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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.11 - FEBRUARY 2001
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What's A Digital Media Futurist? HK: Did you think that it would make them feel less like victims and more empowered by finding information and asking questions in this format? JVT: I didn't even think of that. You know, we didn't have the Internet then, so I didn't have a framework for it and that's why I didn't look to support it particularly in theory. Therefore I couldn't really write it up, but that was the conclusion that I reached, yes. HK: So you just put it out there saying, 'I wonder how they will react to this different, interactive stimuli?' JVT: I did have some things that I did test that I would say really supported some of the research, which is that people in the interactive group actually experienced more emotions and a wider range of emotions. Consequently their intellectual grasp of the material suffered a little bit because they could go back over things and really deepen their emotional response to it. Let me tell you, side effects is a very emotional thing for a cancer patient. You are going to be sick. You are going to lose your hair. Nobody wants to hear this. Part of the question was, "Could you use an interactive device, like a computer, especially if it had video material, in place of a person?" Which initially sounds horrible, but consider this, would you rather have a well produced piece or a nurse practitioner at 4:00 p.m., who has already told eight people the effects of cancer treatment? That person has been through a lot and so at the end of the day they may forget to tell you things. They have had their own emotional experiences that day. HK: So these pieces that you produced, they had video and then they also had...I am just trying to figure how it worked...how it was interactive. JVT: The video pieces were the same. The people who saw linear video, that's all they saw; all the pieces put together. But in the interactive conditions I broke them up in different ways. It looked like TV. HK: If you had a question could you go more into that area and then skip other areas? JVT: .You couldn't skip, but it looked like you did. HK: Were they interacting with the other patients as well? JVT: No. When I got out of grad school I went back to television. I started teaching but I wasn't able to stay there because I realized that the students' world was going to be changed within ten years of their graduating. I couldn't stand the idea of not equipping them for it. I became more and more tilted toward digital media. Gradually it took over, and here I am, totally digitized. HK: How do you spend your time now? I know that you've been at Pepperdine and at UCLA. Do you do special seminars? JVT: I do at UCLA. I taught as a faculty member at Pepperdine, but I stopped because of my full-time writing. I wanted to write more because at the Annenberg school, I was given this vision of the new communications of the world and I will tell you how I thought of it: it is global, high definition, interactive, two way communication networks. HK: Which is where we are heading very quickly. JVT: I have a 50-year timeline. It's not so much high definition as it is variable bit rates. So it's a variable definition depending on what your needs are and what the infrastructure permits. For instance, you are not going to have broadband wireless everywhere anytime soon. HK: But pieces and chunks will eventually come together. JVT: They are already here! A really completed global network is what I consider the work of the 21st Century. This is what we are doing. HK: In The Industry Standard, they had pictures of underwater cable that was laid a year ago versus this year and it was just incredible! From these threads to these chunks of red. We are building a whole new infrastructure. How do you think gaming, or what gaming is going to evolve into, is going to fit into this new structure? JVT: I started out like everybody else on consoles. Then in about 1987, I went online to things like MUOOS, Multi User Object Oriented Spaces. They weren't so game oriented. They were more like chat rooms where you imagined the space that you were in. It was a sort of collectively designed space. MUOOS was very much the forerunner to things like Ultima. You got to be an immortal by designing an area. You came into the central square and it would be a kingdom of some kind. A lot of them had this medieval idea to them. There were usually multiple kinds of points and you chose the kind of player that you were. At any given time you could alter your communication between whisper, talk and shout. You could talk to one person, to only the people on your team or to everyone in that location, which was shouting. You used words in little pointy brackets to indicate, 'Joan curtseys,' or 'Joan waves.' I went on a few times and then a guy contacted me and I got on his team. You could be a warrior, magician, etc. There were things written into the game so you had to sleep and eat, which means you had to stop what you were doing and go take care of business. If you didn't you ran out of what were called "mana" points. There were three kinds of points to get: money, killing points to get weapons, and then there were mana points, which were power points. If you ran out of power points then you couldn't go anywhere and had to sit out a whole round. You can see all these elements coming together now in the online, multi-player games. My general belief about this is that there will always be a market for fictional entertainment and that games are the template for what will be in the interactive environment. So far we have about 30 years of interactive entertainment development. The only successful ones that I have really seen are games. One thing that has not migrated has been traditional drama/comedy type programming. But where you do see it is in games like Ultima. Ultima was developed out of MUOOS. It is an online game that takes place in a sort of vaguely medieval space. A player is born into Ultima pretty much like you were born into the world: naked, crying and alone. You have to accumulate an identity and it takes a long time. It also costs $10 a month. The more time you spend the easier your identity will become. You buy property, you build a house and you take on an occupation. There is actually quite a conflict between the settlers and the soldiers so to speak. The same conflict if you had a house in Woodland Hills and people were always starting wars. It's really very funny. Pretty much the users keep the story moving; 90% of the story is moved by the players. But they have a staff of writers and if they begin to feel there needs to be some big event then they will stage it. Or they have celebrities come on who play characters. It's starting to take on some of the characteristics; the attention to detail, individual environments, the use of writers to quote 'move the story along.' I think some people have been looking at the wrong format. Look at DEN and the most recent crop of failures. What was their template? TV. TV is not natively interactive and isn't going to work. Games have a native interaction to them. No matter how fast or slow, they just do, so they fit the interactive environment really well. We are going to see many, many, many more ways of doing games that are collaborative, dramatic environments; fantasy environments. HK: So when your TV/computer et. al. is one, you might have the option of watching TV or a movie as we know it today, or interacting in one of these environments? JVT: Yes. Who wouldn't want to have a big, beautiful game that's 8 x 10 while you're leaning on the couch eating grapes with your horizontally and vertically fixed air mouse? It probably won't work for twitch games very well though.
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