts the future when the future has passed it by.
Science fiction is a pop medium and a very obsolescent
medium. The fact that written science fiction is a prose
medium gives us some advantages, but even science fiction
has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle
of literary excellence... we try to do this sometimes, but
generally we have to be really drunk first. Still, if
you want your work to survive (and some science fiction
*does* survive, very successfully) then your work has to
capture some quality that lasts. You have to capture
something that people will search out over time, even
though they have to fight their way upstream against the
whole rushing current of obsolescence and innovation.
And I've come up with a strategy for attempting this.
Maybe it'll work -- probably it won't -- but I wouldn't be
complaining so loudly if I didn't have some kind of
strategy, right? And I think that my strategy may have
some relevance to game designers so I presume to offer it
tonight.
This is the point at which your normal J. Random
Author trots out the doctrine of the Wonderful Power of
Storytelling. Yes, storytelling, the old myth around the
campfire, blind Homer, universal Shakespeare, this is the
art ladies and gentlemen that strikes to the eternal core
of the human condition... This is high art and if you
don't have it you are dust in the wind.... I can't tell
you how many times I have heard this bullshit... This is
known in my field as the "Me and My Pal Bill Shakespeare"
argument. Since 1982 I have been at open war with people
who promulgate this doctrine in science fiction and this
is the primary reason why my colleagues in SF speak of me
in fear and trembling as a big bad cyberpunk... This is
the classic doctrine of Humanist SF.
This is what it sounds like when it's translated into
your jargon. Listen closely:
"Movies and plays get much of their power from the
resonances between the structural layers. The congruence
between the theme, plot, setting and character layouts
generates emotional power. Computer games will never have
a significant theme level because the outcome is variable.
The lack of theme alone will limit the storytelling power
of computer games."
Hard to refute. Impossible to refute. Ladies and
gentlemen to hell with the marvellous power of
storytelling. If the audience for science fiction wanted
*storytelling*, they wouldn't read goddamned *science
fiction,* they'd read Harpers and Redbook and Argosy. The
pulp magazine (which is our genre's primary example of a
dead platform) used to carry all kinds of storytelling.
Western stories. Sailor stories. Prizefighting stories.
G-8 and his battle aces. Spicy Garage Tales. Aryan
Atrocity Adventures. These things are dead. Stories
didn't save them. Stories won't save us. Stories won't
save *you.*
This is not the route to follow. We're not into
science fiction because it's *good literature,* we're into
it because it's *weird*. Follow your weird, ladies and
gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your
geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words
of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose
work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the
muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a
"good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A
good science fiction story is something that knows it is
science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring
out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not
be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it
should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE
LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE
LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!
I don't think you can last by meeting the
contemporary public taste, the taste from the last
quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following
demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't
know many works of art that last that are condescending.
I don't know many works of art that last that are
deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek
written all over you; you should aim to be one geek
they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't
hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of
pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should
fully realize what society has made of you and take a
terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get
dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird
and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you
have behind it. Have the artistic *courage* to recognize
your own significance in culture!
Okay. Those of you into SF may recognize the classic
rhetoric of cyberpunk here. Alienated punks, picking up
computers, menacing society.... That's the cliched press
story, but they miss the best half. Punk into cyber is
interesting, but cyber into punk is way dread. I'm into
technical people who attack pop culture. I'm into techies
gone dingo, techies gone rogue -- not street punks
picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within
their reach -- but disciplined people, intelligent
people, people with some technical skills and some
rational thought, who can break out of the arid prison
that this society sets for its engineers. People who are,
and I quote, "dismayed by nearly every aspect of the world
situation and aware on some nightmare level that the
solutions to our problems will not come from the breed of
dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians." Thanks,
Brenda!
That still smells like hope to me....
You don't get there by acculturating. Don't become a
well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and
dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from
every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.
If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don't read
Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read
Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off
talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats.
If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell,
read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the
Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are
hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies
of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will
always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn
who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn't come here
from nowhere. There are reasons why you're here. Learn
those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried
because it was too experimental or embarrassing or
inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.
And when it comes to studying art, well, study it,
but study it to your own purposes. If you're obsessively
weird enough to be a good weird artist, you generally face
a basic problem. The basic problem with weird art is not
the height of the ceiling above it, it's the pitfalls
under its feet. The worst problem is the blundering, the
solecisms, the naivete of the poorly socialized, the
rotten spots that you skid over because you're too freaked
out and not paying proper attention. You may not need
much characterization in computer entertainment.
Delineating character may not be the point of your work.
That's no excuse for making lame characters that are
actively bad. You may not need a strong, supple,
thoroughly worked-out storyline. That doesn't mean that
you can get away with a stupid plot made of chickenwire
and spit. Get a full repertoire of tools. Just make sure
you use those tools to the proper end. Aim for the
heights of professionalism. Just make sure you're a
professional *game designer.*
You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium
just by knocking it off with the bullshit. Popular media
always reek of bullshit, they reek of carelessness and
self-taught clumsiness and charlatanry. To live outside
the aesthetic laws you must be honest. Know what you're
doing; don't settle for the way it looks just cause
everybody's used to it. If you've got a palette of 2
million colors, then don't settle for designs that look
like a cheap four-color comic book. If you're gonna do
graphic design, then learn what good graphic design looks
like; don't screw around in amateur fashion out of sheer
blithe ignorance. If you write a manual, don't write a
semiliterate manual with bad grammar and misspellings.
If you want to be taken seriously by your fellows and by
the populace at large, then don't give people any excuse
to dismiss you. Don't be your own worst enemy. Don't
put yourself down.
I have my own prejudices and probably more than my
share, but I still think these are pretty good principles.
There's nothing magic about 'em. They certainly don't
guarantee success, but then there's "success" and then
there's success. Working seriously, improving your
taste and perception and understanding, knowing what you
are and where you came from, not only improves your work
in the present, but gives you a chance of influencing the
future and links you to the best work of the past. It
gives you a place to take a solid stand. I try to live up
to these principles; I can't say I've mastered them, but
they've certainly gotten me into some interesting places,
and among some very interesting company. Like the people
here tonight.
I'm not really here by any accident. I'm here
because I'm *paying attention.* I 'm here because I know
you're significant. I'm here because I know you're
important. It was a privilege to be here. Thanks very
much for having me, and showing me what you do.
That's all I have to say to you tonight. Thanks very
much for listening.