Scans
The Doom Killers
On Christmas Day 1994, Mike Kulas, co-founder of Parallax Software Corporation, sat down at his old school desk in his boyhood home outside Chicago and used his mother's computer to log on to the Internet. The shareware version of his Parallax game Descent had been uploaded to the Net two days before, and he was eager to check users' reactions. Miles away, his partner, Matt Toschlog, was at his family's house having a similar experience. People were calling, "Come to breakfast!" while he read the early responses.
Any doubts the two had about their game must have evaporated when the responses flooded in from players: "Oh my God! It's totally 3-D and totally disorientating!" "Descent is fantastic!" "Descent rocks!"
In making the Net an integral part of Descent's design process, Parallax demonstrated how software companies are ideally positioned to satisfy customers in ways not previously possible.
"Our aim was to create an '80s-style arcade game with '90s technology," says Kulas, who met Toschlog in the mid-'80s while the two were designing flight sims for Sublogic. "We wanted a full 3-D environment in which the player was surrounded by interesting structures and threats in all dimensions." They approached Apogee Software Ltd. with a brief description of Descent and were issued a check to buy hardware even before a contract was signed.
In January 1994, Apogee abandoned the project after seeing the early prototype, leaving Parallax without a publisher. Kulas's wife was five months pregnant, and both he and Toschlog had quit their jobs to work exclusively on Descent. By then, the team consisted of five people, including artist Adam Pletcher, a Purdue University graduate who was giving Descent its eerie, luminous look. They put together a game demo in a few weeks and submitted it to a dozen publishers, including Interplay, which saw in Descent a potential Doom-killer.
The Net response confirmed Interplay's impression. Says Kulas: "It was satisfying to get feedback and to discover that our design decisions were the right ones. We also found out what we didn't need to change, which was as important as knowing what people wanted us to add - after all, we were on a short deadline for the registered version."
Doom versus Descent is an ongoing debate on the Net. Many aspects of the games are similar, but Descent has a new "engine" that makes it different from any other game so far. The gory Doom is not true 3-D - you are limited to movement on a plane (except for ramps and stairs); in the gore-free Descent you can move along any axis (it helps that you're weightless). The enemies in Doom are like cardboard cutouts that shuttle back and forth somewhat predictably on trails, while the enemies in Descent have more sophisticated behavior - they are eerily intelligent.
The Internet's role has not always been positive for Parallax. Cheat codes were disseminated within days of the shareware's release, and, more seriously, a leaked bootleg of the registered version was widely distributed. "It was a strange and disturbing feeling to sit in an IRC channel and see people offer our game and not be able to do anything about it," says Kulas.
But such problems plague all software companies. In the meantime, Parallax and Interplay have fostered goodwill and consumer loyalty - strong weapons against piracy.
"I've never seen this kind of feedback before in software (or in any other industry)," writes one gamer, "and it's the way things should be done. I've got 40 bucks I can't wait to give you for the registered version." Descent: US$35 to 40. Interplay Productions: (800) 468 3775, +1 (619) 490 9070. Parallax: e-mail parallax@prairienet.org.
The Cannes of Interactivity
Letting the public play with the winners isn't part of most award ceremonies. But at The Interactive Media Festival it's expected.
"We want to create a bridge between interactive technology and media arts, and then provide a showcase for people to come see, touch, and play with them," says festival president Hal Josephson. The second-annual festival, which takes place June 4 to 7 at the Variety Arts Center in Los Angeles, promises four days of innovative art, information, and technology - all of which go beyond point and click.
The high-minded concept had its first stirrings in the late '80s, but it took almost six years to catch on. Not until Motorola came aboard last year as a premier sponsor and the word "interactive" had turned into a catch phrase was the party ready to get rolling.
It was a complicated and crowded liftoff. Members of a 75-strong delegation of nominators found themselves zipping all over the world to inspect large-scale contenders, while back home, scads of smaller pieces were arriving at their doorsteps. The delegation picked nearly 30 diverse works for the first Festival Gallery, all of which then had to be transported to LA for the final review by nine judges.
"When we started out, we thought it'd be easy," says Lisa Goldman, the festival's creative director, "and then there we were, mailing tons of steel. It was deep shipping." The entire process was time-consuming, exhausting, and expensive - all for an overloaded event that received a resoundingly unenthusiastic reception from critics and the public at its unveiling during last year's Digital World in Los Angeles. Much of the playfulness and wit that had originally inspired the festival had been sucked out, replaced by artistic pretension and multisensory cacophony.
This year, chastened organizers have winnowed the selection process down to a jury of 15, and the Festival Gallery will contain no more than 20 works. The current jury, which includes musician George Acogney, Wired President Jane Metcalfe, McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology Director Derrick DeKerckhove, and techno-culture analyst Joichi Ito, had an initial meeting in San Francisco last December. Ever since, jurors have been conducting their business at the Festival's WWW site. "We've got people in four continents and more than twice as many time zones, so there's no way we can get them all together for any kind of live chat," says Webmaster Mark Meadows. In the locked Jury Chamber of the Web site, every submission gets a page, and in a corresponding private conference, its merits are weighed among the jurors. The public, meanwhile, is free to wander the other areas of the Web site. Visitors can take a look at works from last year's gallery, read the whys and hows of the organization, and get up-to-date information on what's planned for the festival.
Even though promoters tout it as the Cannes of interactivity, the festival isn't about arbitrarily crowning anything "Best of." "There are already a lot of clichés in this field," says Goldman. "We're looking for things that push the definition of interactivity, rather than just excellent examples. Our mission is to look at this as a form of expression, and to give people hands-on access to it."
After all, you can put it on a pedestal and hand it a prize, but ultimately, as Goldman explains, "interactivity is still something you have to interact with." The Interactive Media Festival: on the Web at www.arc.org/ or e-mail at info@arc.org.
Push-button Newspaper
If a major election took place in your hometown, you'd want to know about it. That's a big story. But what if you've transplanted yourself halfway around the world - to a faraway country called the United States? You probably won't find much news from home tucked in the pages of your local newspaper. Dailies here are notorious for their mainstream myopia, so the news that matters to immigrant communities often falls by the wayside.
Unless you're one of the 10,000 Indian Americans living in Jersey City, New Jersey. That's where The Jersey Journal, a local newspaper owned by the Newhouse family's Advance Publications Inc. (the parent company of Condé Nast, Wired investor), has, with help from the MIT Media Lab, launched an experiment in grassroots journalism tailored to meet the needs of the local South Asian community.
Each day, about 150 Indians living in Jersey City drop by one of two neighborhood markets, press a big red button, and receive a freshly printed copy of The India Journal - a free, two-page digest of community news, dispatches from India, and cricket scores compiled from wire reports and articles submitted by local correspondents.
At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about The India Journal; it looks like another staid newsletter cranked out with desktop publishing software. But then, much of the magic that has made The India Journal a reality in Jersey City takes place behind the scenes. Edited and distributed by one full-time editor working from a Jersey Journal office, The India Journal takes a creative mix of digital technology and turns out a high-quality news service delivered to a targeted audience on a shoestring budget.
The Jersey-based freelancers who contribute local stories to The India Journal file their stories on a local BBS. Shreeram Krishnaswami, The India Journal's editor, cleans up the stories and combines them with wire reports before laying out the pages and sending them to Eastern Microwave Inc. in Syracuse, New York. The file is translated into television scan lines and piggybacked onto the regular broadcast signal of WNBC-TV in Manhattan.
Back in Jersey City, the two Indian markets that distribute The India Journal have been equipped with a device called a Faxcast decoder, it receives and extracts the Postscript file from the TV carrier signal. The file then flows into a laptop PC-and-printer setup, which spits out the latest edition of the newsletter whenever a customer pushes the big red button inside the store. Voilé! - the daily miracle.
Jeff Jarvis, creative director at Newhouse Newspapers New Media, says The India Journal represents a "transitional technology" that falls somewhere between the newspaper production and distribution systems of the past and the customized online newspaper of the future. Krishnaswami hopes to enlarge the newsletter to four pages, introduce advertising, and expand distribution to include other Indian markets throughout the New York area. The India Journal: +1 (201) 217 2403.
Ostertag's Osterizer
The first thing you notice upon meeting Bob Ostertag, besides his shaved head, is his voice - it's a near-whisper. Call it yin and yang: although the San Franciscan musician speaks softly, he likes his music to scream.
Working with such divergent collaborators as Fred Frith, jazz artists John Zorn and Anthony Braxton, Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, and members of the Kronos Quartet, Ostertag has scrunched technology and recorded music into the same claustrophobic box since the late 1970s. Incorporating "found sounds" cribbed from varied sources - All The Rage includes angry shouts from a pro-gay riot and Sooner or Later features a weeping Salvadoran child burying his father - Ostertag creates moody, politically tinged "reality pieces" that musically address anger, grief, and joy. Yet his latest effort, Fear No Love (Avant), is a beat-driven dance-club record reflecting his perceived need for "timely queer music."
Ostertag's Say No More ensemble melds flesh-and-blood musicianship with hard-edged technology in yet another provocative way. This project began with three musicians - a vocalist, a contrabassist, and a drummer - whose solo improvisations Ostertag recorded and, using digital sampling equipment, diced into tiny fragments of sound. Reassembling the snippets, he wrote new pieces from them, and the original musicians taught themselves to play the resultant work. "It's a way for me to write for an ensemble without resorting to the hieroglyphs of traditional notation," Ostertag explains. "I can specify precise things I want to happen at different times. Since I'm using the musicians' own playing as my original source of material, I'm assured that whatever I do will be idiomatic to them."
Ostertag compares this process to breaking apart and recombining separate syllables of language. The challenge, he says of his composing technique, is "to disassemble the initial recordings sufficiently so they can be reconstructed into physical music, yet not break them into such small splinters that the voice of the original soloist is lost.
"The whole point - and I had to convince the musicians of this - was to develop ensemble material that we could never have arrived at without going through this process." His voice conceals a quiet urgency: "Even though the musicians know they can't replicate what's on the computer, it's what they're given to start with. It makes them play in entirely new ways. Phil Minton, for example, has extraordinary vocal techniques: this vehicle pushes him hard, displaying his full range from beginning to end."
Ostertag recently returned from a tour with Say No More in time for the release of Fear No Love, a massive collaboration with local queer and queer-friendly scene makers - friends he chose to work with but who "weren't virtuoso composers."
"I've been a political organizer, journalist, and musician," he says, "and I don't want to make speeches or write articles. I want to make music. I feel constrained sometimes in predominantly heterosexual social conventions. To me, everything about my work is queer - in all senses of the word. It's funny: the gay community produces lots of dancers, painters, and writers, but musicians are expected to sing show tunes or cabaret." For soft-spoken Ostertag, the digital sampling keyboard will continue to do the singing - and screaming. Fear No Love: US$15. 41 Sutter Street, Suite 1108, San Francisco, CA 94104.
Making Multimedia Cheaper
Multimedia may be booming right now, but not everyone is bullish. Hamish Forsythe thinks the technology's on the verge of a painful shakeout. "I want this industry to live," he says. Right now, explains Forsythe, creating multimedia titles is so costly that many never make it to market - the ones that do often cost too much and deliver too little.
Forsythe is president of mFactory Inc., whose new multimedia authoring system, mTropolis, is designed to make developing sophisticated titles easier.
Most authoring tools, notably Macromedia's hugely popular Director, are designed to let authors coordinate the playback of animation and sound.
mTropolis, on the other hand, lets authors create miniature worlds full of objects that look, sound, and behave in certain ways. The mTropolis engine gives the user a view of these objects and allows them to manipulate what's happening inside the miniature worlds at any time.
For example, consider the buttons on the inside of the fireplace in Myst: You click on the metal and there's this tinny poit sound as a square indentation appears beneath the mouse's pointer.
In most authoring systems, you would accomplish this by writing a script that tracks where the user is and what he or she is doing. If the user is in the fireplace and clicks the mouse, your script checks to see if the mouse was over the button when the user clicked it; animation and sound files are then played in response to the event. Your script has to keep track of where the buttons are, how they behave, whether or not they've been pushed yet, and so on.
With mTropolis, all of this is encapsulated in a button object that you create once. The object contains pointers to animation and sound files. Paste it on the screen and drag it into position. Then tell the button to open a door (another object) when it's pressed. The button knows that when the user clicks on it with the mouse, it goes flat if it's already dimpled or goes dimpled if it's already flat. Whenever it changes its state, it plays the poit.
An author who has created such an object can put it anywhere - another scene, another title, wherever! Just copy it to an object palette and paste it to any scene needing a button. Your program doesn't have to keep track of the button at all - whenever it needs to know whether or not a button has been pushed, it simply looks at it.
Iain Lamb is a Director guru at The Cryptic Corporation and is using Director to develop Bad Day on the Midway, the forthcoming Residents CD-ROM. But as a mTropolis beta tester, he likes what he sees. "They're empowering the user to do cooler things with interactivity than they could using Director."
J. A. Nelson, lead programmer for Seismic Entertainment Software Inc., is also impressed with mTropolis. "They're doing what Kaleida wanted to do but wasn't able to. If you have reusability, then developing your first title costs X, your second costs a third of X, and your third title is free." And that's what's really at stake - cost. If Media Factory's new tool helps developers get more bang out of their buck, it's going to make waves. "Assuming it all comes together," says Lamb, "it'll be a serious competitor for Macromedia. We really need that." mFactory: +1 (415) 548 0600, e-mail at info@mfactory.com.
Yellow Page Envy
Have you looked in the McKinley lately? As in, the McKinley Internet Directory, soon to be mirrored at a site near you? It's a question publisher Christine Maxwell hopes Net surfers everywhere will start asking each other. She's convinced her hyperlinked, online directory to the Internet is poised to be the standard reference work of cyberspace.
Maxwell, co-author of the New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages, the smaller hard-copy version of the McKinley Directory, contends that "the McKinley" outshines other directories by virtue of its exhaustively researched reviews of more than 40,000 URLs. Her team consists of hundreds of surfers, "most of whom have masters degrees or above and are specialists in particular fields," along with "around 50 advisers" including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gellman, who evaluate the sites.
"Right now, you have to sample and sample and sample until you find what's right." says Maxwell, a longtime professional "information broker" who has publishing in her genes (her father was the late British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell). "It's that exercise in frustration that led us to create the Internet Yellow Pages. There will always be a need for human intervention to put a value-added layer onto what we produce."
Selectivity also aids what Maxwell calls the "seamless linking" of advertising and content. An icon placed next to each Internet information resource leads directly to businesses that sell related products. According to Maxwell, more than 1,000 advertisers were lined up in advance of the directory's early spring launch.
Maxwell isn't the only person smelling the potential profits of such an approach. "Every RBOC is evaluating Internet opportunities for yellow pages," says John Kelsey, president of The Kelsey Group Inc., a consulting firm that tracks yellow pages advertising. "This is a phenomenally profitable business." Kelsey notes that on average, telephone companies earn 20 percent of their net profit from yellow pages ads. Nationwide, according to figures provided by the Yellow Pages Publishing Association, yellow page ad revenue totaled US$9.8 billion in 1994.
So whoever sets the standard, be it Maxwell's McKinley Group or AT&T, for Net mavens or newbies in search of anything, there will be one easy answer - just let your browser do the surfing: www.mckinley.com.
Homework Helper
Infonautics has come up with a way to make homework easier. Founded in 1992, the company has just launched Homework Helper, a bright, graphical online reference library with access to millions of pages' worth of information. Students simply type in a question, and the program searches through databases of encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, and major works of literature. The information can then be cut and pasted into a document. Although marketed toward children, Homework Helper can also be an invaluable tool for professionals. In fact, Infonautics says it will soon create a new interface for an older market. Available on Prodigy, (800) 776 3449, +1 (212) 759 8059.
Model Quake Model
Risk Management Solutions Inc. of Menlo Park, California, has developed software to predict the impact of a Tokyo, San Francisco, or Los Angeles earthquake. Information like soil type, fault characteristics, building materials (wood, cement, steel), and population density are dumped into a computer; out spit the damage estimates. For a magnitude 7.9 hitting Tokyo at evening rush hour - Risk Management predicts US$2.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion in quake, fire damage, and toxic release; 40,000 to 60,000 dead; as many as 100,000 seriously injured; and up to $1 trillion in business disruptions. Risk Management Solutions Inc.: +1 (415) 617 6500.
Adam Penenberg
