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
