If you burrow far enough into the “massive video database” of the new CD-ROM Total Distortion, you’ll eventually stumble upon a full-length anthem of creative angst — a song written by Total Distortion’s chief creator, Joe Sparks, about his own difficulties in completing the long-awaited game.
People say “quit” but not quite yet
Just a few more things to do. . .
We’ve got to saw it off and ship it
In a box
Saw it off and ship it
And send it on out, now.
Total Distortion has been the most celebrated example of multimedia vaporware for so long — close to four years — that it’s hard to believe Sparks and his company, Pop Rocket, have finally sawed off their product and shipped it. Clearly, the operation involved some pain.
What’s in the box? Total Distortion casts you as a music-video entrepreneur — male or female, your choice — combing an alien universe called the Distortion Dimension for hot clips to sell to picky Earthside DJs. Its creators call it a “music-video adventure game;” it’s something like a role-playing game inside a Myst-like environment with a make-your-own-video module at its heart.
You can play Total Distortion and get your money’s worth without ever leaving your “Personal Media Tower” and its video-editing console. (A sort of sophisticated toy version of programs like Premiere, it lets you mix sound, titles and three graphic layers into videos that you can save, trade and even enter into contests at Pop Rocket’s web site.) But to win the game, you need to earn money and “fame points” — and avoid getting blasted to sonic bits by hulking “Guitar Warriors” whom you must face in chord-to-chord combat.
Ambitious multimedia innovators usually shy away from the “game” label. They seek to remove complex gaming elements from their creations — to banish the buttons and inventories and combat systems that traditionally clutter a game’s interface. They struggle to give audiences as transparently lifelike an experience as current technology allows. They want their games to feel like life.
Total Distortion gleefully charges in the other direction: it thumps its game-proud chest, dubbing itself, in one of its many opening screens, a “Great Big Game Thing!” And it translates every aspect of life into a sequence of gaming challenges.
It’s not just a matter of solving puzzles to get doors to open, as in Myst or The Seventh Guest; you must master little games simply for your character to sleep, eat and survive. If, for instance, you don’t learn to shoot down the evil grinning nightmares and, literally, “catch Zs,” your character will pass out from exhaustion — and Total Distortion will perform a nose-thumbing dance of victory over your corpse.
Life as a game: Total Distortion takes that slightly crazy concept to deliberately baroque extremes. Its genius lies in the way the game rewards you as you master it — not only with points but with new raw material for your art. The deeper you travel into the game’s rock ‘n’ roll universe, the more crunched-out music and spiky images you can carry home to use in your videos. If making those videos is enjoyable in itself — and it was for me — then Total Distortion has managed to reward not just your game character but you, too.
The game borrows its hyperactive aesthetics from its MTV-of-the-future subject matter. The Distortion Dimension turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a noisy place, a soup of soundbites — guitar licks, groans of pleasure, cries of “C’mon, baby” and “Not dead yet?” All of Total Distortion’s music was written and performed by the Pop Rocketeers themselves, and they’re featured in many of its video clips, too — along with people they found on the street near their Haight-Ashbury digs. Self-referential? Sure, but in an endearing way. In a marketplace full of junk CD-ROMs cranked out by corporate committees, here’s one that’s lovingly handcrafted — and covered with its creators’ fingerprints.
Strangely enough, the one thing Total Distortion isn’t going to feel like is a technological advance. Razzle-dazzle devices and techniques that looked revolutionary two years ago when Sparks previewed them at trade shows are now relatively common. For all its flash and fun, Total Distortion is less a breakthrough leap onto some new multimedia level than a summation of what’s gone before. It’s more the end of an era than the beginning.
The word “censorship” has popped up so often in public debate in the United States that we’re a little numb to its use. It’s been tossed around, often loosely, in arguments over TV violence, pop-culture excess, Madonna’s literary output and National Endowment for the Arts grants.
But now, with the enactment of the new 1996 Telecommunications Act, we’re suddenly faced with the real thing. This is not an argument over public funding, “chilling effects” or political correctness. It is a naked instance of brute government censorship, fueled by fear and ignorance.
The new Communications Decency Act, tacked onto the omnibus telecommunications bill and signed on Feb. 8 by President Clinton, applies fines of up to $250,000 and prison terms of up to two years for “indecent” expression online. What’s “indecent”? Legislators want you to think that their law is aimed only at the most despicable child pornographers. But the legal standard they’ve adopted is the broadest of brushes. It’s far more inclusive than “obscenity”; it means pretty much whatever your local judge says — really, whatever any local judge says, since the Internet globalizes all “local community standards.”
Under the new law, a publication might find that the same articles it can freely publish in print are illegal to distribute on the Net. An online discussion group might find its participants arrested for talking to one another. Web publishers, bulletin-board sysops, chat participants, e-mail senders are all breaking the law — as I am right now — should they dare utter a “fuck.” Or post information about birth control. Or reprint “Howl,” “Ulysses” or “Catcher in the Rye.”
How did we end up with this absurd, unconstitutional and probably unenforceable piece of legislation? If you followed the mainstream press coverage, it was a mere footnote to what we were told was the “real” story of the telecommunications bill — a massive “deregulation” of the media business opening the way for a free-for-all in which telephone companies, cable TV operators and media conglomerates will all invade one another’s turf, seek global domination and supposedly provide consumers with more choices.
The thinking behind the bill seems to be: while we’re deregulating corporate behavior, why don’t we regulate individual behavior, too? If we’re worried about what our children read and see, why should we take responsibility ourselves when our legislators and courts offer to play nanny for us?
In a way we should be thankful to the backers of the law. Spurred by inflated press accounts of “cyberporn” and fearful of a new medium they don’t understand, they have exposed just how fragile freedom of expression online really is. They have given us a chance, early in the development of this new medium, to fight for its right to be more open, democratic and responsive than the older media it increasingly competes with.
We know what happens when the censors move in on a young medium because it’s happened so many times before. The technology of “many-to-many” online communications has the potential to mimic many of the existing media — broadcast TV and radio, magazines and newspapers, “snail mail” and books and the telephone. Laws like the Communications Decency Act aim to stuff the new medium into the straitjackets of the old. And if we treat it like TV, the Net will surely become like TV.
The good news is that the nature of the technology itself — which bypasses international borders and makes centralized control difficult — renders laws like this almost irrelevant. Tools for individual users will soon accomplish whatever kind of personal filtering of “indecent” messages you want. (Intelligent agents will allow U.S. senators to block out all the porn they want from their own computers; meanwhile, I will be sure to bozo-filter Rush Limbaugh.)
The bad news is that we face long and expensive court battles to preserve our rights, with no guarantee that judges will uphold freedom of expression or recognize that computer networks are the kind of press worthy of First Amendment protection.
The battle is on now. If in a year or two you look out and find that the noisy, anarchic ferment of today’s Net has become a mute commercial wasteland, you’ll know precisely whom to blame.
“On air,” the sign says, only plainly you’re not. You’re sitting at a computer, playing a new quiz-show game called “You Don’t Know Jack.” The voice of a nervous producer counts off the cues, readying for broadcast, and an obnoxious prompter named Cookie starts snapping orders at you as if you’re wired up with earphones.
Before you know it, you’re answering questions on topics like “Communication and Gilligan’s Island,” “Pornography and Ornithology,” “Shakespearean Drink Orders” and “If you reproduce asexually, do you still have to pay for dinner?” “You Don’t Know Jack” bills itself as “the show where high culture and pop culture collide” — and the encounter can feel like a hit-and-run accident.
Unlike a lot of CD-ROM-based multimedia creations, “You Don’t Know Jack” requires no study or manuals; it’s easy to pick up because it so thoroughly mimics a familiar model. “Jack” is
game-show television transplanted to your desktop and implanted with a heavy dose of free-floating scorn. Playing it is like choosing a front-row seat at a comedy club: a certain amount of abuse comes with the territory.
The CD’s title is not, as you may guess at first glance, an invitation to make the acquaintance of a fellow named Jack — perhaps, say, the bullet-head who festoons the cover. Nor does it play off the media profile of well-known Jacks, like Nicholson and -in-the-Box. It’s instead a dirtball taunt that’s been coyly shorn of its vulgarity. (Though the game is full of rude references — “Let’s say your friend Norman named his penis ‘Joey’ after a newborn kangaroo,” one question begins — it’s shy of actual four-letter words.)
“You Don’t Know Jack” makes a science of the light sneer. “If you’re good at other trivia games,” the opening screens announce, “it don’t mean Jack now!”
Attitude isn’t something we’re accustomed to from software. Your word processor never informs you, say, that “you can’t write for beans!” And no spreadsheet ever adds up your rows and columns and announces, “Your business model sucks!”
But the makers of “You Don’t Know Jack” understand that they’re in the entertainment business. And the prime challenge for makers of entertainment software is to figure out how to get people to stop thinking of the computer as a workplace tool or an educational device and accept — without feeling too guilty — that it’s really just a high-priced toy.
“Jack” solves this problem by nakedly imitating radio and television — down to the curved-corner TV-screen shapes that litter its design, the mock-soulful jingles that introduce each question and the hyperactive drawl of the announcer, who sounds like a huckster hawking a motorbike sale on a progressive-rock station.
In today’s multimedia marketplace, full of colorless corporate products, such touches easily pass for personality — and “Jack” has proven a surprise retail hit for its publisher, Berkeley Systems, a company better known for its flying-toaster screensavers. “Jack” seems relatively glitch- and bug-free, which gives it a leg up on the competition from the start. And in its own snotty way, it’s genuinely fun. It may be pumped up with post-Letterman irony — but then so are most of us.
Still, you may find yourself a little uneasy after playing the game, and not just as a reaction to its speed and volume. There have been so few genuine hits in the CD-ROM market that every success like “You Don’t Know Jack” spawns a host of imitations. We can now expect a slew of pseudo-”Jacks,” most of them likely to be less clever, less cheeky and more middle-of-the-road.
But obviously “Jack” itself is an imitation, too. It’s media-savvy, has good production values and will appeal to executives in search of prototypes for interactive television programming. But it has sharply limited ambitions for itself: it’s basically a 15-minute novelty. And its dependence on a TV model is depressingly backward-looking. “You Don’t Know Jack” is ultra-hip about what kind of multimedia works right now, but it doesn’t know Jack — or Rudy, or Desmond — about the future.
