Microserfs (14 page)

Michael has an office more or less to himself, behind the bar, and walled off with sound baffles. He shares it with Ethan, who visits only twice a day for "face-time": first to talk with Michael in the morning - and then once in the afternoon for a wrap-up. The downside of a closed door office is the overaccumulation of dead skin particles. With Ethan's dandruff, the floor looks like Vail, Colorado.

Not infrequently, Michael locks himself inside and geeks out on code. We call this bungee-coding. He always does his best work when he really geeks out. Nobody's offended - it's the way he is.

I asked Mom what she knew of Dad's work with Michael. She said it's Top Secret, but she gave me a clue: his fingers are all red and sore at night.

"Don't worry about it, Dan, he's happy, and so as long as the Feds aren't called in, let him be." So much for curiosity.

I tried looking at Mom's rock collection today. They continue to perplex me. Beauty is absolutely in the eye of the beholder.

Todd broke the 400-pound mark on the bench press today and celebrated by making protein drinks for everybody, but they had a rotting protein odor. We pretended to enjoy them, then formed tag teams running to the laundry sink to dump them.

I looked at Dad's hands and they are indeed all chafed and red.

Susan's dating some guy from Intel, but I don't think it's going to work, because Intel's corporate culture is so weird.

"They're like Borgs," says Susan. "They have one mind. They're like this sci-fi movie I once saw where if one child in a village learned something, all the other children learned it simultaneously. It's a hive mind. You get the feeling there's a sub-audible tape playing that says, resistance is futile . . . you WILL assimilate . . ." And then Susan got thoughtful and said, "The more I think about it, it's actually like Microsoft. In fact all huge tech firms are like Microsoft."

Went out for a drink with Ethan at the Empire Tap Room on Emerson Street. He said, "There is no center to the Valley in any real sense of the word. There is no one watching; it's pretty, but it's a vacuum; a kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings."

I know what he's talking about - the deficit of visionaries - the centerless boredom of Valley life. I mean, if I really think about it, Valley people work and sleep - work and sleep and work and sleep and somewhere along the line the dream border is blurred. It's as if there is a collective decision to disfavor a Godhead. It's not despair; they just want the Real Thing. The Beast.

And the penny pinching! The nondisclosure forms! The extreme wealth of the high-IQ'ed genetic gift baskets who won on the Punnet Square of life! I suppose this is the birthplace of the new, postindustrial economy here amid the ghosts of apricot orchards, spinach farms, and horse ranches - here inside the science parks, industrial areas, and cool, leafy suburbs. Here, where sexy new technologies are being blueprinted, CAD'ed, engineered, imagineered, and modeled - post-machines making countless millions of people obsolete overnight.

Palo Alto is so invisible from the outside, but invisibility is invariably where one locates the ACTION.

Worked until 3:30 a.m. Breezy night. Went for a walk down La Cresta Drive. So quiet. I got to feeling meditative. I felt as though my inner self was much closer to the surface than it usually gets. It's a nice feeling. It takes quiet to get there.

The liquid engineers left the pool heater on too long, and at night, chorine vapors rose above the plant life of the planet, and I

imagined my flesh,

being inside the pool, being warm, and protected, feeling gravity, but able to mock it as I floated. Would you float with me now, if I asked you, would you jump in the pool and not even bother to strip? Could I strip you down, remove your clothing and we would fall inside the water together?

It scares me.

I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again.

This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you.

You stole my loneliness

No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my Windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.

Michael made us attend: "Interactive Multimedia, Product Design, and the Year 2000." It was at a Hyatt or something down in San Jose. Michael wanted us to have "a good overview of the industry." We barely made it through the event.

The day after the seminar, I might add, Michael bought us all San Jose Sharks inflatable toys as penance. (The Sharks are *huge* here. I think I'm already beginning to bond with them.) If my ship comes in this year, I'm going to buy season's tickets for next year's games. Can't wait for the season.

I e-mailed my notes to Abe.

"29 Steps: My Trip to the Interactive Multimedia Seminar"

by Daniel Underwood

1) Some people believe that the suspension of disbelief is destroyed by interactivity.

2) The people who attend "Multimedia Seminars" aren't the same people who design games. Their shirts are ironed, they carry unscuffed leather attache cases, they're infinitely earnest and they look like they work for Prudential-Bache and Kidder-Peabody. These suits are all bluffing now, but soon enough they'll "get it" and they will become "visionaries."

3) Narratives (stories) traditionally come to a definite end (unlike life); that's why we like movies and literature - for that sense of closure - because they end.

4) The stakes for multimedia may actually turn out to be embarrassingly small in the short run - like Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, or Hasbro cranking out board game versions of The Partridge Family, The Banana Splits, and Zoom.

5) With interactivity, one tries to give "the illusion of authorship" to people who couldn't otherwise author.

Thought: maybe the need to be told stories is like the need to have sex. If you want to hear a story, you want to hear a story - you want to be passive and sit back around the fire and listen. You don't want to write the story yourself.

6) This sick thing just happened: I had this moment when I looked up and everyone had been picking at the baby zits on their foreheads and everybody's forehead was bleeding! It was like stigmata. So gross. Even Karla.

7) "There's an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project." (*TRUE*!)

8) Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don't have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

9) The 8 Models of Interactivity (as far as I can see)

i) The Arcade model

Like Terminator: kill or be killed.

ii) The Coffee Table Book model

Enter anywhere/leave anywhere; pointless in the end; zero replayability factor.

iii) The Universe Creation model

I built you and I can crush you.

iv) The Binary Tree model

Limited number of options; reads from left to right; tightly controlled mini-dramas.

v) The Pick-a-Path model

Does our hero smooch with Heather Locklear, or not - you decide! Expensive. Unproven entertainment value. Audiences don't pay money to work.

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)

For adolescents: half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

vii) The Agatha Christie model

A puzzle is to be solved using levels, clues, chases, and exploration.

viii) Experience Simulation models

Flight simulators, sport games.

10) I wonder if we oversentimentalize the power of books.

11) Studios in Hollywood are trying to sucker in writers by burying multimedia rights into the boilerplate of contracts. It's intellectual gill-netting. They say they've "always been doing it historically" . . . assuming "since July" means historically.

12) The extraordinary cost of producing multimedia games theoretically is supposed to exclude little companies from entering the market, but it's the little companies, I'm noticing, that are coming up with all of the "hits." Hope for Oop!.

13) Karla and I met this cool-looking woman at lunch, Irene, and so we had coffee with her before the afternoon session began. It turns out she's a makeup artist for multimedia movies, and she wants to get into production herself. Karla said, "Gee, you look really tired," and she said, "Oh - I've been working double shifts every day for two weeks."

So I asked her, "What kind of things are people filming for multimedia games?" and she said, "It's always the same . . . Sir Lancelot, Knights of the Round Table, thrones, chalices, damsels. Can't somebody come up with something new? My Prince Arthur wig is getting all tired-looking."

I suggested she use a Marilyn Monroe wig.

14) Ideally in a game you have hardheaded adventures, but at the end you get a glimpse of the supernatural.

15) In Los Angeles everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product.

16) There's a different mental construction in operation when you're playing tennis as opposed to when you're reading a book. With adrenaline-based competitive sports, the thought mode is: "I want to kill this fucker." It's the spirit of testing yourself; accomplishment. You are gripped. Suspension of disbelief is not an issue.

17) A multimedia product has to deliver $1 per hour's worth of entertainment or you'll get slagged by word-of-mouth.

18) The great Atari gaming collapse of 1982 (*sigh* I remember it well).

19) Games are about providing control for nine year olds . . . "the bigger and neater the entity I can control, the better."

20) Multimedia has become a "packaged goods" industry now. The box copy is more important than the experience. But how do you write cool sexy box copy for a game like Tetris? You can't.

21) Cool term: "Manseconds": (Ergonomic unit of measurement applied to keyboards, joysticks).

22) "Embedded intelligence": (Intelligence buried in the nooks and crannies of code and storyboard design).

23) Last year at a Christmas party up in Seattle, there were all these little kids - all highly sugared and on the brink of hysteria - but instead of screaming, they sat complacently by the TV playing SEGA games. The games were like "Child Sedation Devices." It was spooky.

Susan was there. She said, "Just think, in 50 years these same kids will be sitting at the switches of our life-support systems figuring out a way to play a game by biofeedbacking our failing EKGs. Me, I seem to remember that when I was younger, overly sugared brats were sent down into the basement to fend for themselves, like Lord of the Flies."

24) How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? ("Cardigan: The Adventure")

25) Flight Simulation games are actually out-of-body experience emulators. There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed.

26) "The replayability problem" (Engineering a desire for repetition).

27) I think "van art" and Yes album covers were the biggest influence in game design.

28) I wonder if I've missed the boat on CD-ROM interactive - if I'm too old. The big companies are zeroing in on the 10 year olds. I think you only ever truly feel comfortable with the level of digitization that was normal for you from the age of five to fifteen. I mean sure, I can make new games workable, but it won't be a kick the way Tetris was. Or will it?

29) In the end, multimedia interactive won't resemble literature so much as sports.

Random moment earlier tonight: out of the blue Todd asked everyone in the Habitrail 2, "When they make processed cheese slices that are only 80 percent milk, what's the remaining 20 percent made from?"

Michael replied instantly, "Why, nonmilk additives, of course."

Today we learned that Bug had a piece of shareware on his computer that installs wood paneling all over your Macintosh desktop — and he didn't even tell us! Grudgingly he gave us a download. "It's called shareware, Bug, not hogware."

So now we all have digitized wood paneling on our desktops. The rumpus room dream lives on inside our computer world.

Abe-mail:

I am going to RANT today. 2 things: 1)

The US Dollar is the working currency not only of the domestic econimy, but of nearly every other country on earth (minus Europe and Japan). That must count for somethin. It's obviously grossly undervalued. Why does the Federal Reserve keep the value so low?

(insert conspiracy theory here)

And WHATS WITH THESE MUTUAL FUNDS AND PENSION FUNDS? I REFUSE to believe that money put into a bank in 1956 is *still* money in 1994. 1956 money may still technically be "there" (wherever "there" is) - but it's undead money. It's sick. Evil. I can't believe that *I*, of all people, am saying this, but there's something obscene about money that sits inside a bank and collects interest for decades. "lt;s hard at work," we're told . . .

OH RIGHT!

No, I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life - a decade or so? and then it becomes perverse and random. Expecting a pension kids? Ha hah ha!

I'm feeling like Bug today.

2)

Easter egg

platform

surfing

frontier

garden

jukebox

net

dirty linen

pipeline

lassooo

highway

We will have soon fully entered an era where we have creatted a computer metaphor for EVERY thing that exists in the real world.

Actually when you think about it, *everything* can be a metaphor for "anything*.