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Death looms large in the world of computer games. On the Internet, you
can play MUDs (multi-user dungeons) or MUSEs (multi-user scenarios) in
which you share the game space – be it a medieval village or a spaceport
– with other online players. Everyone takes on an individual persona with
‘powers’, built up from ‘experience points’ gathered from earlier adventures.
But life on the Internet can be barbaric. The enhanced powers that bring
advancement are often achieved by eliminating others. Lose your powers in
this way and you must go back to square one to rejoin the fray.

Now games manufacturers are looking for ways of providing the fun without
the sting. ‘If your character can die and you have to go back, that alone
says it’s a game,’ declares Greg Roach, artistic director of the Seattle-based
Hyperbole Studios. Roach sees interactive films as the way of the future.
Here you will follow the story not just through the camera’s neutral eye,
but from the viewpoint of each character. For Hyperbole and its rivals the
problem is how to market a product that lies somewhere between a film and
a game – at home neither in cinemas and video stores nor in the arcades.

Roach likens his predicament to that of the cinema pioneers. ‘Early
films probably had a strong attraction because of their novelty,’ he says.
‘Movies didn’t replace live theatre. At first they were just repeats of
theatrical plays.’ The breakthrough came with the making of the first epic
movie. ‘It’s only when you got something like Birth of a Nation (the 185-minute
silent film released in 1915) that it arrived.’ Computer games, he reckons,
are awaiting their own first epic. ‘Everything before that is a preamble.’

And who writes them? ‘We are trying desperately to find programmers
who are artists,’ says Roach. ‘And female programmers.’ Roach himself used
to work as a theatre director, before he decided computers were a better
medium. Nowadays it’s the skills of graphic artists that the games companies
want. The software tools to write games have become sophisticated enough
to take over the chores for which programmers used to be needed. Imagination
has become the key element. ‘It’s an artistic endeavour,’ insists Roach.

Shiny new hardware is on the way, too, from the Japanese giants of home
video games. Nintendo is working with Silicon Graphics (of Terminator 2
and Jurassic Park fame) on a 64-bit system it calls ‘Project Reality’. Sega
has roped in Microsoft to develop ‘Saturn’, a parallel-processing 32-bit
system that will have three graphics coprocessors and hundreds of MIPS of
processing power. Both systems will bring the processing power of a graphics
workstation into the home at an affordable price, they say.

And the games might even be good for you – at least in some respects.
‘A very successful interactive medium’ is how Donald Norman, an Apple fellow,
describes them. ‘Someone playing them uses all the skills that we adults
find admirable: hand-eye coordination, problem solving, long attention
spans – much longer than the normal 8 to 10 seconds.’ But there is a downside:
‘What you’re learning is socially useless.’

Sega is also keen to interest more girls in its games. According to
Nick Alexander, managing director of Sega Europe, girls reckon computer
games are arid because too little personality is involved. ‘The limits of
the technology mean that game characters’ faces are too small even to register
extreme emotions,’ he says. ‘But with 32-bit systems we could have romance
games, love games, something players can have empathy with.’

Perhaps it isn’t the technology that is at fault, but what the games
manufacturers choose to do with it. Hyperbole was surprised to find that
half the registered buyers of its first CD-ROM title, The Madness of Roland,
were women. This is an interactive medieval tale, not a game. Maybe the
future really does lie with Roach’s ‘interactive films’.

* * *

Multi-user dungeons (MUDs) grew up on the Internet from beginnings in
British universities. As in the multi-user scenarios (MUSEs) that evolved
out of them, many people take part at once, each player appearing to the
others as a fictional character and all of them moderated by the game’s
software. But while MUSEs create modern or hypermodern environments for
adventures, MUDs often revolve around medieval tales of warlocks, warriors
and the like.

On the screen MUDs (and MUSEs) are astonishingly primitive by the standards
of home computer games. They are text-only adventures: you type in your
moves, and read all the action. Graphic versions will come later. New players,
called ‘newbies’, join a MUD with no strength, magic spells or weapons.
You collect these vital attributes as you venture through the MUD’s imaginary
locations or ‘rooms’. If another character enters the room you are in, your
screen flashes a message telling you ‘Zarrack the Gentle enters the room’,
or whoever. If you are in trouble other players may help, or respond with
indifference, misdirection or worse – in some MUDs, killing newbies is a
recognised means of gaining power.

And so it goes on, sometimes for hours at a time. The determined may
seek out a partner with whom to have ‘sex’, as textually as they wish, though
invisible wizards may be watching or ungenerous sex partners recording everything
for later rebroadcast in embarrassing detail over the network.

Elisabeth Geake