Fannon has spent over a decade writing and producing gaming titles like The Mutant File and Champions Universe, but his audience is small compared to the millions who shoot their way through the animated worlds of games like Quake, Doom and Tomb Raider. The 3D graphics, video effects and multi-player environments flaunted by these games are just about the closest anyone’s come to that most coveted grail of the personal computer game industry, virtual reality.

Still, Fannon’s fans and other devotees of text-based gaming — a small but stubborn community of role players — find that V.R. is less important that good old-fashioned storytelling. At Web sites like WebRPG and The Play-by-Email News, gamers busily conduct text-based Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with players from around the world. WebRPG claims 2 million page views per month and runs thousands of games through its message boards, while the Play-by-Email News carries announcements for hundreds of e-mail adventures of every conceivable variety.

“You can get more depth out of a text-based game than a graphic game,” says Rick Loomis, president of the Game Manufacturers Association and owner of the Flying Buffalo game company. “This is less true than it has been in the past, but the more graphics and music and everything else you add to it, the less depth there is to the game.”

Fans of multi-player titans like Ultima Online and EverQuest might disagree. And there’s certainly no reason to believe that some gamers wouldn’t be happy hopping between an imagined world that they shape as they write and the rich, graphic experience of multi-player adventure games. But it’s clear that there is a hardcore group of gamers who eschew the Ultima Onlines and EverQuests — with their seven-figure development costs — in favor of the orcs and saving throws of that tabletop classic, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).

Some participants in this summer’s Re:Play game developers’ online conference were certainly more interested in storytelling than pictures. “It should be clear … that good simulation of human behavior will change the way that games are made, and possibly [the] kinds of games that are made,” wrote Marc LeBlanc, lead engineer of the game engine team at LookingGlass Studios, in one of the online conference’s forums. Other contributors agreed.

“MUDs were supposed to have an open structure, but their appeal is gradually being confined to satisfy the testosterone frenzy of the ‘majority’ MUD audience,” one writer said. “Yes, we all believe that commercial parties are developing MUDs with a broad appeal, full of blacksmiths and diplomats and midwives, but we never see them … Classic pencil and paper RPGs [still] come closest to providing an open structure.”

Fannon is banking on the continued appeal of such simple interactions. Obsidian Studios is structuring its new game system, The Shards of the Stone, around e-mail and chat-room forms of play, and though Fannon hopes to expand to “more of a full graphical Ultima Online, Everquest-style approach,” he says he’ll never stop supporting text-based gaming.

Some advocates of text-based gaming are quite critical of the graphical fantasy games. “Only when a computer brain can achieve close to human intelligence will it be possible for a multi-player game or MUD to offer the same degree of flexibility that a human-moderated game can,” says Nick Pendrell, who created the D&D-style world of Bohavia, which generates about 3,000 words per day. Pendrell’s players have fought a herd of bulls intent on copulating with the ox drawing their cart, encountered a magical, disembodied nose and stumbled across a medieval gay bar — all scenarios unimaginable in the pre-programmed world of Everquest.

The kind of commitment and verbosity that Pendrell’s players evidence is made possible, surprisingly enough, by the delayed nature of play. While the action in an e-mail campaign can seem glacial compared to that of a real-time role-playing game, that’s just fine with players who can’t or don’t want to commit several hours at a stretch. Most of Pendrell’s campaigners are professionals, many are married and some have kids — yet most can scrounge a few moments each day to send off an e-mail message and stay in the game.

“Personally, I hate real-time games,” Loomis says. “I feel rushed. Quick-quick, what am I gonna do, what am I gonna do. I prefer to get my move, look it over, savor it awhile … and at my leisure decide what to do and turn in the results.”

Such complaints may lie behind the so-called “churn rate” faced by some online games. “Both Ultima Online and Everquest claim to have over 125,000 users,” says Greg Costikyan, a long time game designer and author of the just-released report “The Future of Online Gaming.” “On the other hand, Ultima Online I think has sold more than 400,000 copies and Everquest about 300,000, which means the majority of the people who bought Ultima Online … have decided not to renew their subscriptions. So clearly churn rate is an issue.”

Fannon remains convinced that the antidote to churn is a more rewarding degree of interpersonal contact. In order to offer graphics-based game players options beyond “just walking off into the wilderness and seeing what happens,” he hopes to adapt some of the elements found in e-mail gaming and MUDs. He’s particularly excited about the prospect of assembling networks of skilled facilitators — in short, online dungeon masters — who can guide newcomers toward a satisfying experience.

“The next level of online gaming is not about the technology,” he says. “It’s about the social engineering.”

The most enduring, yet least publicized, of Be’s ever-changing identities is the one that’s carried it for much of its lifetime: its reputation among hardcore geeks for creating irresistibly whizzy new technology. The BeOS’s 64-bit file system, for instance, is unprecedented. As Neal Stephenson wrote in a recent online manifesto that likened the various operating-system concerns to automobiles, if Windows is the equivalent of a station wagon and the Mac OS is a “sleek, Euro-styled sedan,” then Linux is a tank — and the BeOS a Batmobile.

“What Be has done in OS technology is kind of breathtaking,” agrees Scot Hacker, co-author of “The BeOS Bible.” “They’ve taken all the futuristic buzzwords that other OSes would like to incorporate and actually implemented them. That’s kind of like erotica for geeks.”

Turbo-charged code may raise pulses in IT departments, but the marketplace is another matter. Skeptics point out that the BeOS has a bare handful of applications and a minuscule user base. “Word of mouth is a very powerful advertising tool, but you’ve got many forces at work here,” says Lawrence York, co-manager of the WWW Internet Fund, which invests heavily in technology stocks. York, for one, isn’t betting on Be making it big.

Adding to such doubts was the company’s recent announcement that it may start giving away its product. This move seems aimed at duplicating the bootstrap success of Linux, which has spawned auspicious ventures that produce proprietary software and peddle dirt-cheap Linux boxes. Two makers of sub-$500 PCs, Microworkz and iDot, recently announced their machines will run the BeOS. Along with the network of volunteer coders busily writing device drivers and porting their favorite applications, such partnerships could fuel a Linux-like groundswell for Be. Or not. “It’s a model that has been used successfully in the past,” York says. “I wish them success, [but] it’s extremely difficult. I would give them a low probability of success.”

Suddenly, fantasy was becoming reality. Everybody wanted to be online. “Technology as lifestyle” magazines like Wired, Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing appeared. Ordinary people, people in the suburbs, started having Net sex and hanging out in newsgroups and reading books with titles like “Virtual Community” and “The Cyberpunk Handbook.” Geeks were in demand — not just in the job market but on television. On television! To be interviewed by the expensively hairdo’d former cheerleaders who’d once seemed tangible only within the confines of 2 a.m. masturbational fever-dreams! It was unreal.

All this had kind of a funny effect on the prognosticators. Of course, their books were read more widely than ever before — and they were invited to ride the wave, to consult on sci-fi films and write magazine articles about the high-tech world. But that insiderism corroded vision. Cyber novels in the ’90s haven’t had as many jazzy new ideas in them as the early books did. The big ideas are still there, but ’90s cyberpunk — Gibson’s “Idoru” (1995), Sterling’s “Holy Fire” (1996), Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” (1995) — has by and large continued to mull over concepts introduced a decade ago. And with the real world mainstreaming the Net world as fast as it can, it’s begun to look as though the deeper potential of cyberpunk, the philosophical freak-outs the movement promised, will never be realized on a large scale.

That’s why cyberpunk icon Rudy Rucker calls his new nonfiction collection “Seek!” The command is distilled from “Seek ye the gnarl,” a typically wacked-out catchphrase he came up with while writing a manual for artificial life software — software that allows computers to simulate the behavior of living cells.

“‘Gnarl’ is being used here in the sense of ‘gnarly,’ which is one of my favorite words now that I live in California,” he writes in the introduction to “Seek.” “I use it to apply to things that have a level of chaos that is tuned right to the boundary between order and disorder.” To seek the gnarl, therefore, is to look for that level of chaos in everything. Anybody can seek the gnarl, and should, Rucker believes — for to do so makes one a cultural saboteur.

Finding and maintaining chaos is Rucker’s answer to the forces that would normalize his ideas. The ubiquity of this organized disorder is such a trippy idea, it’s inherently resistant to mainstream assimilation. It’s also a totalizing philosophy. As is clear throughout “Seek,” Rucker believes gnarliness to be the defining quality of life, the universe and everything — even human thought. He sums this up in “California New Edge,” an essay originally published as the introduction to Mondo 2000′s “1992 User’s Guide to the New Edge:”

“A potentially infinite information structure can emerge from one simple equation, if the equation is iteratively coupled to a repetitive computation,” he writes. “And THAT could very well be how the world is made, you dig, a simple rule plus lots and lots of computation. The world’s ‘rule’ is the Secret of Life and the world’s ‘computer’ is matter — pursuing the analogy another step, the ‘system software’ for the world’s ‘computer’ is physics.”

Rucker reiterates this metaphor of the world as a computer throughout “Seek.” In essays written over a decade he returns again and again to gnarliness, finding it in a dizzying array of situations and questions. His favorite metaphor for all things gnarly is the Mandelbrot Set, that mystically complex, surprisingly deep, yet mathematically definable icon of chaos theory. It pops up repeatedly in his essays, whether he’s writing about chaos itself or life in California or visiting Japan. And the ideas exemplified by the Mandelbrot Set are visible in virtually every “Seek” here, which are themselves chaotically various, yet united by common themes.

With giddy self-confidence, Rucker pontificates about nanotechnology, complex mathematics, Japan’s high-tech culture, the oddities of Silicon Valley, artificial life, chip fabrication plants and hacking code — and about drugs, hiking in Yosemite, mysticism, scuba diving in the South Pacific, Pieter Bruegel, Jerry Falwell, Ivan Stang and a dog named Arf. The implicit message is one that’s popular among techies: If you have a certain set of tools, you can master anything.

Your reaction to this maxim will probably have a lot to do with where you’re coming from. Anyone who’s devoted significant time to studying history and literature will chuckle incredulously at, for example, Rucker’s hygienic formula for assessing literary value. As a humanities person myself, I’m impelled to quote it at some length in hopes of spurring a chorus of obloquy among my fellows:

The information in a pattern P is equal to the length of the shortest computer program that can generate P. This quantity, also known as algorithmic complexity, can be defined quite precisely and rigorously. If I find a certain SF novel about cats in outer space stupid and boring, it may not just be that I don’t like cats. It may be that the book really is stupid and boring, as can be witnessed by the fact that the book has a very low information-theoretic complexity … If I say something is boring, it’s not just my cruelty speaking. It’s objective fact. Something either has a lot of information or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t have much information, it’s a waste of time.

This sounds like a blueprint for self-satisfied sterility. Oddly, though, Rucker and many other cyberpunks couple such faith in overarching order with a decidedly unruly approach to society. Rucker conducts his life in a spirit of ’60s-style anarchy: taking drugs, shrugging off momentary hankerings for wealth and status, deliberately irritating the powerful. With such experiences to draw on, his autobiographical writings are ceaselessly effervescent. He tells of wandering around New York City in a druggy daze, contemplating God while hiking in the mountains, fumbling with Japanese culture during a visit there — all in fast-moving, colorful prose that dances and sparkles with life.

In one memorable passage he recounts how he gave the finger to his neighbor, Moral Majority leader Cal Thomas. “Christ sent me here to take you and Jerry [Falwell] out!” he shouted drunkenly. Beset with remorse two days later, Rucker dropped off an apologetic letter and a copy of his book “Infinity and the Mind.” (“I was nervous doing this, as Friday he’d intimated he’d shoot me if I ever stepped on his property again.”) Thomas responded graciously with a letter of his own and a copy of his book, “Book Burning.” And so a tacit peace was reached — though Rucker notes that shortly thereafter, Falwell spoke out against “this poisonous rot,” science fiction.

“Seek” is full of goofy stories like this interspersed with optimistic reports on cool new technologies. Together they make this collection, much of which was written in the late ’80s and early ’90s, an extended flashback to the Net’s carefree period. Its bad-boy quality is a welcome antidote to the banal avarice that’s enervated the tech world. In an era when silicon millionaires devote their time to attending stuporous parties and dreaming up ever-more-garish ways to squander wealth, it’s nice to be reminded of the radical promise the Internet once held.

Interestingly, though, such radicalism seems to go hand in hand with scientific arrogance, both in Rucker’s book and in the real world. Are they inextricably intertwined? It’s hard to say. They’re certainly closely related, as Rucker’s description of the impact of the modern computer revolution shows.

“Thanks to high-tech and the breakdown of society, you’re free to turn your back on the way ‘they’ do it, whatever it might be, and do it yourself,” he writes. “Before hackers it seemed like you needed a factory and an accountant and a bunch of workers before you could actually make something. But in the information economy, you can package it up and ship it right from your home.”

A certain arrogance is required for such solitary ventures. It’s also, apparently, a factor in Rucker’s continuing creation of his wacky worlds. Certainly it took a zealot’s stubbornness to forge a new mold for science fiction back in the dead zone of the early ’80s. Whether arrogance is necessary to the tech revolution as a whole — whether the progress of science will inevitably eliminate uncertainty and awe — remains an open question. Maybe, if they can jar themselves out of their current rut, the cyberpunks will take that up next.

Yet, somehow, Roberts is still the talismanic megastar she was in
1992, when Robert Altman and Michael Tolkin satirized her status in “The
Player.” Remember? Her unbeatable bankability was the movie’s running joke; her name was
uttered like an incantation (usually in the company of that other magic
phrase, “Pretty Woman”). Finally, in the climatic moment of the movie-within-the-movie,
the Pretty Woman appeared — but not to flash that gleaming smile she’s so
famous for. Instead, she played a death-row inmate who was rescued at the
last minute from a gruesome, wrongful execution. It was a vignette that
proved oddly prescient in its summation of Roberts’ clout. For all the
talk of her lovely smile, her real knack is for suffering — and that,
apparently, is priceless.

A quick review of her oeuvre confirms Roberts as the queen of misery. This
actress who can be so infectiously effervescent, who clowns and laughs
more adorably than any other person on earth, spends nearly all her time playing characters who
are frightened, abandoned, rejected or just generally melancholy. She
was afraid for her life in “Sleeping With the Enemy,” “Pelican Brief,” “Mary
Reilly” and “Conspiracy Theory”; lonely in “Dying Young,” “Something to Talk
About” and “My Best Friend’s Wedding”; exhausted in “Ready to Wear” and
“Stepmom.” And let’s not forget 1989′s “Steel Magnolias,” in which she died of
diabetes.

Roberts didn’t have much control over her career back when “Magnolias” was made, of course.
She was a new face then, the only unknown in a cast of divas. But she’s since
left her fellow Magnolias in the dust, along with virtually every other
actress in Hollywood. One of only six actresses to make Premiere magazine’s 1999 “Power 100″ list,
she’s the highest-ranking at No. 33. But unlike some of her contemporaries (Demi Moore springs to mind),
she hasn’t used her Hollywood power to choose power roles, opting instead for the
frightened maid in “Mary Reilly,” the fragile pawn in “Conspiracy Theory” and the neurotic homewrecker in “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” She may have executive-produced “Stepmom,”
and even tinkered with the script, but she didn’t dilute her role as the klutzy,
disdained newcomer to Susan Sarandon’s perfect matriarch.

Of course, Roberts has her real-life woes as well — first among them
the notoriously oppressive tabloid scrutiny under which she’s huddled for
the past nine years. No star seems less comfortable with fame than
Roberts, and no star is more widely pitied for it. Magazine writers never
grow tired of clucking over her fear of flashbulbs; in the June Vanity Fair,
Ned Zeman marvels at how the local New York press “has detailed the minutiae of her life with a level of
tediousness that borders on breathtaking,” generously observing that in spite of this she displays only
“fairly gentle … gallows humor.” She may have developed a degree of aplomb in recent years, but that’s because she somehow managed,
as People magazine wrote in January, to “conquer … her dread of the Hollywood
glare.” Well, it’s about time. Usually Roberts approaches a red carpet as
if it leads to a dentist’s chair. When photographers snap her out on the
town, invariably her expression is one of weary beleaguerment.

“Notting Hill” is the perfect climax to this pageant of pain. It executes an
astonishing switcheroo: celebrating its star’s incomparable glamour and
success, then placing her among ordinary people and managing,
miraculously, to make her seem pitiable by comparison. Not pitiful:
there’s no question that Roberts’ character enjoys her status. But that doesn’t
mean she doesn’t suffer. In a remarkable scene, she and several of
William’s ordinary friends playfully argue about who among them is the
worst off. The circle includes a low-paid record store clerk, a chubby
stockbroker on the verge of being fired and a woman in a
wheelchair — yet somehow, when it’s Anna’s turn, those wet brown eyes make
us sympathize. A moment later the group dissolves into laughter at her
lightweight list of troubles (painful nose job, mean boyfriends), but this
dismissal is more ritualistic than real. It echoes the audience’s own
mixed feelings about celebrity in order to neutralize them.
And Thacker, naturally, is the perfect stand-in for the average audience
member. Dogged by rabid paparazzi, he reproaches Anna: “My
best friend is confined to a wheelchair for life!” he shouts. “I’m just asking you to
have some sense of perspective!”

This dismissal is, in a sense, what the movie — and Roberts’ whole persona — is all about.
“Notting Hill” is the tale of a goddess brought low by a mortal, and Roberts has been brought low by her
fans again and again. She gives her public the vicious thrill of seeing
just how thoroughly they’ve harassed her.
She doesn’t hide how often their attention has made her cry. Despite her eventual vindication in both the film
and in her real life, she’s still dependent on our goodwill. As her character reminds Thacker, “The fame thing isn’t really real, you
know. I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking you to love
her.” Confusing grammar aside, such a bald-faced plea is
irresistible. All Roberts’ money, fame and power
is forgotten; we see only a lonely little girl we can root for with all
our hearts.

It’s hard to say how deliberate Roberts’ act is, but at some level she
clearly understands the sadistic impulse that lurks within celebrity
culture. She has some grasp, either explicit or intuitive, of how the
masses need to destroy their idols — particularly their female idols. Male
stars may be father-gods, hunky protectors men can emulate and women
adore, but female stars must possess some fatal frailty — incompetence,
less-than-perfect looks, self-doubt. Otherwise they’re too threatening to
the onlooker’s fantasy of connecting with that powerful male. The actors
on the screen become frustrated Oedipal parents, forming a seamless
union that shuts the needy spectator out.

Roberts, on the other hand, brings the spectator into the scene. In this respect,
she’s the only major star in our era to evoke the screen queens of Hollywood’s
golden age. Not Katharine Hepburn — though “I Love Trouble” and
“My Best Friend’s Wedding” begged for comparison (Hepburn was too scrappy,
not tragic enough).
Roberts’ true foremothers are the drama queens: Bette
Davis, star of a succession of popular “women’s weepies” (to which “Stepmom”
explicitly harks back), and Joan Crawford, so glamorously miserable in
“Mildred Pierce.”

Other contemporary female stars try to muster this larger-than-life,
old-Hollywood aura, but they overlook its subtle yet definitive note of
vulnerability. Particularly in feminism’s wake, Hollywood actresses are
determined to show off their empowerment on-screen. Demi Moore, Sharon
Stone and Geena Davis have all struck a Helen Reddyish superwoman pose,
and all have paid a price — particularly Stone. After bragging about her
looks and determinedly trying to be a “serious” actress, she’s quietly loathed by women everywhere.

Roberts could never be treated that way, because she gives her public all
the power. She never lets the audience forget her fate is in their hands.
Like an Aztec king or stigmata’d saint, she offers herself willingly to
the bloodthirsty mob.

Even in her most upbeat film, “Pretty Woman,” this remained her central role.
That movie’s success befuddled critics at the time — particularly feminists, who
were knocked for a loop by its uncanny appeal. Elayne Rapping, perhaps
the last unabashedly angry feminist writer in America, wrote, “The movie,
I confess, tickled me.” Years later, “Pretty Woman” remains the classic
guilty pleasure.

Critics have attributed this appeal to everything from subconscious
prostitute fantasies to Roberts’ megawatt smile, but Daphne Merkin offered
the most compelling explanation in her 1990 article “The Knight in Shining Armani.”
The film’s appeal for women, Merkin wrote, lay in the story of a woman who, “in the course of
teaching a driven corporate raider how to feel, earns not only a whole new
wardrobe culled from Rodeo Drive, but also his love.” The key word here is
“earns.” In “Pretty Woman,” like in all her roles, Roberts made a spectacle of sacrifice.
Her character endured a boggling array of humiliations — prostituted, snubbed, doubted, insulted, patronized,
assaulted, nearly raped — before her selfless forbearance eventually won
out. “Pretty Woman” was the story of a martyr, a virgin/whore Madonna who
did everything but weep blood to sanctify her suffering.

Roberts’ clean-hearted prostitute remains a secular saint to this day.
(Aware of this, the writers of “Notting Hill” make two separate references to her
signature role.) The working girl’s mortification at the hands of a couple
of gimlet-eyed Rodeo Drive salesladies nearly a decade ago won her permanent underdog status, as well as the
allegiance of an audience that needs reassuring. As a teary Lisa Kudrow tells Mira Sorvino in “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion”
– noting that’s she’s seen “Pretty Woman” 36 times — “I just get really happy when they finally let her shop.”

Hunt and psychology major Kerry Delf filed a religious discrimination
complaint with the university’s office of affirmative action and put out
word on the Net, garnering a blizzard of angry e-mails and articles in the
campus and town newspapers. The computer center responded with a 3,000-word document defending its policies and musing on whether Satanism was a religion at all, or “merely a cultural practice … such as … tailgate parties … [or] Scandinavian folk songs. “Finally the office of affirmative action pronounced its solution to the
matter: a committee. Holding that St. Sauver’s actions “could be perceived
as discrimination, albeit unintentional,” it ordered that “formal general
guidelines regarding university newsgroups be developed.”
Meanwhile, the students say, St. Sauver has retaliated, sabotaging the
Usenet system with a technical trick. He reduced the amount of time
messages are kept on the system from the standard week or two to a single
day, making discussion difficult.