Bruce Sterling

The Wonderful Power of Storytelling

Game conference speech: "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling"

From the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991, San Jose CA

Thank you very much for that introduction. I'd like to thank the

conference committee for their hospitality and kindness -- all

the cola you can drink -- and mind you those were genuine

twinkies too, none of those newfangled "Twinkies Lite" we've

been seeing too much of lately.

So anyway my name is Bruce Sterling and I'm a science fiction

writer from Austin Texas, and I'm here to deliver my speech now,

which I like to call "The Wonderful Power of Storytelling." I

like to call it that, because I plan to make brutal fun of that

whole idea... In fact I plan to flame on just any moment now, I

plan to cut loose, I plan to wound and scald tonight.... Because

why not, right? I mean, we're all adults, we're all

professionals here... I mean, professionals in totally different

arts, but you know, I can sense a certain simpatico vibe....

Actually I feel kind of like a mosasaur talking to dolphins

here.... We have a lot in common, we both swim, we both have big

sharp teeth, we both eat fish... But you look like a broadminded

crowd, so I'm sure you won't mind that I'm basically, like,

*reptilian*....

So anyway, you're probably wondering why I'm here tonight, some

hopeless dipshit literary author... and when am I going to get

started on the virtues and merits of the prose medium and its

goddamned wonderful storytelling. I mean, what else can I talk

about? What the hell do I know about game design? I don't even

know that the most lucrative target machine today is an IBM PC

clone with a 16 bit 8088 running at 5 MHZ. If you start talking

about depth of play versus presentation, I'm just gonna to stare

at you with blank incomprehension....

I'll tell you straight out why I'm here tonight. Why should I

even try to hide the sordid truth from a crowd this

perspicacious.... You see, six months ago I was in Austria at

this Electronic Arts Festival, which was a situation almost as

unlikely as this one, and my wife Nancy and I are sitting there

with William Gibson and Deb Gibson feeling very cool and rather

jetlagged and crispy around the edges, and in walks this

*woman.* Out of nowhere. Like J. Random Attractive Redhead,

right. And she sits down with her coffeecup right at our table.

And we peer at each other's namebadges, right, like, *who is

this person.* And her name is Brenda Laurel.

So what do I say? I say to this total stranger, I say. "Hey. Are

you the Brenda Laurel who did that book on *the art of the

computer-human interface*? You *are*? Wow, I loved that book."

And yes -- that's why I'm here as your guest speaker tonight,

ladies and gentleman. It's because I can think fast on my feet.

It's because I'm the kind of author who likes to hang out in

Adolf Hitler's home town with the High Priestess of Weird.

So ladies and gentlemen unfortunately I can't successfully

pretend that I know much about your profession. I mean actually

I do know a *few* things about your profession.... For instance,

I was on the far side of the Great Crash of 1984. I was one of

the civilian crashees, meaning that was about when I gave up

twitch games. That was when I gave up my Atari 800. As to why my

Atari 800 became a boat-anchor I'm still not sure.... It was

quite mysterious when it happened, it was inexplicable, kind of

like the passing of a pestilence or the waning of the moon. If I

understood this phenomenon I think I would really have my teeth

set into something profound and vitally interesting... Like, my

Atari still works today, I still own it. Why don't I get it out

of its box and fire up a few cartridges? Nothing physical

preventing me. Just some subtle but intense sense of revulsion.

Almost like a Sartrean nausea. Why this should be attached to a

piece of computer hardware is difficult to say.

My favorite games nowadays are Sim City, Sim Earth and Hidden

Agenda... I had Balance of the Planet on my hard disk, but I was

so stricken with guilt by the digitized photo of the author and

his spouse that I deleted the game, long before I could figure

out how to keep everybody on the Earth from starving....

Including myself and the author....

I'm especially fond of SimEarth. SimEarth is like a goldfish

bowl. I also have the actual goldfish bowl in the *After Dark*

Macintosh screen saver, but its charms waned for me, possibly

because the fish don't drive one another into extinction. I

theorize that this has something to do with a breakdown of the

old dichotomy of twitch games versus adventure, you know, arcade

zombie versus Mensa pinhead...

I can dimly see a kind of transcendance in electronic

entertainment coming with things like SimEarth, they seem like a

foreshadowing of what Alvin Toffler called the "intelligent

environment"... Not "games" in a classic sense, but things that

are just going on in the background somewhere, in an attractive

and elegant fashion, kind of like a pet cat... I think this kind

of digital toy might really go somewhere interesting.

What computer entertainment lacks most I think is a sense of

mystery. It's too left-brain.... I think there might be real

promise in game designs that offer less of a sense of nitpicking

mastery and control, and more of a sense of sleaziness and

bluesiness and smokiness. Not neat tinkertoy puzzles to be

decoded, not "treasure-hunts for assets," but creations with

some deeper sense of genuine artistic mystery.

I don't know if you've seen the work of a guy called William

Latham.... I got his work on a demo reel from Media Magic. I

never buy movies on video, but I really live for raw

computer-graphic demo reels. This William Latham is a heavy

dude... His tech isn't that impressive, he's got some kind of

fairly crude IBM mainframe cad-cam program in Winchester

England.... The thing that's most immediately striking about

Latham's computer artworks -- *ghost sculptures* he calls them

-- is that the guy really possesses a sense of taste. Fractal

art tends to be quite garish. Latham's stuff is very fractally

and organic, it's utterly weird, but at the same time it's very

accomplished and subtle. There's a quality of ecstasy and dread

to it... there's a sense of genuine enchantment there. A lot of

computer games are stuffed to the gunwales with enchanters and

wizards and so-called magic, but that kind of sci-fi cod

mysticism seems very dime-store stuff by comparison with Latham.

I like to imagine the future of computer games as being

something like the Steve Jackson Games bust by the Secret

Service, only in this case what they were busting wouldn't have

been a mistake, it would have been something actually quite

seriously inexplicable and possibly even a genuine cultural

threat.... Something of the sort may come from virtual reality.

I rather imagine something like an LSD backlash occuring there;

something along the lines of: "Hey we have something here that

can really seriously boost your imagination!" "Well, Mr

Developer, I'm afraid we here in the Food Drug and Software

Administration don't really approve of that." That could happen.

I think there are some visionary computer police around who are

seriously interested in that prospect, they see it as a very

promising growing market for law enforcement, it's kind of their

version of a golden vaporware.

I now want to talk some about the differences between your art

and my art. My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as

literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three

thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct

competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren't

in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable

rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent

everything every time a new platform takes over the field. This

is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It's

a terrible kind of curse really.

This is a lesson about cultural expression nowadays that has

applications to everybody. This is part of living in the

Information Society. Here we are in the 90s, we have these

tremendous information-handling, information-producing

technologies. We think it's really great that we can have groovy

unleashed access to all these different kinds of data, we can

own books, we can own movies on tape, we can access databanks,

we can buy computer-games, records, music, art.... A lot of our

art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to

be digital... But our riches of information are in some deep and

perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive

load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have

to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the

real explanation for the triumph of compact disks.

Compact disks aren't really all that much better than vinyl

records. What they make up in fidelity they lose in groovy cover

art. What they gain in playability they lose in presentation.

The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all

your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection

that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice,

the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you

down. You're never going to play those Alice Cooper albums

again, but you can't just throw them away, because you're a

culture nut.

But if you buy a CD player you can bundle up all those records

and put them in attic boxes without so much guilt. You can

pretend that you've stepped up a level, that now you're even

more intensely into music than you ever were; but on a practical

level what you're really doing is weeding this junk out of your

life. By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to

the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a

relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it

take up disk-space in your head.

Computer games are especially vulnerable to this because they

live and breathe through the platform. But something rather

similar is happening today to fiction as well.... What you see

in science fiction nowadays is an amazing tonnage of product

that is shuffled through the racks faster and faster.... If a

science fiction paperback stays available for six weeks, it's a

miracle. Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off...

Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book form,

when a science fiction *book* came out it would be in an edition

of maybe five hundred copies and these weirdo Golden Age SF fans

would cling on to every copy as if it were made of platinum....

But now they come out and they are made to vanish as soon as

possible. In fact to a great extent they're designed by their

lame hack authors to vanish as soon as possible. They're cliches

because cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write a

whole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one...

Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print. They

still have the cultural properties of print.

Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a long time

because they can be replicated faithfully in new editions that

have all the same properties as the old ones. Books are

independent of the machineries of book production, the platforms

of publishing. Books don't lose anything by being reprinted by a

new machine, books are stubborn, they remain the same work of

art, they carry the same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill.

MOBY DICK for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't until

the 1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and then

it got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't even publish

books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill

pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way

into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard to

get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's

ear. And everybody who writes from then on in some sense has to

measure up to this woman. In the art of book-writing the

classics are still living competition, they tend to elevate the

entire art-form by their persistent presence.

I've noticed though that computer game designers don't look much

to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse,

they're projected into the future. When you're a game designer

and you're waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure

your work by stuff that doesn't exist yet. Like now we only have

floppies, but wait till we get CD-ROM. Like now we can't have

compelling lifelike artificial characters in the game, but wait

till we get AI. Like now we waste time porting games between

platforms, but wait till there's just one standard. Like now

we're just starting with huge multiplayer games, but wait till

the modem networks are a happening thing. And I -- as a game

designer artiste -- it's my solemn duty to carry us that much

farther forward toward the beckoning grail....

For a novelist like myself this is a completely alien paradigm.

I can see that it's very seductive, but at the same time I can't

help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every

time a platform vanishes it's like a little cultural apocalypse.

And I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might

vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of

expression? Alan Kay -- he's a heavy guy, Alan Kay -- he says

that computers may tend to shrink and vanish into the

environment, into the walls and into clothing.... Sounds pretty

good.... But this also means that all the joysticks vanish, all

the keyboards, all the repetitive strain injuries.

I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with very

intelligent, very small, invisible computers.... You could have

some entertaining way to play with them, or more likely they

would have some entertaining way to play with you. But then

imagine yourself growing up in that world, being born in that

world. You could even be a computer game designer in that world,

but how would you study the work of your predecessors? How would

you physically *access* and *experience* the work of your

predecessors? There's a razor-sharp cutting edge in this

art-form, but what happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?

As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that this is

happening.... I don't think that as a culture today we're very

interested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot more

interested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we long

to reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and never

grow old. We have to run really fast to stay in the same place.

We've become used to running, if we sit still for a while it

makes us feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss those

sixty-hour work weeks.

And much the same thing is happening to books today too.... Not

just technically, but ideologically. I don't know if you're

familiar at all with literary theory nowadays, with terms like

deconstructionism, postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talk

very long about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff,

and I don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields of

study where it's sometimes wise to treasure your ignorance....

But the thing about the new literary theory that's remarkable,

is that it makes a really violent break with the past.... These

guys don't take the books of the past on their own cultural

terms. When you're deconstructing a book it's like you're

psychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says,

you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural

reasons for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is

that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful not to

let it get its message through or affect you deeply or

emotionally in any way. You're in a position of complete

psychological and technical superiority to the book and its

author... This is a way for modern literateurs to handle this

vast legacy of the past without actually getting any of the

sticky stuff on you. It's like it's dead. It's like the next

best thing to not having literature at all. For some reason this

feels really good to people nowadays.

But even that isn't enough, you know.... There's talk nowadays

in publishing circles about a new device for books, called a

ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it in your hands like

this.... Has a very nice little graphics screen, theoretically,

a high-definition thing, very legible.... And you play your

books on it.... You buy the book as a floppy and you stick it

in... And just think, wow you can even have graphics with your

book... you can have music, you can have a soundtrack....

Narration.... Animated illustrations... Multimedia... it can

even be interactive.... It's the New Hollywood for Publisher's

Row, and at last books can aspire to the exalted condition of

movies and cartoons and TV and computer games.... And just think

when the ReadMan goes obsolete, all the product that was written

for it will be blessedly gone forever!!! Erased from the memory

of mankind!

Now I'm the farthest thing from a Luddite ladies and gentlemen,

but when I contemplate this particular technical marvel my

author's blood runs cold... It's really hard for books to

compete with other multisensory media, with modern electronic

media, and this is supposed to be the panacea for withering

literature, but from the marrow of my bones I say get that

fucking little sarcophagus away from me. For God's sake don't

put my books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope. Don't put me

into the stereograph, don't write me on the wax cylinder, don't

tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece of hardware,

because hardware is even more mortal than I am, and I'm a hell

of a lot more mortal than I care to be. Mortality is one good

reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake

don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not

really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the

business of marking place.

Okay.... Now I've sometimes heard it asked why computer game

designers are deprived of the full artistic respect they

deserve. God knows they work hard enough. They're really

talented too, and by any objective measure of intelligence they

rank in the top percentiles... I've heard it said that maybe

this problem has something to do with the size of the author's

name on the front of the game-box. Or it's lone wolves versus

teams, and somehow the proper allotment of fame gets lost in the

muddle. One factor I don't see mentioned much is the sheer lack

of stability in your medium. A modern movie-maker could probably

make a pretty good film with DW Griffith's equipment, but you

folks are dwelling in the very maelstrom of Permanent

Technological Revolution. And that's a really cool place, but

man, it's just not a good place to build monuments.

Okay. Now I live in the same world you live in, I hope I've

demonstrated that I face a lot of the same problems you face...

Believe me there are few things deader or more obsolescent than

a science fiction novel that predicts the future when the future

has passed it by. Science fiction is a pop medium and a very

obsolescent medium. The fact that written science fiction is a

prose medium gives us some advantages, but even science fiction

has a hard time wrapping itself in the traditional mantle of

literary excellence... we try to do this sometimes, but

generally we have to be really drunk first. Still, if you want

your work to survive (and some science fiction *does* survive,

very successfully) then your work has to capture some quality

that lasts. You have to capture something that people will

search out over time, even though they have to fight their way

upstream against the whole rushing current of obsolescence and

innovation.

And I've come up with a strategy for attempting this. Maybe

it'll work -- probably it won't -- but I wouldn't be complaining

so loudly if I didn't have some kind of strategy, right? And I

think that my strategy may have some relevance to game designers

so I presume to offer it tonight.

This is the point at which your normal J. Random Author trots

out the doctrine of the Wonderful Power of Storytelling. Yes,

storytelling, the old myth around the campfire, blind Homer,

universal Shakespeare, this is the art ladies and gentlemen that

strikes to the eternal core of the human condition... This is

high art and if you don't have it you are dust in the wind.... I

can't tell you how many times I have heard this bullshit... This

is known in my field as the "Me and My Pal Bill Shakespeare"

argument. Since 1982 I have been at open war with people who

promulgate this doctrine in science fiction and this is the

primary reason why my colleagues in SF speak of me in fear and

trembling as a big bad cyberpunk... This is the classic doctrine

of Humanist SF.

This is what it sounds like when it's translated into your

jargon. Listen closely:

"Movies and plays get much of their power from the resonances

between the structural layers. The congruence between the theme,

plot, setting and character layouts generates emotional power.

Computer games will never have a significant theme level because

the outcome is variable. The lack of theme alone will limit the

storytelling power of computer games."

Hard to refute. Impossible to refute. Ladies and gentlemen to

hell with the marvellous power of storytelling. If the audience

for science fiction wanted *storytelling*, they wouldn't read

goddamned *science fiction,* they'd read Harpers and Redbook and

Argosy. The pulp magazine (which is our genre's primary example

of a dead platform) used to carry all kinds of storytelling.

Western stories. Sailor stories. Prizefighting stories. G-8 and

his battle aces. Spicy Garage Tales. Aryan Atrocity Adventures.

These things are dead. Stories didn't save them. Stories won't

save us. Stories won't save *you.*

This is not the route to follow. We're not into science fiction

because it's *good literature,* we're into it because it's

*weird*. Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying

to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude.

In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible

obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years,

"woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a

"good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good

science fiction story is something that knows it is science

fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the

other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like

movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like

computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT

THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO

IGNORE!

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public

taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think

you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting

expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are

condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are

deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek

written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they'll

never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that

straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell

with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what

society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird.

Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly,

thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of

horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic *courage* to

recognize your own significance in culture!

Okay. Those of you into SF may recognize the classic rhetoric of

cyberpunk here. Alienated punks, picking up computers, menacing

society.... That's the cliched press story, but they miss the

best half. Punk into cyber is interesting, but cyber into punk

is way dread. I'm into technical people who attack pop culture.

I'm into techies gone dingo, techies gone rogue -- not street

punks picking up any glittery junk that happens to be within

their reach -- but disciplined people, intelligent people,

people with some technical skills and some rational thought, who

can break out of the arid prison that this society sets for its

engineers. People who are, and I quote, "dismayed by nearly

every aspect of the world situation and aware on some nightmare

level that the solutions to our problems will not come from the

breed of dimwitted ad-men that we know as politicians." Thanks,

Brenda!

That still smells like hope to me....

You don't get there by acculturating. Don't become a

well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull.

Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle.

Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the

muse of the odd, don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge

plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's

off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats.

If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read

about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites

and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of

extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have

always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the

apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You

didn't come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you're

here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried

because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable

or uncomfortable or dangerous.

And when it comes to studying art, well, study it, but study it

to your own purposes. If you're obsessively weird enough to be a

good weird artist, you generally face a basic problem. The basic

problem with weird art is not the height of the ceiling above

it, it's the pitfalls under its feet. The worst problem is the

blundering, the solecisms, the naivete of the poorly socialized,

the rotten spots that you skid over because you're too freaked

out and not paying proper attention. You may not need much

characterization in computer entertainment. Delineating

character may not be the point of your work. That's no excuse

for making lame characters that are actively bad. You may not

need a strong, supple, thoroughly worked-out storyline. That

doesn't mean that you can get away with a stupid plot made of

chickenwire and spit. Get a full repertoire of tools. Just make

sure you use those tools to the proper end. Aim for the heights

of professionalism. Just make sure you're a professional *game

designer.*

You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by

knocking it off with the bullshit. Popular media always reek of

bullshit, they reek of carelessness and self-taught clumsiness

and charlatanry. To live outside the aesthetic laws you must be

honest. Know what you're doing; don't settle for the way it

looks just cause everybody's used to it. If you've got a palette

of 2 million colors, then don't settle for designs that look

like a cheap four-color comic book. If you're gonna do graphic

design, then learn what good graphic design looks like; don't

screw around in amateur fashion out of sheer blithe ignorance.

If you write a manual, don't write a semiliterate manual with

bad grammar and misspellings. If you want to be taken seriously

by your fellows and by the populace at large, then don't give

people any excuse to dismiss you. Don't be your own worst enemy.

Don't put yourself down.

I have my own prejudices and probably more than my share, but I

still think these are pretty good principles. There's nothing

magic about 'em. They certainly don't guarantee success, but

then there's "success" and then there's success. Working

seriously, improving your taste and perception and

understanding, knowing what you are and where you came from, not

only improves your work in the present, but gives you a chance

of influencing the future and links you to the best work of the

past. It gives you a place to take a solid stand. I try to live

up to these principles; I can't say I've mastered them, but

they've certainly gotten me into some interesting places, and

among some very interesting company. Like the people here

tonight.

I'm not really here by any accident. I'm here because I'm

*paying attention.* I 'm here because I know you're significant.

I'm here because I know you're important. It was a privilege to

be here. Thanks very much for having me, and showing me what you

do.

That's all I have to say to you tonight. Thanks very much for

listening.