Once upon a time, CD-ROMs were the thing. “Look at all you can do! Things move! There’s hi-res color and sound! It’s like a movie, where you can be a part of creating the story!” Which sounds hokey in retrospect, but back then, it started to grab my attention, and I decided to make a go of it, largely because of outfits such as Voyager Company. Finally, here was a company that made things I cared about! They were a huge influence in my trying to stick out being in the tech industry, as was Chris Crawford, who wrote the cold war geopolitics game Balance of Power. I started to feel like I’d found my niche in the tech industry, even though the format was small (try to get animation along with graphics and audio onto a 640 MB disk) and the coding, janky. It was my second love affair with computers, after learning how to program BASIC on a Commodore – I was a lot more cynical about the industry by then, but it was starting to rekindle some of my passion for the potential benefits of technology in society, including creatively.
Then? It all fell apart. (The joke at the time was that multimedia was a “zero billion dollar industry” – which is part of the problem, investors and wannabe tech moguls were looking for the thing that would make them even more rich.) Voyager effectively went out of business (although part of it lives on in The Criterion Collection, in relation to film), other companies did as well, and that was that.
Shortly thereafter, the modern web was born, in all its glory and soon-to-be crass commercialization. For a while, it looked like the web was going to continue the best aspects of multimedia, with more accessibility and less dependency on the limits of physical media at the time. But that was replaced by “Web 2.0” – in other words, the commercialization of the web, as a commons.
The result was that titles such as “Live from Death Row” and “How the Other Half Lives” were replaced by things starting with “e” and Amazon. (People used to laugh at Jeff Bezos saying that Amazon’s goal was to subsume all of retail – that is, until it actually started to happen.) There are ways the web as we know it compensated for that, at least somewhat – but back in the CD-ROM days, titles such as these were just part of the fabric of the industry. There was enough happening of interest that it made putting up with the likes of Bill Gates almost bearable – that is, until the attempts to turn multimedia into a Hollywood-meets-Silicon-Valley cash cow failed, and people jumped over to the web instead. It was enough of an awful turn of events that I’m still pissed off about it.
On Chris Crawford’s end, he stopped making titles for a long while, once first-person shooters became popular. Never one to mince words, he expanded at great length about how fucked things were. Which was even more heartbreaking, because the industry came very close to being something like the feature documentary part of the film industry, but with an actual revenue stream to fund projects like the ones i mentioned in-house.
There’s definitely a humanistic streak through tech that’s been around for decades, but time and again, it gets plowed over by opportunism and greed. Disrupting things and its close cousin, acceleration are like kryptonite to the creative process, as well as creating and releasing digital art in all its forms. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve had to retool everything I’m doing because some asshole or group of assholes in offices somewhere decided it would be a good time to do so.
Now, though? I think about making art pre-computers a lot, given the times we’re all in. “If everything collapsed, including the electrical grid, what would I have”. It’d be awkward for a while, but I have my hands, my voice and whatever acoustic instruments that I play. so, a start. Same goes for writing – pen and paper. If there’s no paper, I could make it. Same goes for ink, although my knowledge around both is limited. Notation books and pencils at the public reuse exchange:
“What’s this paper with the bars and lines on it?”
“No idea, but i’ll give you a bag of turnips for it.”
“Sold.”
I’m a musician and a writer. Both of which are professions – yes, professions – that are controlled by large hegemonic institutions, that are based off of a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” model of labor, including when you’re signed. In other words, you get an advance (hopefully) and then, you produce new work which is accepted (hopefully) and released (hopefully), frequently with little to no likelihood that the advance will be recouped and a vary paltry form of profit-sharing will kick in, with an even smaller chance of fame and fortune.
But for a time, multimedia showed a way that arts and technology could join forces, while still reflecting the creative spirit that is inside us all (hopefully.) It looked as if the tech industry and the arts industries had a common ground, where the rules were more like documentary film, but with a sustainable revenue stream, at least potentially.
That all said, much of the indie games scene, especially in its smallest, “opposite of multi-million dollar AAA titles” form, reminds me of multimedia, as does the wide range of musicians on platforms such as Bandcamp. (I wish I could say the same for the “free” software community, which seems to be a “zero billion dollar industry” of its own when it comes to ethics far too often.) Here’s to its spirit, long may it flourish – in whatever form it takes.
