Because the future has just started
A lot of what I do is go out into the world and talk about the future. And always I do it with live demos.
Why go through so much trouble and preparation to talk about something that hasn’t even happened yet? Today I talk about that in my Future Reality Lab blog post.
I have always had mixed feelings about interactive narrative. On the one hand, it’s a subject of endless fascination in some quarters.
There have been entire conferences devoted to the liminal space between game and story. What if we, the reader or viewer, had the power to change the outcome of a narrative?
Yet every time I actually encounter such a thing, I feel a sense of disappointment. When I am being asked to make decisions about what I am viewing, I feel less immersed in the experience.
My best theory about this is that the part of our mind which listens to a story is very different from the part of our mind which makes active decisions. It’s not that being an audience is a passive experience — on the contrary, it’s a very active experience.
To be a member of an audience is to accept a contract to perform a very particular kind of work. We are agreeing to use our minds to understand where a story is going, to find resonance in the characters and their journeys, to connect the particulars of the plot with larger themes.
If you ask an audience member to do a different kind of work — to actually choose the outcome of the story — then you are breaking that contract. I think interactive narrative fails not because it asks too much of us, but because it asks too little.
I watched the first episode of the reboot of Roswell, after reading the on-line Netflix reviews. I was intrigued that every review is either near 10 (awesome) or near 1 (awful).
When you read the reviews, the reason becomes clear. The reboot has been cleverly configured as a star-crossed (literally!) love story between two young people whose parents were aliens. Both of the young lovers want desperately to fit in, to simply be acknowledged and allowed to chip in as a productive member of society.
Both lovers fear, above all, becoming identified as an “other”, rather than as a unique individual. The thing that makes all this so clever is that the heritage of one the young lovers is outer space, and the heritage of the other is Mexico.
It seems that about 40% of viewers who left a review think this approach is a blatant left-wing politicization of a once beloved show. I strongly disagree, yet it’s hard for me to be objective, since I clearly belong to the other 60% of viewers.
But I will give it a go: The entire point of the original Roswell was sympathy for misunderstood and persecuted children of alien parents. All the producers of the reboot have done is emphasize that exact point in a way that would resonate in 2019.
Unless of course you have no sympathy for hapless young people of alien heritage, just trying their best to get by in a sometimes hostile world. In which case, why were you watching a show like Roswell in the first place?
O Poet! my Poet! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Poet! dear teacher!
Your words live in my head!
It is some dream that on this earth,
You’ve long been cold and dead.
Today is the 30th day of the 5th month of the year, and also the 150th day of the year. If you multiply the day of the month (30) by the number of the month (5), the result is the number of days in the year so far (150).
How rare an event is this? Is this something we can say is true for many days of the year? Obviously it is true for all 31 days in the month of January, but that’s a sort of degenerate case.
Not counting January, how many days in the year have this unusual numerical property?
Let’s hearken back to a time pre-millennial
For today is a calendar date most centennial
When Eddington went on the trip of all trips
To Príncipe, where he measured the total eclipse
Which led to a truth most perennial
‘Twas a topic, they say, of some sensitivity
Noted physicists felt extreme negativity
Toward Einstein, whose spirits were certainly lifted
When all of the stars on the photo-plate shifted
Which confirmed, for all time, relativity
Yes, in case you were wondering, as we all watch the daily outpouring of idiocy, the thought has indeed occurred to me: Our so-called “president”, and the current U.S. “administration”, is in fact a parody created by Mad Magazine.
The only thing that puzzles me is this: Has Mad Magazine ever sunk to this level of juvenalia? I would have thought that even they would have had more dignity than this.
Alas, I have a suspicious feeling that if Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Gaines were alive today, they’d be turning in their graves — not from despair, but from jealousy. It has taken more than half a century, yet finally somebody has succeeded in creating a parody that is ridiculous beyond even their wildest dreams.
Is there one here among us, who dislikes the tea fungus?
How lucky for me, to drink kargasok tea
I hear Titus Andronicus drank fungus japonicus,
And down in the Congo they like to sip hongo
In old Vietnam they’re enjoying teeschwamm
Meanwhile in Madras they drink loads of teekwass
And the knights toast their leige with a pint of cajnij
Whereas in Macao they all drink fine haipao
After which thereupon they will take some kwassan
While somewhere in Toronto they will serve you spumonto
Where a start-up (a Newco) prefers fresh tschambucco
And sometimes for thrills they will try wunderpilz
So perhaps it would suit ya to drink some kombucha
talking it all through
won’t always solve the problem
but it couldn’t hurt
At a meeting the other day at our lab, one of our invited guests was Professor Hiroshi Ishii from the MIT Media Lab. After experiencing our co-located VR technology, he issued the following challenge: How can we know when our technology has really succeeded?
But Hiroshi went further than that. What he was really seeking was a clear and concise answer.
So he looked at everyone around the table, and challenged us to convey our answer in the form of a haiku. I thought this was a very fair test, and I gave him the following seventeen syllable response:
i foresee a day
when we’ll use our tech within
a meeting like this