Why Can't Johnny Ship?

1. As individuals, we lack a clear understanding of makes a great interactive title. The interactive producer today is like the film director in 1923. We're still inventing cameras and making fundamental discoveries about film and sound.
   
2. Interactive multimedia has yet to find its own unique creative and production process. Developing interactive titles combines the complexity of software development, which benefits from small, tightly focused teams, with the complexity of a feature film production, which supports iterative layers of work by numerous highly skilled specialists. The domains of software and film pose very different requirements for managing work. Software demands intensive communication among the core programmers, reflecting the fact that one misplaced bit can cause the entire program to crash. Film emphasizes product over process, requiring good project coordination, traffic management, and resource management.
   
3. The market for interactive products is new and relatively immature. Producers in the Hollywood sense understand the delicate interplay between creative expression and bottom-line profitability. They're able to optimize the development of a given product to reflect its intended market. For the most part, multimedia publishers lack this degree of experience and a market in which they can apply it."
   

Moon makes some excellent points. However, I question the equation of film c. 1923 and multimedia today. Are the principles that underlie interactive presentation still so thoroughly uncodified? Is every title a completely new invention? Are we still making fundamental discoveries about tools and processes?

Let's look at a couple of interactive titles starting with Broderbund's successful Living Books line of CD-ROMs. These interactive children's books present stories in text and animation that can be viewed in a linear or interactive fashion. Broderbund created a Living Books engine that has served as the foundation for the entire product line. Although newer releases feature better animation and interactive design, the basic technology is much the same today as it was when Just Grandma and Me was published in 1992. The differences largely have been creative, and the creative emphasis has made Living Books a reliable purchase for parents.

Take another example, Cyan's breakthrough adventure game Myst. The company's first title, Manhole, presented a magical world of characters and places to explore. This black and white HyperCard title was one of the first ever to use a user interface in which objects in the scene serve as interface elements. If you want to go through a door, you click on the door. If you wanted to talk to Mr. Rabbit, you click on Mr. Rabbit. It sounds simple, but it was an original idea in 1988. Cyan refined this virtual-world concept to include animation with Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx. Myst combined the transparent interface with evocative imagery, inviting interactions, and a great story to produce on of the best-selling CD-ROMs yet.

The road from Manhole to Myst does parallel the progress of technology. Black and white illustrations became color 3D renderings. Music segments became longer, audio quality crisper. Nonetheless, the real advances were in the creative arena. Cyan created a challenging adventure game without using opaque interface elements such as a menu or inventory - no mean feat.

I once got into an argument with a successful game developer at Art Teco 1. It began something like this:

Me: "Would your CD-ROM adventure have been successful if you had published it five years ago for a black and white Macintosh?"

Him: "No."

Me: "It's not art, then."

(Huge argument follows.)

Actually, I think his title would have been fun on a black and white Mac five years ago. I also think he missed the point. Sure, you wouldn't want to ship an adventure game in black and white today. But using the latest technology doesn't guarantee success any more than shooting a film in Panavision wins you an Oscar.

The success of the title in question is a result of the experience of playing it. And what is that experience? It's the interface, puzzles, dialog, story, and - art. By art I mean more than the sounds and pictures. I mean the design of the interactive experience. The artist masters tools, but artistic expression transcends the tools, be they hammer and chisel or parallel processors.