"Bruce Sterling - Digital Dolphins in the Dance of Biz" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]

CATSCAN #9 "Digital Dolphins in the Dance of Biz"

"It's the crystallization of a community!" the organizer exulted. He
was a skinny, manic, handwaving guy, with a glittering eye and a sly toothy
grin. He wore slacks, a zippered shirt of a color not found in nature, and a
two-foot-tall novelty cowboy-hat, of bright purple felt, with a polka-dot
hatband.
The "community" in question were computer game designers,
swarming in a big roadside hotel in Silicon Valley, for four days in March
1991. There were close to four hundred of them. Time once again for
"Computer Game Developers' Conference." This was the Fifth Annual gig, and
the biggest one yet for "gaming professionals," and the best yet, maybe even
the richest yet -- but, according to what I heard over the wine and cheese, it
was somewhat less weird than the earlier ones. Almost dignified by
contrast, almost professional. Some side-effect of all that "crystallization,"
presumably....
Five brief years ago, the very first such game-design conference had
been conjoined in Chris Crawford's living room, and with room to spare. Mr.
Crawford was the gentleman in the purple twenty-gallon hat.
I recognized the funny-hat syndrome. Made me feel right at home.
When I first met Damon Knight, at Clarion, this legendary SF critic, editor and
organizer had shown up with a big white bushel-basket beard, half-a-dozen
hollow plastic baseball bats, and great bounding bag full of rubber
superballs, which he proceeded to fling into the hallways and whack with
vim. Damon Knight, as a turbo-weirdo, a veritable ne plus ultra of cracked
genre loon, does not even have to try to pass for normal. And neither does
Chris Crawford. This is pretty much what genuine "power" and "influence"
look like, in a milieu of creative lunatics.
Chris Crawford is founder of the gaming conference, author of three
books and thirteen computer games, and the premier critic, theorist, and
analyst for THE JOURNAL

OF COMPUTER GAME DESIGN: "The finest periodical
dedicated to computer game design -- the longest-running periodical
dedicated to computer game design -- the ONLY periodical dedicated to
computer game design!"
Computer gaming, like science fiction, has old roots; they even share a
common ancestor in H.G. Wells, a great player of simulation war-games.
But as a conscious profession, "computer game design" is only five years old.
Science fiction writing as a conscious profession dates back to Knight's
founding of the Milford Conference in 1956, followed, almost ten leisurely
years later, by his establishment of the SFWA. The metabolism of computer
gaming is very swift. Science fiction writers are to computer game
designers as mosasaurs are to dolphins.
So, I had arrived in San Jose at the functional equivalent of a SFWA
gig. A neatly desktop-published programme announced, on page one, "Our