#INSERT VIDEO INTO COMIC LIFE 3 SOFTWARE#
In the late 80s-mid 90s video games got a new lease on higher culture as the software industry started pushing the idea of “edutainment” games. What were the deeper themes of Dig Dug? What exactly was Galaga going to teach you about war (with aliens)? What could they bring to the human experience that other media couldn’t? How could this button-tapping twitching doggerel be of use? There was nothing about them that was or even could be redeeming, much less rise to the level of literature. This characterization may seem a bit harsh and unfounded, but if you grew up in a certain era, you know damn well what I mean. Stupid, puerile, time-wasting, life-wasting, boy’s toys video games. No, the native art of computers was going to have to be video games. It was just what we’d always done, but Now On A Screen! HTML, hypertext, and the web never, despite the attempts of many including myself, developed a computer-native literature. To this day, HTML isn’t common culture, it’s a hidden tech tool that rules our lives in terms of infrastructure. But like an alphabet, HTML was too far removed from cultural production to directly give birth to a literature specific to it. That mix of ideas about creating links between documents (the hyper part) was key to the birth of HTML and the World Wide Web. As far as I could tell back then, they were mostly looking at hypertext and hypermedia, influenced by the computer world’s elite thinkers, like Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think and Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines. The academics and professionals who wanted to be all Formal and have grant funded dissertations about computers and Important Culture were not looking at BBSes, internet MUDs⁵, or Nintendo games. But they were producing it together and for each other. Like writers staring at the blank white page, they started in the dark, confronted by the blackness of the blank screen⁴, and most of what they produced was not great. The greater community of computer nerd-dom was already slowly groping towards a literature of its own. It was the same something I was seeing in the text adventure games I played, and on the pre-internet BBSes of the LA area. It was a total nerd move, and correctly marked me as a weird nerd in high school, but I was on to something. It worked, and while it probably looked more like experimental theater than a computer program, I can tell you I was trying to LARP³ my own text adventure in Orwell’s world. I was trying to create something in physical space like the interactive fictions I had written and programmed at home, so that I could make literature as real to my peers as it was to me. At 14, I created a kind of interactive book report on 1984 for my English class, explaining to my fellow students how their lives worked in Oceania² and giving them slips of paper to read aloud that spelled out the consequences of their situations.
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