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Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 29, 2004
Resurrect the Wabbit
P and I are mentioned obliquely in today's New York Times -- Circuits section, Online Shopper column. Here's the link. We're the friends who bought the beloved, chewed-to-death bunny for Michelle's daughter Clemmie in the first place. Who knew a $7 impulse buy would have such an effect on a child's life?
White Wedding
If you haven't already seen the anonymous burly tattooed guy who modeled and sold his ex-wife's wedding dress on eBay, go check it out. The most amusing thing is to read his updates. He has a working man's no-nonsense writing style that really makes him come alive as a character. I love this bit: "I have taken offense to some of the people that told me I’m ugly and a loser. All I have to say is you’d be ugly too if you had a huge white blotch on your face." Call him the Harvey Pekar of eBay.
Get the Ralph Outta Here
Seen this? The latest poll says bad news -- like, oh, I don't know, the beginning of another Iraq war -- is beginning to sink in with the electorate. Bush approvals at all-time low. Kerry beats Bush on head-to-head match-up ... assuming Nader doesn't run. If Nader does, he picks up five points, all of them from Kerry.
Which confirmed for me that Ralph Don't Run is absolutely the most important political movement of the hour. This issue is the true tipping point, and it is here that a donation could potentially make the most difference. I was moved once again by the flash animation, and gave a quick and painless $100 over PayPal. I encourage everyone to do the same (you too, British anti-Bushies). A big spike in donations at this critical moment would make news, I guarantee it. And no, I have no connection to the site's creators ... but admittedly, I do have faith that they'll do something with the money that makes an even bigger noise. And further faith that sharp rises in cash levels are, in America, the biggest noises of all.
Fog Of War
Who is behind Warforum.net, and where did they get hold of these disturbing movies of apparently unarmed civilian targets being blown up casually by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which are currently doing the email rounds? Are they real? Could they be faked? How were they procured? The site won't tell us, which is a good a reason as any to exercise skepticism.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Droite du Riche
To Larry Ellison's house in Pacific Heights for the launch of his wife's new romance novel. Actually, it's not so much his house as his four-level, $100 million Pacific Heights pied-a-terre, all septic steel and painfully precise minimalism. During a tour, Ellison -- who is now only the fourteenth richest man in the world, poor thing -- casually mentioned he barely uses the place except for functions such as this (normally he lives in his Japanese-style mansion down the peninsula). That just blew my mind, that and the staff hired to keep the house clean and at least one tub in the myriad bathrooms perpetually full. This city is bursting at the seams with people trying to get a house -- indeed, with people trying to get shelter of any kind. Here's a place that could house a dozen families on every floor, lying almost completely fallow. "Need a housesitter?" ventured one journalist. Ellison smiled and said nothing.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Dating Game
The success of the Sims four years ago caught the game industry napping, partly because it is run by overgrown adolescents who can't understand why anyone would want to play anything that didn't involve a gun or a ball. This is why store shelves are not overflowing with copies of this all-time bestseller. But that is starting to change. Eidos is about to release a German game called Singles: Flirt Up Your Life. From the press release:
Singles: Flirt Up Your Life places players in the role of matchmaker. Choosing from over a dozen, unique characters, the player will pick two people to move into a sparsely decorated apartment and begin their adventure together as new roommates. Numerous opportunities to engage the characters in situations will make or break their relationship in the house. The player, having no idea what each individual?s tastes and opinions are, must choose the character?s actions as they interact and learn about one another. Anticipation and curiosity will build from learning how to collaborate on furnishing the home, to finding out what your roommate enjoys watching on television most. Of course, if someone forgets to vacuum the house, there will be trouble.
Tissue of Lies
Flash: Bush caught on camera using woman's shirt to clean his glasses!
All those billions of deficit spending, and they can't afford some Presidential kleenex?
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 23, 2004
This Email Brought To You By ...
I got my Gmail account a couple of weeks ago. I wish I'd mentioned it before, because now it seems everyone and their aunt in the Bay Area is getting the Wonka golden ticket-esque invite from Google to set up a beta account. I was first, dammit! But I didn't mention it, largely because it hadn't been very useful (it only worked on my PC, which I'm using less and less of late. As of now it appears to work, albeit sporadically, on this here Mac). In fact, all I've done with it so far is test the controversial system whereby the server will scan the text of your message and try to give you subject-appropriate advertising down the side of the screen. (So shocking is this idea that the California Assembly recently moved to ban it; Google certainly wasn't expecting that).
Of course, the first thing I had to do was take the ad system for a spin. I asked P to write me a message laced with product placement; she composed a love poem that mentioned Kleenex, Nike, Myoplex, Lenox China and Elizabeth Arden lipstick, among about a dozen other brands. Curiously, the only one Gmail picked up on was the lipstick. When I opened the message, it gave me ads for Sephora. Next she tried forwarding steamy articles about the new British crazes for toothing and dogging; they produced no ads. Nor did another ad-fishing expedition from my friend Aaron, who tried to goad the server by mentioning "viagra" about five times.
Now when I come to look at my inbox, I see even the Sephora ad has disappeared. The only email with ads? Something else P forwarded me: a company giving away free mini-iPods. Because the company is based in Columbia, South Carolina, I've got ads for real estate in Columbia, trips to Columbia, the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina Technology Alliance. Poor Gmail server, it worked so hard on this one. I haven't the heart to tell it how way off base its ads were.
Want to join in the fun but don't have a Gmail account yet? Send a brand name-filled email to ctaylor@gmail.com, and I'll let you know what showed up.
Plate Spinning
Dan and I were out playing tennis today--a glorious day in S.F. when it seemed everyone was goofing off and we had to drive around five different courts before we found a free one. When we finally parked, it was behind this license plate --
NWR4OIL
-- into which we separately read two polar opposite messages. Dan saw "no war for oil." I saw NWR (national wildlife reserve, as in Alaska) for oil -- a pro-drilling statement. We then realized that its essential ambiguity made this plate effectively the first political bumper sticker that will not offend either side of the political chasm.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 21, 2004
War Comes to the Comics
 Speaking of the emotional connections we make to fictional characters, I doubt I'm the only newspaper reader to be profoundly disturbed by the last panel in this morning's Doonesbury. There's B.D., who goes way back to the very first strip more than 30 years ago, injured in Iraq -- and now we discover he lost a leg, to say nothing of seeing him without his helmet for the first time. What the medical team keeps saying about him pulling through sounds very ominous too. And the thing is, this is probably going to move more hearts and minds on the Iraq issue than any real death or injury in the country.
Goodbye to Old Friends
Just finished the last West Wing episode from the syndicated Bravo reruns I had piled up on TiVo -- that is, the last Aaron Sorkin-penned West Wing I hadn't already seen. (For the record, it was the one where the Surgeon General suggests decriminalizing marijuana). There are still a whole bunch of unwatched post-Sorkin West Wings from last season on my machine, but I'm hardly optimistic about them; they got bad reviews, and I'm thinking of ditching them on principle. And out of solidarity with Sorkin, who seems to have a lot of the same instincts as me -- a love of wordy dialog, a keen eye for the absurdity of politics -- though he is a lot more infatuated, blindly at times, with the bells and whistles of authority.
Such supposedly patriotic moments make me marvel anew at how autocratic the Presidency is compared with, say, a parliamentary system. Yes, there are checks and balances, but without, not within. There are very few checks within the executive branch, and all of them come from unelected officials. Perhaps we need to elect all the other players separately, the Leos and the Joshs and the Tobys; perhaps the answer is uberdemocracy. Perhaps I wouldn't be so concerned about the US system not working if I didn't live in a world where the GOP dominates all branches of government. Please tell me that's going to end soon? Please tell me Kerry is going to help the Dems acquire a backbone? When will the real-life Leos realize that their endless strategizing does not come without cost, that it shines through their words so painfully, so obviously; that voters know when they're being spun? That they want to hear the best arguments, the most passionately-felt arguments, and not necessarily the most palatable ones?
Anyway, I felt strangely sad deleting this episode from TiVo. The moment reminded me of what my mother said about finishing Lord of the Rings for the first time: "It was like saying goodbye to old friends." How bizarre that we make such an emotional connection with entirely fictional characters -- and how comforting to know it's not something we suddenly started doing with the arrival of TV, much less TiVo. We've been doing it since the dawn of entertainment.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Office Spaced
From this morning's NYT:
The other day the chairman of 20th Century Fox, Jim Gianopulos, said he got a call from a lawyer friend. The friend said it was an anniversary of the firm and asked where he could get 100 DVD copies of the cult Fox movie "Office Space." The film made only $10 million at the box office but has become a hit on DVD. No one at Fox pretends to know why ...
Dear Gianopulos and other Fox executives: I despair. Do you even watch the movies you make? Of course Office Space wasn't a hit at theaters; who wants to go sit in a darkened room with strangers and watch a comedy about cube farm life? It's too close to the bone, too much like the dead-end job you just walked out of. But sitting at home and watching it with friends from your own particular veal-fattening pen, with added beer -- that's a different proposition. That's catharsis.
I watched it again with a friend this weekend; we're both work-at-homers, so it was more a celebration of what we don't have to put up with than mutual commiseration. But everyone has held jobs like that. Make movies that tap into people's real lives, and you've got a rich seam of comedy. Of course, I doubt that Fox executives know much about real life. So if you could just go ahead and move your office into a cubicle, that would be great. Mmmkay?
Listen with iPod
I'm currently going a little crazy trying to fill up my 40-gigabyte iPod. It was three-quarters full of music when I discovered how to turn tapes into MP3s with this free Audio Recorder program. And how. Most of my tapes are spoken-word, and don't need to be recorded at such a high quality as music. A half-hour comedy takes up a mere 10 megabytes or so -- about as much as two four-minute songs. I'm digitizing the whole of Dylan Thomas' delightful two-hour radio play Under Milk Wood as we speak, and it'll barely make a dent on the eight remaining gigabytes. I'm starting to wonder if everything I've ever listened to will be assimilated by this small white thing, which on the one hand is comforting -- I can take this gargantuan opus everywhere! -- and on the other is quite humbling. Is that tiny device really the audio input of a lifetime? I need to listen more.
Oh, and don't even get me started on how much fun it is to rip the sound from my favorite DVD scenes.
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 19, 2004
Paper Jam
As I mentioned last month, those lovely hardworking people at the Immigration and Naturalization Service have agreed to declare me an Extraordinary Alien. That may sound like a redundancy -- aren't all aliens extraordinary by their very nature? -- but I love it as a title, and will shortly be adding it to all my business cards. In crayon.
Nevertheless, just because the INS has approved me doesn't mean I have the new visa in my hot and sweaty hands. No, that would be too easy. The creaking bureaucratic logic of Washington dictates that I must leave the country in order to stay. That is, I need to go visit an American consulate in another country to get the actual stamp in my passport. So after much angst with the online booking system, I got myself one of the few appointments available in Toronto at 8:30am one Monday morning this coming June. I've been through this system before, of course, for my H1-B, and marveled at the sheer weight of red tape involved, the pain and expense this bloated bureaucracy likes to inflict upon immigrant workers. (No wonder most of them stay illegal.)
But that was before 9/11. Now the number of forms I must fill in, and the stricture placed on my activities while waiting to hand them in, have reached Kafkaesque levels. The entire process, which used to take a day, now apparently takes three. For as long as I'm in the consulate, I may not use my cellphone, iPod or Palm. I also may not eat or drink. I was just sent a full sheet of text detailing exactly how to photograph myself and how to attach that picture to my DS-156: "it is preferable that the ears be exposed ... busy, patterned or dark backgrounds will not be accepted ... the head should measure between 1 inch and 1 3/8 inches." Helpfully, the form adds, "the key requirement is that the photograph clearly identify the applicant."
But it is the DS-157, now required for all male foreigners, that has me really shaking me head in disbelief. Let us ignore for the moment the requirement to list your "clan or tribe name". Let's brush over the impossibly tiny boxes in which you're supposed to list all countries you've visited in the last ten years and all educational institutions you have attended. Move straight to question 14: "Do you have any specialized skills or training, including firearms, explosives, nuclear, biological, or chemical experience?" Thanks to that comma after "training", practically everyone who fills in this form -- that is, anyone with any specialized skills or training -- should answer "yes." Especially if their specialized training is in the English language. Question 16 asks "have you ever been in an armed conflict, either as a participant or victim? If yes, please explain." Yes, I feel like writing -- I am another innocent victim in the misguided bureaucratic war on terrorists whom, the government appears to imagine, will own up to every one of their evil intentions if you catch them out with ungrammatical questions.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 18, 2004
Journo Talk
Just back from a three-hour seminar on magazine journalism moderated by Dave Eggers; a charity event on behalf of his 826 Valencia workshop. That's Dave and former Rolling Stone senior editor Ben Fong-Torres sitting next to me in the picture; also on the panel were Louise Rafkin and Kathryn Olney, our Noe Valley neighbor (on the good side). It seemed to go pretty well. Attendees had plunked down $100 checks to be there, so I was nervous about them getting their money's worth. We managed to whip through a dizzying number of subjects in three hours, including blogs. I tried to encourage everyone there to start one up if they're serious about writing. Anyone can become a better writer if they force themselves to publish regularly. Dave himself is doing something similar right now by publishing his latest novel piecemeal on Salon. As he told me, it's less about the publicity and more about having a damn good reason to crank out 1,000 words a day.
Speaking of writing advice, I'm currently reading a great book called The Forest For The Trees by Betsy Lerner. It's the first how-to book I've seen written by an editor, and is almost refreshingly harsh. She's got our number, fellow writers. I definitely recognized myself in the list of questions she opens chapter one with:
Do you have a new idea almost every day for a writing project? Do you either start them all and don't see them to fruition or think about starting but never actually get going? Are you a short-story writer one day and a novelist the next? A memoirist on Monday and a screenwriter by the weekend? Do you begin sentences in your head while walking to work or picking up the dry cleaning, sentences so crisp and suggestive that they make perfect story or novel openers, only you never manage to write them down? Do you blab about your project to loved ones, coworkers or strangers before the idea is fully formed, let alone partially executed? Do you snap at people who ask how your writing is going? What's it to them?
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 15, 2004
Multiple Kerry Clones
Great piece in Salon on how Battlefield Vietnam might help Kerry win the election. Don't laugh -- the younger generation has its disturbingly powerful blind faith in the U.S. military in part because of the America's Army game, cunningly distributed for free. As part of an experiment, the author of the piece named his Battlefield Vietnam avatar "Lt.JohnKerry". Which is interesting, because I remember playing several games with someone who'd named themselves simply "John Kerry." Could this be a trend? In a game played by three million politically apathetic young people, multiple John Kerrys running around could conceivably tip a close election.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Neighbors From Hell Update
A "for sale" sign went up on the Bates Motel yesterday, which is about the best thing I've seen all year. The backyard is blissfully silent. My landlord called last week, and best as he could make out (this family isn't great at phone conversation, either) they're trying to find a good home for Max. About time he had one, the poor little mutt. Terriers need a lot of love and attention.
Longtime Onion Fan
My good friend Dan quoted me extensively in today's top Wired News story, which is all about how some major news organizations (like MSNBC) have started taking the Onion for a serious news source:
Chris Taylor, the San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine, and a longtime Onion fan, says it shouldn't be difficult to tell that the publication is nothing but satire. "If it wasn't, it would be chock-full of the biggest scoops in history," Taylor says. "As a true journalist, you have to be skeptical even about stories you see on the front page of The New York Times."
Many people who mistakenly believe Onion stories do so in part because the stories are e-mailed around endlessly, often to the point where the source is no longer clear. But Taylor doesn't think much of that as an excuse. "Average readers do themselves no disservice if they're skeptical about every news story they read," he says, "fake or not."
And it seems that one reason many people fall for Onion stories is that they're too close to the subject matter to see humor in it. "Some people are so desperate for proof of their point of view, they'll seize upon any old e-mail forward that floats by," Taylor said.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Woodware beats Software
Bill Gates is no longer the world's richest man. That title now belongs to Ingvar Kamprad. Sound familiar? Does "Ingvar" sound like it belongs on a tag attached to cheap pine-effect furniture? Does it bring back memories of trundling round a packed warehouse with your significant other, jonesing for meatballs? It should do -- Kamprad is the founder of Ikea. He's only ahead in the game because of international currency fluctuations (and quite possibly because a personal wealth of "400 billion crowns" just sounds cooler). Until now, though, I doubt many of us knew he was even close. But it stands to reason. Everyone in the world needs furniture. Everyone in the world does not need Windows.
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 12, 2004
Disturbing Quote of the Week
"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. As far as they are concerned, Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
-- anonymous British officer, quoted on ABC Australian Radio, bemoaning the recent military crackdown
So what is that? Post-9/11 jumpiness? Too many military types who grew up watching Westerns? A lack of calm, reflective stoicism in the American character? Or simply a cross-cultural misunderstanding on the part of my countrymen? If we Brits have an Achilles heel when dealing with Americans, it is a tendency to seek the most simplistic explanation for their behavior. Pretty ironic, that.
Although in this case, I think the officer's probably right. Have you seen the private bodyguards that swarm around any official American figure in Iraq? All sunglasses and unnecessarily revealed biceps? These WWF-wannabes piss me off, never mind the Sunnis and the Shiites. It's about time the U.S. high command understood that perception is more than half the battle; it's important in Iraq as it is during an election back home.
Voicemail Tip of the Month
"I have good news to tell the whole world, and I want you to print it in the Time magazine. I used to have a lot of hair, I had black hair and long hair on my legs. I used the eyebrow tweezers to tweeze my legs for more than ten years. Now I don't have hair on my legs. I only have few hairs on my legs, because I used to have lots of hairs on my legs. And I want you to tell the whole world because a lot of woman, they are not happy about hairs on their legs. They shave the legs all the time. So please, you know, let the world know about this news. My telephone number is [snip ...]"
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 08, 2004
Space Insurance
So if the planet is turning against us, it's a wise idea to get at least some of us off it. (Me! Me! Pick me!) We're a little closer to that goal as of yesterday, when the Department of Transportation issued its first ever license for high-orbital, manned sub-space travel. The lucky recipient was the Paul Allen-funded SpaceShipOne rocket plane, which has already hit Mach 2. Of course, any spacecraft sponsored by a Microsoft billionaire would have to squash its name together like that, as if it were software.
This is one area where I do think government needs to get off our backs. A license to leave the planet? Will they be stamping our passports and electronically fingerprinting us on departure? No, this kind of bureaucracy will seem laughably outdated just as soon as we can leave and never come back.
Getting Too Much Sleep At Night?
Then try Bruce Sterling's eminently scary Wired column: five ways you never knew the planet -- indeed, the whole solar system -- was turning on us. Sunlight is getting dimmer, for one thing, and scientists don't know why. What the hell? Reminds me of a childhood nightmare of mine in which the sun was snuffed out altogether by some powerful force beyond our understanding. The nightmare was eight seconds long -- exactly the amount of time we would have to savor our last ever rays of light.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Neighbors From Hell
Well, that was an interesting way to wake up. Our neighbors' terrier Max -- a mangy, badly neglected little mutt whose only purpose in life seems to be to create as much noise as possible -- once again rose me from my slumber with his incessant yapping. I took a walk up to the back deck, which directly overlooks theirs. Yep, they'd left him out in the yard again.
My neighbors' yard is a sight to behold. Where all the yards around it are leafy-green, this one is barren. It contains concrete, dead weeds and a shed that looks like a fallout shelter. The house itself, shabby and Victorian, bears a strong resemblance to the Bates Motel. The family fit into this environment perfectly. The grown-up son can be seen wandering among the weeds, idly slicing them with a scythe. Our predecessors in this house saw him taken away to a mental institution after many nights of talking loudly to himself; they did not believe he would be returning. The mother I've never seen -- very Psycho -- but she has a loud and blood-curdling voice when she yells the terrier's name: "MAAAAAAAAAAX!" By comparison, Max's yelps have an air of desperation: "get me the hell outta here!"
I went out front, and to my surprise the neighbors were actually home. They were having their rugs cleaned, and rather than take the dog out for a badly-needed walk, they simply abandoned him in the yard again. A blonde-haired woman, apparently the niece, was supervising the cleaning. Conversation was not her forte. When I said "excuse me," she barked back: "who are you? Who are you?" Refusing to discuss the matter, she suggested it was perfectly acceptable to allow one's dog to bark in the yard all day, and that if I thought differently I should call the police. I can tell you, a confrontation (or non-confrontation) like that is a good way to get the blood rushing in the morning. Better than coffee.
Neighbors from hell are nothing new to me. When I lived in New York, my upstairs neighbor managed to crack and leak the thin ceiling with a washing machine she refused to put on blocks. What saddens me is that they should exist here too, even in Noe Valley paradise. I could understand if this were the neighborhood from hell, but they are surrounded by gentle neighborly types with vibrant gardens and happy-to-help smiles. Don't you think that would rub off a little?
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 05, 2004
Kerry Goes Bananas
The other thing that intrigued me about that banana story in its online incarnation was the John Kerry commercial running next to it. I don't know what it says about Kerry that he's buying up space next to articles about celibate fruit, but who am I to complain? This is a lovely little Flash ad that shows Kerry knocking Bush off his cash-rich pedestal with a flood of $25 contributions. What we're left with is the impression, at least, that the candidate really gets the Internet. And calling it a "Never Back Down" campaign is, I hope, a taste of things to come. I've said it before: Kerry needs to appropriate the Dean anger any way he can. He should even do a version of the scream speech, if only for yucks. It may be the missing link required to bring his patrician image to life.
Bananas Who Need Bananas
Since reading The Botany of Desire, I'm a sucker for stories that tear the lid off the steamy world of plant sex. This morning the San Francisco chronicle jumped in with the tale of how the world's supply of bananas may be in peril because this most suggestive of fruit "has not had sex in 10,000 years". We genetically manipulated the species that long ago into a seedless and sterile--if edible--version of its former glory. (What, you thought GMO food was a modern invention?) Now soil fungus and weevils are threatening the mutant plant. But do we go back to the non-celibate versions and encourage them to get it on in the hopes of producing a newer, more resistant and dare we hope tastier model? Do we hell. Why let sex take its course when science can provide a costlier solution?
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 04, 2004
You Oughta Be in Pixels
And now for the hefty main course -- so far as I'm aware, the largest videogames story Time has published in the Arts section. Kudos to page design guru D.W. Pine for the punny headline.
A R T S / V I D E O G A M E S
You Ought to Be in Pixels
Video games have gone Hollywood. That makes these five the newest entertainment moguls
By CHRIS TAYLOR/SAN FRANCISCO
Monday, Apr. 12, 2004
You can tell that James Bond 007: Everything Or Nothing is a video game the same way you can spot the difference between a painting and a person. But people in the next room can't. They hear the voices of the real Pierce Brosnan and Judi Dench bantering about the usual enjoyable spy nonsense — nuclear suitcases from Tajikistan!--as created by veteran Bond screenwriter Bruce Feirstein (GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies). "You're either terrified of the future or you embrace it," says Feirstein, who had never written a game before. "Games are the future. I'd write another one in a heartbeat."
Feirstein is not the only Hollywood type who has seen the light. If anything, he's a little late. Video games overtook movies in the annual revenue race in 1999. But that was an apples-to-oranges contest. The average game costs up to five times as much as a movie ticket. And back then a console title was a movie afterthought, a more expensive Burger King toy. Now, with original blockbuster fare like Everything or Nothing, released in February, the titans of the $21 billion games business have shown their Hollywood cousins (a puny $9.2 billion biz) they can lead as well as follow.
As goes the money, so follows the talent. Musicians like Mya and Method Man are lending their skills to game sound tracks (a smart move, as the average title is played for 50 hours). And as goes talent, so follows buzz. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which won Best Game of the Year at last month's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., got more adulation from critics and Star Wars junkies than any of the Lucas movie prequels. And games are getting even more ambitious: Half Life 2, with a record-breaking $40 million budget, has been six years in development, with no end in sight.
The games world is going Hollywood in the wrong ways too — falling back on formulas and pandering to 18-to-35-year-old males, for example. But just as in the movies, many of the major players are entertainment innovators. Here are five of them:
Mogul of the Matrix
Bruno Bonnell, CEO of Atari = Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney
Bruno Bonnell wants to be the next Michael Eisner — literally. "No company has ever impressed me more than Disney, and I hear they may be looking for a new boss," says the head of games giant Atari in his heavily accented French. "Maybe I should apply?" It's just a light-hearted thought for now. But if there's one thing you learn from looking at Bonnell's career, it's never to underestimate his ability to leapfrog. Leaping frogs, in fact, is where he started. In 1983 Bonnell co-wrote Autoroute, the French version of Frogger. He then founded one games company, Infogrames, and proceeded to snap up 25 others — including the onetime arcade giant Atari, which last year became the name of the whole conglomerate.
At 45, Bonnell has the swagger of a movie mogul. He bristles at the word games, preferring to call his product interactive entertainment. For the past few years, he has been aggressively racking up licenses to movie franchises, like Mission: Impossible, so that Atari can create games based on them. He seemed to have struck gold when he inked a deal — terms undisclosed but by all accounts incredibly generous — with the Wachowski brothers for Enter the Matrix, a game whose plot dovetails with that of Matrix Reloaded, going so far as to buy the company, Shiny Entertainment, that already held the Matrix license.
Enter the Matrix looked great, but the final product was slammed by fans as too buggy (it sold 5 million copies). What happened? Bonnell had insisted it be released the same day as the movie — an unusual move in an industry notorious for constantly pushing back its deadlines. But like the embattled Eisner, Bonnell has no regrets. Enter the Matrix was worth it, he says, for the phone calls he's getting from actors and their agents (like Ving Rhames and Mickey Rourke, whose voices will be heard in the latest game in Atari's Driver series). "Ten years ago, most studio bosses didn't know what a PlayStation was," he says. "Now, who knows? Maybe my successor will buy a studio."
The Gangster Player
Terry Donovan, Rockstar co-founder = Quentin Tarantino, Star director
Imagine Quentin Tarantino parlaying Pulp Fiction into an endless string of movies, each set in the mean streets of a different city. You're getting close to picturing Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series from British gamemaker Terry Donovan. The most recent installment, 2002's GTA Vice City, is a kind of homage to Miami Vice, in which you play an underworld figure in 1980s Florida. You are what Donovan calls an "aspirational gangster."
Like all the GTA series — and Tarantino's movies — the game is packed with moral ambiguity. For example, your character can make his name in drug deals or drive-by shootings. He can kill a prostitute who has just serviced him and get his money back. He can even make an honest living delivering pizza. Naturally, it isn't the pizza that outraged parents and politicians. Senator Joseph Lieberman said the game caused "perverse antisocial behavior." Donovan, 31, was unapologetic — this, after all, was what the M (for mature) games rating was invented for, and besides, whatever you do in the game is your choice. Vice City has sold 11 million copies.
But Donovan's output represents a trend in the industry that troubles even some insiders — namely, the lack of truly thoughtful games or any with emotional resonance. "Our plots are all power fantasies for 14-year-old boys," says Warren Spector, creator of the conspiracy-theory game Deus Ex. "Why is our business so firmly rooted in adolescent nonsense? Does every game have to be the equivalent of a Bruckheimer production? Where is our Lost in Translation?"
Turns out that Donovan can create mood, if not emotion. The Fall of Max Payne, one of his 2003 releases, is the closest the games world has yet come to film noir. You can be Payne, a New York cop, or his femme fatale, Mona Sax. Yes, there is plenty of violence and gunplay, but there is also a tender and tragic love story. If Donovan is a part of the malaise of the industry, he may also be a cure.
At the Top of his Game
Shigeru Miyamoto, Shogun of Nintendo = Steven Spielberg, King of directors
It's hard to beat being the guy who brought us Jaws, E.T. and Indiana Jones — unless you're the guy who created Donkey Kong, Mario Bros. and Zelda. Ever since Shigeru Miyamoto first sicced that platform-climbing arcade monkey on us back in 1981, everything Nintendo's lead designer has touched has turned to gold. His games have sold in excess of 100 million copies. Practically all the under-35's in the games industry today — which is most of them — grew up influenced by his work. "Every Miyamoto title pushes game technology and creativity a little further," says Souris Hong-Poretta, co-president of New York City — based Invasiv Studios, a game developer. "Not one or the other. Always both."
The bright colors, cute characters and music-box noises of a Miyamoto game may seem childish to the uninitiated. But try playing 15 minutes of a Legend of Zelda game, particularly 1998's Ocarina of Time. Next thing you know, it's 3 a.m. Miyamoto has an uncanny ability to come up with a puzzle whose difficulty keeps pace with a player's grasp of the game.
Like Spielberg, Miyamoto presents a popular image of the boy who never grew up. His games, he says, are made entirely to please his inner child. He finds inspiration in unlikely places, like his garden (which gave us Pikmin, the tale of a spaceman who has to grow and harvest brightly colored flower people; Pikmin 2 is in the works). Miyamoto lives modestly in Kyoto with his wife and two kids (who don't play video games). He bicycles to work, is fond of Mickey Mouse ties and keeps a banjo by his desk.
But that image hides a tougher, Hollywood-mogul side — especially in recent years, since Miyamoto, 51, has become more manager than creator. Eiji Aonuma, director of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, tells of Miyamoto's habit of coming in at the end of a game's gestation to "upend the tea table"--a phrase that harks back to what Japanese fathers used to do when they didn't like what was for dinner. The boy who never grew up is not afraid to make a mess if he doesn't get what he wants.
Master of Doom
John Carmack, Doom designer = Mel Gibson, Passion player
If anyone can produce a piece of popular entertainment more blood-soaked than Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, that person is John Carmack. The creator of two of the most violent game franchises in computer history, Doom and Quake, is a few months away from releasing Doom 3. It's a remake of the original, in which you play an Alien-esque space marine battling the ghostly spawn of hell down gloomy corridors of a futuristic Mars base. Not that the hokey plot matters much to hard-core gamers. "Doom 3 is just going to terrify the pants off people," says Rob Smith, editor of PC Gamer magazine.
Like Gibson, Carmack is obsessed with the finer details of his production. He sees himself as an engineer of extreme realism, and has spent the past four years figuring out stuff like how to create the most realistic reflections in lightbulbs and what ominous splatters of blood look like on a tiled bathroom floor. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails will provide the ambient sound. It has been a tough project, as shown by the swelling of Carmack's tiny operation, based in Mesquite, Texas, from 14 staffers to 20. The phenomenally intelligent Carmack tends to hire only programmers who know something he can't learn from them — and that's not many.
And just like Gibson, Carmack has an unlikely pet project. The millionaire, 33, is actively competing for the $10 million X Prize, an award to the first private entrepreneur who builds a fully functional rocket that can carry passengers to space. Hey, why not? Mel's dream came true.
Home-Movie Maven
Lucy Bradshaw, Sims scion = Sofia Coppola, Tinseltown tyro
The games industry is overwhelmingly dominated by men, which creates something of a vicious circle. If men keep creating games for themselves — if there's no game equivalent of a date movie or a chick flick — how are women ever going to break in? The notable exception is the all-time best-selling computer game — The Sims — built by a design team dominated by women. Lucy Bradshaw was part of that team; now she's executive producer on this fall's hotly anticipated sequel, Sims 2. Colleagues at Maxis call her the Sofia Coppola of the industry — hip, young and iconic. And the feature she's working on, Movie Maker, could make directors out of us all.
The Sims has long been the antithesis of plot-driven games, like Everything or Nothing, in that you can control much of what happens to your virtual family. "When you talk to Sims players, they start telling you the story of their Sims," says Bradshaw. That gave her an idea. Why not let players film the story of their Sims?
Movie Maker spreads cameras through your Sims family's house: you click on one to start recording digital footage of your self-created character. Bradshaw's team has been experimenting with its own home movies. Her favorite: Maxis Revolutions, starring a family of Sims that all resemble Keanu Reeves' character Neo. Sims 2 lets you edit your Sims' looks and personality in detail, so you've got all you need to create almost any movie star you want. Hollywood can only dream of doing that.
It's Clone-y at the Top
George Lucas, Star Wars director = George Lucas, Star Wars gamester
Who is the George Lucas of games, the geekiest of them all? Easy. George Lucas, owner of Lucasfilm and LucasArts. The latter produced Knights of the Old Republic, a role-playing adventure set centuries before Star Wars Episode I. Knights was a critical hit, mostly because players have the freedom to choose the Jedi or Sith sides of the Force. Star Wars Galaxies, an online game with thousands of players, allows them to choose their species (now anyone can be a Wookie). Mercifully, no one gets to be Jar Jar.
You've Got Gmail
Two stories in the magazine this week. First the appetizer:
Here Comes Gmail --? and a Sales Pitch to Boot
By CHRIS TAYLOR
Monday, Apr. 12, 2004
When search giant Google announced on April 1 it was road testing a new Web-based e-mail service, a lot of tech types assumed it was an April Fool's prank: One gigabyte of storage memory per account, for free? Yahoo charges $10 a year for a tenth of that space. Yet Gmail is for real. It sorts, searches and spam-filters your e-mail. Just two catches: it won't be widely available for up to six months (test accounts are being offered only to employees' friends and families right now). Also, every message is sponsored, often based on your text. If the e-mail server spots, say, the word camera in your message, it will append tiny text ads for electronics stores. Google promises that doesn't mean anyone human will be reading your e-mail, but privacy hawks may wish the whole thing had been a joke after all.
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 02, 2004
Nothin' but a Gmail Thing
Went down to Google this morning to check out Gmail. And to spare my blushes from yesterday a little, had it confirmed that Larry and Sergey did try to make the press release sound as much like an April Fool's joke as possible. "There's still a certain impishness to this company," said Wayne Rosing, Google's VP of Engineering, with a look of glee on his face. Rosing was an industry veteran -- he'd worked for Steve Jobs and John Sculley at Apple in the bad old days, and he seemed delighted to finally be at a company where everything worked, everything was cool, and the founders let you have a lot of fun.
We'll see how long that lasts after it's a publicly traded company.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 01, 2004
Blast Off
John Carmack, creator of Doom and Quake, intends to blast his wife into space. He's taking part in a privately-funded contest to produce the first privately piloted craft to go up more than 86 miles. His wife, who happens to be around 5ft tall, is evidently the perfect pilot for a module that's trying its damndest to escape the Earth's tender embrace.
He'll do it, too. I've met the guy and he's beyond supergenius level when it comes to engineering. If ever there were a Charles Lindbergh of the private space race, that would be him.
Thanks, Rob!
Mea Culpa
Just heard back from Google. The Gmail thing is for real. They were just playing around with the press release, trying to fool us into thinking it was an April Fool's. Dammit.
This is the real Google April Fool's joke.
April Google
You've got to love the Google guys. This press release about a supposed new web mail service called Gmail with a gigabyte of storage is a painfully obvious hoax, and yet they managed to fool a whole host of news sources from the BBC to CNN to the FT. Or maybe they were just playing along with the prank. Yes, I'm sure that's what they'll tell us once they figure it out.
Anyone want to buy a bridge?
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