"Bruce Sterling - The Wonderful Power of Storytelling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

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