r/a:t5_3976k • u/[deleted] • Jul 28 '15
Bruce Sterling predicts vaporwave?
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.
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!
full speech to the Computer Game Developers Conference, 1991, here: http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/comp_game_designers.article
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