Quest Into The Unknown by Douglas Crockford Marin County, California Volume II: The Gathering Storm Not for Sale or Trade October 24, 1985 That's right IT'S SHOWTIME! And do we have a couple of shows for you! They are both presented in CompressoVision and they both have Dynamic Action. You'll love 'em both or you'll die. The first one has a working title. It will get a real title later when we know more about the plot. That's right, I'm talking about DIAL "C" FOR COMPRESSOVISION! Once people get picturephones, they will also get picturephone answering machines. What you get is a little more unusual. When you turn it on, an instructional program comes on the screen. It tells you how to use the machine. It is very unusual because it allows you to call up any answering machine and to examine all of its messages. Of course, sale, use, or possession of this machine is a violation of the Communications Act of 1989. You don't even know where it came from, except that it was manufactured by Kwi Dan Heavy Industries. There is one number in the dialer's directory. Should you do it? You can't be detected. Go on. Try it. And that's how it begins. That first person's messages will contain some other numbers. Those automatically go into the dialer's directory, and your little world expands. It is like watching television. You are spying on people's lives. It is no more difficult that changing channels. And it's really interesting. You get to know these people and learn their stories. And then you hear about a murder. And it turns out that you can be detected. What is going on? Why was the machine built? Who built it? And why was it given to you? You are really involved now. The only way to find out the answer is to DIAL "C" FOR COMPRESSOVISION. When danger calls, don't answer unless you've got a really good explanation. And also on COMPRESSOVISION It's those aliens again! This time they've settled down in a little tourist trap which is the home of the Giant Mud Torpedo and the Biggest Foam Rubber Warehouse and Gift Shoppe on this side of Interstate 80. So hop in, and take a ride to ALIEN SPRINGS, WYOMING! And thanks to CompressoVision, you don't even really have to go there! And you know that Wyoming will be your new home. Foam Home, that is. Yee hah! [drawing] October 26, 1985 Today I bought my daughter a book called _The Telephone Book_. It is by the same woman who did _Pat the Bunny_ and _Pat the Cat_. In all of these books, there is something to do: move something, peek behind something, touch something, sniff something. Every page has some gimmick like that for the kid to do. And it's all tied together in a little story about a boy and a girl you are visiting. This one starts with a picture of a telephone with a cardboard handset attached with a piece of black cord. Ting-a-ling a-ling a-ling a-ling! That's the telephone. It's for you. Jane picked up the paper handset. You answer it. Say "Hello?" I would not read anymore until Jane said "Hello?" loud enough to be heard over AT&T. Hello! This is Paul and Judy. Will you come and help us take care of our little brother? Jane said "Yes." That's good. Good bye.* *Copyright 1942 by Dorothy Kunhardt. Copyright renewed 1970. Printed in USA by Western Publishing Company, Inc. Used without permission. Then there's several pages in which you do stuff with the kids. Then the last page. Another picture of a telephone. This one doesn't have a removable handset. You know, reduce production costs, that kind of thing. Ting-a-ling a-ling a-ling a-ling! That's the telephone. It's for you. Turn to the front of the book. Pick up the receiver, say "Hello?" And she answers, "Hello?" Hello! This is Paul and Judy and Timmy. Are you home now? "Yes." Thank you for helping us. Will you come and see us again? "OK." That's good. Goodbye. "Goodbye." Wow! Compare that performance to the branching book! This book is strictly linear, but the impression of interactivity that Jane got was infinitely more satisfying. Moral: Branching is no substitute for interaction. October 27, 1985 At last, the true and complete story of the Computer Revolution. WHEN GEEKS RULED THE EARTH. It was funny because it was true. It all makes sense when you have all the facts. [drawing] October 28, 1985 Some day, the Academy of CompressoVision Arts and Sciences will give out their annual Mr. Fun Statuettes. Of course there will be the technical awards (like best original microcode, or best microcode based on another algorithm). But the ones I'm hoping to win are Best Experience Lifetime Achievement and the coveted Carl Hollywood Good Sport Award. They'll open the envelope, read my name. Somehow, I get to my feet and find my way to the podium. Never in my life have I been this moved in a public gathering. And this is my acceptance speech: I don't have a speech prepared, so instead I'd like to sing a brief selection from Oklahoma. All the cattle are standing like statues, All the cattle are standing like statues. All the cattle are standing like statues-- All the cattle are standing like statues... Oh, what a beautiful morning, Oh, what a beautiful day. All the cattle are standing like statues! All the cattle are standing like statues. If you're like me, and I know I am, then you'll want to know more about Alien Springs. You may have burning questions, like "What's the Deal?" The Alien Springs location solves a lot of problems. We've got these enormous constraints put on us by the medium when we try to do a branching environment. I haven't learned my lesson yet, so that's what I want to do. The constraints cannot be hidden. The best we can do is to dress them up and pretend they are intentional. The aliens help us do that. Where high tech dressing is required, they provide it. Where low tech dressing is needed, we have Wyoming. And when the technical limitations are so stupid as to be unexplainable, it turns out that the Aliens aren't as smart as they look. So, we have more freedom in fitting the environment to the medium in Alien Springs than anywhere else on Earth. If I put you in a more familiar environment, you would have expectations about what you can do that the medium cannot meet. Similarly, in a pure science fiction environment, you would have SciFi expectations. But in the trailer park world of Alien Springs, you don't know what to expect. And that's just the way I want it. And if the show is funny, and if the constraints of the medium are a part of the basic jokes, then it works well. We just have to make sure that we are laughing at Alien Springs and not at CompressoVision. The vacationland aspect of Alien Springs ties in nicely with the travel-in-your-own-livingroom idea. The science fiction part helps with the Lucasfilm image. The show will open in space with a spaceship. The rest of the show is land locked. You drive all night through this small town with Aliens: MORE ALIEN GRAFFITI. And think of the sequels: AN ALIEN GRAFFITI IN PARIS. Etc. Maybe we can do some of that pop culture stuff that I like. But if we do that, then we'll have to do a much better job than _Explorers_ did. And that's why we're in Wyoming. Basically, there's something funny going on, and you are there, trying not to get in the way too much. I still have to figure out what you're doing there. I think that you are not the main character, but you are right up there. Suppose the town looks like this: [drawing] - notice, there are no roads going out of town. The diagonal street may run up against Alien Springs Creek. It may be more trouble than it's worth, but never mind that now. The way the Alien GO-OMATIC system in your vehicle works is like this: You select a destination on the WHERE dial and then press the GO button. This procedure must be repeated at every intersection. (The system is more like STOP-OMATIC.) That's because an alien once made a mistake, and they want to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again. And besides, whenever you stop, aliens can get in or out of the back seat. They hide in the shadows until a car rolls up and stops, and then they jump in. And of course, two screens! One of the street, and one of the guys in the back. Actually, I'm thinking of getting rid of the street screen because we don't need it! Having it makes this just a who needs it driving game. It will be fun to solve the branching problem, but NOBODY CARES ABOUT THAT! Branching is no substitute for interaction. The story is the guys in the back. Why are they here? Why are you here? [Two Aliens get in] [Dad has the GO-OMATIC Controller] "Take us to the Opera House." "We'll just see about that." [The Aliens look at each other [The kids aren't impressed] in alarm] "Please, Earthling. "Come on, Dad." Take us to the Opera House." "Yeah, Dad, take them to the Opera House". "Please, Earthling." "Get with it! Jesus!" October 29, 1985 WARNING! This page has strong* sexual content. *But not strong enough according to local community standards. A few years ago, I worked at Atari Labs. ("Putting off 'til tomorrow what we could do today, building a new future for all of us.") A good friend of mine there, John "Hacker Jack" Palevich had done a lot of messing around with modems and data communications, and he proposed investigating the development of gadgets that would let people have sex by wire. He never explicitly described the devices or explained how they might work, but everybody got the idea anyway. And after they got the idea they laughed at him. But not me! I thought the idea had merit and said so. Still do. And as we move into the age of modem-based recreation, I know that I would have a better time knowing that there's an interesting woman at the other end, than a geek or a basement-type. Know what I mean? Is this getting through? Get the picture? The screen will look something like this: [Graphic] It's as easy to use as your TV at home, using your GO-OMATIC console: [Graphic] In general, you turn the dial to select one of the items in the menu area. When the item you want is highlighted, you push the GO button, and something happens. The STOP button will do different things depending on what's going on, but generally it stops what's going on. This has to be simple enough that Mom can say "This is simple." The initial screen will have the Title Screen, and the menu bar will contain: Instructions Directory Credits Coming Attractions Power Off. Instructions brings up the slide show with the Japanese girl who demonstrates the operation of the machine. Directory brings up the dialing directory. More on that later. Credits will list the hundreds of people who made this show possible. Coming Attractions will tell you about Alien Springs, Wyoming. Power Off doesn't really turn the power off. But it is a clean way to make the show stop. The Directory Screen puts names (if known) in the picture square, and phone numbers in the menu bar. Also in the menu bar are Previous Page Next Page because the directory can grow to 100 names. The STOP button will toss you back to the Title screen. Pressing GO while a number is selected will put you into the Message Menu if the connection is established. (It might be busy or out of service.) The message menu has: Hang Up Insta-Dial[TM] Pause Previous Page Next Page Hang Up breaks the connection and bops back to the directory. Insta-Dial[TM]. If there is a return number associated with the last call, then this will do a hang up, find it in the directory, and call it for you. A real timesaver. Pause will suspend the current message and change the menu item to Resume or Continue or Proceed or something. Previous/Next Page will show the other portions of the message list if it is longer than one screen. Selecting an item in the message list will cause that message to be played. Items you've already seen will be dimmed a little bit. [Graphic] I also need a text line that tells you the current time and other status junk. Maybe I'll do something like SLIDING PANELS on the Menu Area to make transitions between menus less confusing. Meanwhile Way down the road from Working Parts, Wyoming, is the sleepy, sneezy, dopey little town of Alien Springs. Don't go lookin' fer it on the map, 'cuz ya won't find it, heh heh heh. Nope. But it's thar. Just as sure as shit. Hey, let's get serious, for a moment. Wyoming? Of all the states and all the towns in all the world, why do I end up here? What time is it in New York? How about Alien Springs, New Zealand? Or Alien Springs, Wales? Or Alien Springs, Tahiti? Or ...but the list could be endless. But hey! It's better that Alien Springs, North Dakota, isn't it? OK, OK, here's the design process: There is what we are permitted to do by the medium, and then there's the stuff that is fun and interesting because human are involved. I always thought that design would be so much simpler if humans weren't involved. Another plus: it is somewhere between the East Coast and the West Coast. October 31, 1985 Halloween I'm working without Annette Safety in the context of the original CompressoVision features. It will take time before audiences and producers get comfortable about the new medium. Eventually, we will have new structures and new stories, a whole new vocabulary for representing the images and dynamics of experience. We can't do that right off the bat, even if we knew how, because it is too weird, risky, not safe, what does it mean. And that is why Dial "C" and Alien Springs are my first features. They both pretend to offer complete worlds, with all the constraints made reasonable. It is my expectation that that completeness and reasonableness won't be so important in the future. Audiences will know what they want from the experience and will know how to get it. They won't be distracted that the images don't reflect superficial reality. They want Dynamic Action, not Image Quality. FOAM ON THE RANGE I've been going crazy trying to figure out why there's all this foam in Wyoming. I had several theories: 1. They make it into food shapes and then eat it. 2. That's what people turn into after they get zapped. 3. They have a plot to conquer Earth by changing people into aliens, but they lack the technology to actually do that, so instead they're going to dress everybody up in foam rubber alien suits. They _know_ it won't work, they're just trying to fool their bosses into thinking that the invasion is on schedule so that they won't be called home. 4. The waste product of their rockets is foam rubber. 5. There are no real aliens. It's really spies in rubber suits. 6. The aliens thought that they could make lots of money selling foam rubber. Where else in No Man's Land Wyoming can you get such a selection? 7. They use it for holiday decorations. (It does make more sense than pumpkin mutilation or ritual tree murder.) 8. They just like foam rubber. They think it's neat. When I started writing this treatise on foam rubber, my plan was to list these ideas and then to conclude that it didn't matter, that the Foam Home was just one joke and that's good enough. That way I could exorcise this foam block, and figure out what's really going on in Alien Springs. But I like those ideas, in particular #3, #6, #7, #8. So that's the first approximation on what the aliens are doing here. The next big question is: WHAT ARE _YOU_ DOING HERE? Yes, what do you do here. Maybe you play a videogame. There's something you do by driving around the town. The town is shaped a little like a PacMan maze. You get points every time you complete the circuit. You run over dots... Never mind...Sigh... "I'm in the mode for love ..." MR. FUN WHERE ARE YOU??? I got the part about the aliens, thank you, but you left out the part that the participant does! What does Mom do? Of course, what I mean by "Mom" applies to a much broader class of people than females 18-45 with living children. I really mean all those people who might be touched by this medium who also will find that a Geek-O-Rama special effects show won't be enough. I mean the opposite of Nerd. Not necessarily female. Not necessarily a head of household. Not necessarily an adult. There's a little bit of Mom in most if not all of us, and it is that part that I refer to when I say "You can't fool Mom." But Mr. Fun, I already knew that! Are you giving me some kind of clue? Are you saying that I have the answer and just don't see it? Hey, now, look! You aren't God. You are just Mr. Fun! So come on! Let's see some fun! What? Turn the page? OK, let's turn the page ... November 1, 1985 Last night was Halloween. Jane and I went Trick or Treating with the Fox's. While we were driving home, I thought some more about the track. The problem with the track is that you have no slack. You can't get the immediate feedback that you need. G recognizes that, and so he's pushing that panning stuff. But it is too expensive, too slow, and it doesn't give the right kind of feedback. And while I was driving down San Marin Drive, I thought about how the view from the center lane is very similar to the view from the right lane. The delta is small, but is exactly the feedback that we want. Is there a cheat that will transform a left lane view into a right lane view, and all the positions in between? If so, the drill would be to pull off the next frame, decompress it, and then do the POV* WARP on it. *Point of View. The question then becomes can we do a POV WARP? I think maybe yes. OK, Mr. Hollywood, how do you do it? To do it, we need one more (well, maybe more than one, but let's start with the simple case) piece of information: the coordinate of the vanishing point. Let's look at some illustrations. [drawing] The two views vary greatly only near the bottom of the screen (ignoring overhanging trees and tunnels and stuff). Suppose we shred the picture horizontally, and then, starting at the bottom, slide the strips* to the left. At the bottom they may slide a lot, and the amount of sliding decreases as we approach the vanishing point. *A strip is a row in the VR˙AM. VDP2's vertical interpolation will be a big help here. It won't be convincing for very large moves off-center, but close to center it might work. That's all I really need: just a little slack with which to provide feedback. But, will it work? Don't know. I'd like to take some photographs and shred them and see how closely they match. It will be a week or two before I can do the experiment because I have to go out to help New Jersey now, oh Damn, oh well, true science must wait until I return. Trivial problems: When we shift stuff in, we need new picture detail to fill in the triangle [drawing] One trick requires having more data, so that a complete picture has a shape like [drawing] which is really [drawing] with the shaded parts heavily low pass filtered so that it compresses well. A SLEAZIER trick would be to define a cockpit window bezel that gives you a field of view like [drawing] where the shaded triangles are structural details maybe with little displays built in. The way that works is any holes that occur due to sliding the shreds are simply obscured by the window detail. People who think they know will be impressed that we can handle non-rectangular displays. If this works, then driving games like Alien Springs make more sense, because the system will have a little play in it. Why wouldn't it work? Because it is a cheat. It will distort things. The more play we give the more it distorts. We can control this somewhat because we have total control over the picture content, and can try to avoid things that will look stupid when distorted. Will this technique handle curves? Probably yes. Hills? Probably no. But it doesn't NEED to be general. All it has to do is take me somewhere, and allow* me to believe that I'm going where I want to go. *ALLOW is an important word here. I can't force you to believe. And if you try to drive off the track, it won't work. But if you want to believe, I will let you believe. Seeing is believing! What is feeling? The wrong use of this is a driving game, where if you get too close to the edge you FALL OFF AND DIE! CRASH AND BURN! FLAMING DEATH! You see, if we want people to believe in this stuff, then we must respect them. It's like in After Hours when the hero says "I just wanted to go out of my apartment and maybe meet a girl. Should I have to DIE for that?" SHOULD I HAVE TO DIE FOR THAT? Remember those words, you're going to see them again. For example, just turn the page and you may find ... SHOULD I HAVE TO DIE FOR THAT? We aren't talking about non-violence. We aren't talking about dumb morality. We're not talking about giving the sucker an even break. No! We're talking about having a good time! (While I wrote that speech I was thinking about Jimmy Swaggart, media evangelist.) Yes, believers, it's the laying on of CompressoVision! Because you care, because you dare, we offer to sell it unto you, safe and effective when used as directed Amen! I seem to have gotten off the point... What I was saying was, an individual's death is a real important and personal thing. If we are asking them to believe in us, then we must believe in them. We cannot be taking lives from them. That spoils the illusion. It breaks the promise. It violates the contract. We've been worried about what happens when they find out that it is fixed. But believe me, brother, that's nothing compared to when they find out that it's not. [drawings] November 2, 1985 There's this movie called Robot Monster about this alien who is a guy weaving a gorilla suit with a diving helmet and TV antennae. The plot is a little complicated, but basically he killed everyone on Earth except for one family of scientists, and now he's after them. He kidnaps the teenage daughter. His orders from the home planet are to kill her, but he really wants to have sex with her, but he doesn't have the equipment. So, trapped between his orders and his desires, he delivers this doleful soliloquy: "I can't. But I must. But I can't. But I must." It is almost 3:00 am. I can't understand why I am kept awake all night with thoughts of Robot Monster. So how does it end? It turns out that it was all a dream. Or was it? The end? It was a really bad movie. It was first presented in 3-D. They try to save it in the end with special effects and dinosaurs. Makes no sense. I'm going back to sleep. But I can't sleep. But I must. But I can't. But... November 3, 1985 Most important of all, since the fairy tale guarantees a happy outcome, the child need not fear permitting his unconscious to come to the fore in line with the story's content, because he knows that, whatever he may find out, he'll "live happily ever after." -- The uses of Enchantment Bruno Bettelheim I love this stuff. It is going to be so much fun! And there's more! Coming soon, Crockford's History of the Novel (as best he remembers it) and It's Relation to the Early Years of CompressoVision (as best as he can figure). It'll be interesting reading, but will have to wait until later because it's almost time for dinner. I don't want to start it yet because I don't have time to finish it. But I do have time to write this sentence and the next one as well. And now I should go. Don't want to be late. I wish I could remember the details. I recall that the first novel was really a text on writing letters. It did so by example. In order to make it interesting, the author made all of the letters about a bunch of characters. Well, that was new. So it was called a novel. So you get these collections of stories that tell a story. Next you have diary writers. Then you get first person witnesses who are telling the story but don't seem to be actively writing it down. And finally you get the omniscient narrator in 3rd person. The problem with that last one is that you might question "How does he [the author] know about that? Could he be making it up? Well yes, but the important thing is that NOBODY EVER QUESTIONS! There's a thing I'm trying to do in Dial C and Alien Springs which is like the original novel. I want the structure of the story itself to explain how it is delivered and why it is the way it is. That's what the by November 8, 1985 QUEST INTO THE UNKNOWN! We can make it interesting. We can make it important. We can make it fun. We can make it repetitive. We can make it repetitive. If we didn't want you to have a good time, then we wouldn't want your money. Always insist on CompressoVision, when you're too tough to care. Forget about President Reagan's "Star Wars." In Washington these days, the real issue is Car Wars. - Wall Street Journal 11/5/85 Soon events occur which show that logic and causation are suspended, where the most ancient and most unique and startling events occur. The content of the unconscious is both most hidden and most familiar, darkest and most compelling; and it created the fiercest anxiety as well as the greatest hope. It is not bound by a specific time or location or a logical sequence of events, as defined by our rationality. Without our awareness, the unconscious takes us back to the oldest times of our lives. The strange, most ancient, most distant, and at the same time most familiar locations which a fairy tale speaks about suggest a voyage into the interior of our mind, into the realms of unawareness and the unconscious. The fairy tale, from its mundane and simple beginning, launches into fantastic events. But however big the detours -- unlike the child's untutored mind, or a dream -- the process of the story does not get lost. Having taken the child on a trip into a wondrous world, at its end the tale returns the child to reality, in a most reassuring manner. This teaches the child what he needs most to know at this stage of his development: That permitting one's fantasy to take hold does not remain permanently caught up in it. At the story's end the hero returns to reality -- a happy reality, but one devoid of magic. -- The Uses of Enchantment IS LENGTH IMPORTANT? (or, it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it.) The LAB Guys seemed worried that you can only get about an hour of stuff on a CD. They suggested multi-disk programs as a solution. But is it a problem? How long should a show be? Seems to depend on the show. Sitcoms are 30 minutes. Cop shows an hour. Movies between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 hours. Fact is, we just don't know how long a CompressoVision program should be. I've been thinking about Dial C as 2 hours, and Alien Springs as a 1/2 hour, but who knows. ABOUT THIS PAGE H sent (faxed) a document that I thought was so important that I wanted to stick it in my book. But I didn't know that Spray Mount can cause ugly black scars on thermal FAX paper. Imagine my shock and horror as the page turned black before my eyes! [shudder!] Interactive paper. November 11, 1985 GRAY'S BINARY We need GRAY'S BINARY to do the GO-OMATIC dial. The thing is, I can't find it in any of my books, so I have to figure it out. The trick is that only one bit is different between any adjacent numbers. So you need a translator to go between the regular binary to Gray and back. Suppose you have a four-bit code. In normal binary, the sequence is: 0101010101010101 0011001100110011 0000111100001111 0000000011111111 But the problem is, if we have 4 pick up heads that can find a 0 or a 1, then the transitions where all 4 bits change will usually pick up a lot of noise, and could produce any value, not just either of the values bounding the transition. Gray's Binary eliminates all that noise: 0110011001100110 0011110000111100 0000111111110000 0000000011111111 And here is the translation function: t: procedure (G: array [L bit]) returns (B: array [L bit]) local i: integer begin B [L - 1] := G [L - 1] for i := L - 2 to 0 step -1 do B [i]: = G [i] xor B [i + 1] od end t November 12, 1985 INSTANT FUN - WHILE U WAIT I met with E for a couple of hours yesterday. We talked about Dial C, Alien Springs, and Crockford's Paradox. We talked about budgets and schedules. His estimates on Dial C were very similar to mine. There's no way to budget Alien Springs yet, too much is still unknown. Much will depend on how we do the aliens, simple puppets vs. complex puppets vs.? In any case, it is likely to be at least several weeks in the Creature Shop. Much will depend on how we do the town. Possibilities include: (*) shooting in a real ghost town (*) shooting a painstakingly created model town (*) digitizing a painstakingly created model town and doing wireframe transforms (*) shooting a sleazy model made by tacking photographs from the real town onto frames (*) digitizing photographs of a real town and doing wireframe transforms. I like that last one best. I figure I'd go out to Wyoming with the photographer and shoot buildings and stuff for locations. November 14, 1986 WHO NEEDS INTERACTIVE VIDEO, ANYWAY? All can be revealed by the secret science of SYNTHAESTHETICS. [drawing] What strange powers does this man possess? So who needs it? People like _you_! But why do you need it? That's harder, but basically it's because it will be fun, and you never outgrow your need for fun. I haven't figured it all out yet, but this "interactive" stuff is going to be more than a gimmick. It will ultimately allow us to reach into the experience and ourselves, and touch something important. Will we do that with the first features? I doubt it. For more Questing is needed. I will be happy if the first two or three features are entertaining. That's all we are promising. That can't be too hard. And it is a big deal. You know how hard it is to laugh with all the terrible problems in the world. And we are on to something. Videogames were big I think because people got a glimpse of this promise. Videogames collapsed when they saw that a glimpse was all they were going to get. CDAV is mostly the product of L. I got a chance to talk to him about what he has started. He thought it would be good for simulating real experiences that are too expensive or too dangerous. Like piloting a plane. I think we will do better to simulate unreal experiences. To simulate a bird, we want freedom in flight, not eating worms. When we fantasized about being a bird, it was freeflight, soaring, escaping gravity, never "What would it be like to have a bird brain and lay eggs?" That's why I think Dreamspace will come closer to you than Flight Simulator. How well can we simulate non-technological experiences? Poorly. The camera vehicle and the video memory fit the technological constraints well. (Not all of the constraints are our New Tech. TV does a poor job of presenting nature, anyway.) How well can we simulate the unreal: The dream, the ancient memory? And how do we do that? Do we do it explicitly, or is it factored into the technological simulations? Clearly, we don't want stuff like Press '1' if Jennifer should leave Jason. Press '2' if Jennifer should give Jason another chance. You should know by now that that is not what we're talking about. I don't understand it all yet. But you have my promise, when the time comes that I must, I will. I'm confident of that. So, let's get this quest into the unknown. Why is interactive video important? "It's more than just a given, it's a conclusion." So after an enormous investment of money and scientific and artistic know-how, the guys now want to know "Why is interactive video important?" They don't need to know for themselves. They have always had an intuition, which is still correct. They need the answers to explain it to others. Because, they have shown it to people who didn't immediately understand how it could be great. One of the reasons they like me is that I could look at it and say "Yeah, it's great." They needed that. Even more than that, they need a way to explain it to the doubters. So it comes back. "OK, Crockford, if you're so smart, why is it important?" Inquiring minds want to know. THE HISTORY OF COMPRESSOVISION Our story begins, oh, 25,000 years ago in a cave in what might someday become a place like France. You've got these Cro-Magnon guys drawing pictures on the wall. That's how it starts. And from that time on, our human history unwinding, the pure flame of racial motivation, driving our ancestors inexorably to that great day when civilization's great purpose is ultimately achieved: Within this decade, Crockford will play with CompressoVision. To be continued ... People are always coming up to me all of the time and asking "What does it mean?" And to tell you the truth, I've asked that very same question once or twice myself. So I've been doing some reading. Steve has recommended some books. The first was Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung and his friends. It was great except it was too light on archetypes and too heavy on analysis. Then I read The Uses of Enchantment by Big Bruno Bettelheim. I thought the first half was wonderful. The stuff he was saying about children and fairy tales, great stuff. I even quoted parts of it in this book. (used without permission.) But in the second half he gets into sex. Weird sex. Check out the chapter on Cinderella. You'll see what I mean. This guy treats kids? Scary. Now I'm reading Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I'm expecting this one to be real good. I'll let you know. Why do I think it'll be good? Because Campbell is not a psychologist. Gary has been sketching the foam rubber alien suit. Pretty funny. There's this guy who performs at the Torpedo Room in the Alien Inn. ("Hey, who's here from Mars tonight? [polite applause] Alright!") Lounge lizards. "Stop me if you've heard this one before." FOAM HOME. Where can you find such a selection? Try Foam on a Rope! Your face in foam...while U wait! Foam on a stick! Cup of Foam. "Our prices are out of this world!" From the mountains, to the prairies, to the ocean, WHITE WITH FOAM. November 15, 1985 What is Really Going on: A True Explanation as Best I's Understands It Up until now, I haven't talked much in these pages about where this technology is coming from, or even who is paying me while I scrawl out these words. OK, stand by for the rest of the story. I've never heard the complete history, but the current activities at RCA Labs comes out of two programs, both based on the ill-fated CED (a videodisc that flopped in a major way). One program was developing "interactive" "applications." The other was using the CED as a digital store. After the CED got nuked, those programs got merged into a home computer effort. This program suffered from a lack of shared vision. The little HC* was being pushed in many directions at once, by individuals at the Labs and by the marketeers at the New Product Division in Lancaster, PA. While each of those directions had merit, not even RCA has the resources to develop them all within the scope of a single product. The "HC"* was described with terms like "schizophrenic," but nobody cared. There was so much that was right with the technology. Its best personality would present itself. *Home Computer. And then, the Lancaster guys found an excuse to pull out. And suddenly the Lab guys are forced to look at some scary truths. Like there is no market for the home computers until somebody figures out what they're good for. Like a product needs to meet the needs of its purchasers. Like if we don't get our act together, this technology will die. It would be a real shame if this technology died because they've worked so hard, and it's going to be so much fun. Crockford told them so. So they are now carving the HC, the universal CDAV box, into focused, specific products that folks might want to buy. The product I am most interested in is the CompressoVision Box which I first proposed in September. It has two features that are really great. First, it will play those Dynamic Action Play Disks. People don't know it yet, but that's what they want. Second, it's not a computer! How does that change things for us? Under the old rules, all we had to do was to develop some programs, and help along the maturation of the technology. We still do that. But additionally, we now have a product championship role, in which we will aid the Lab Guys in getting their box to market. In the recent past that was Lancaster's job. We now have to sell something to another division (like consumer products) or figure out a way to get it to market ourselves. What do we offer? We have our name and reputation. I have spoken George's name and seen the power. I don't like to do that very much, but it does work. We have a vision. I don't think the Lab Guys ever thought about Mom before. Or thought about what it's like. We're wiseguys. I've been able to discover things that are helpful to think about. The more attention they pay to me, the more they'll benefit. For example, after the compression algorithm was explained to me, I predicted that they would have trouble with light and shadow. N predicted that it would be trivial. They did the experiment and it was almost a disaster. We need this stuff. If we are ever going to reach the general audience again, then we must get away from doing dogshit videogames. This CDAV stuff, I think, will be good enough that we can do reactive drama in the home. I've seen nothing else that's better. Let's look at that last statement. Supposing that this is the best we can get is not proof that CDAV is good enough. It might be that we should wait for something better to come along. It would be dishonest to take RCA's money saying that "this is it," if it isn't it. But that's OK because it is good. I don't like all of the technical performance specs, but the things I have found to be constraining would exist anyway, regardless of the technical limitations. These are the biases of the medium, and every medium has them. The question is, can Crockford produce a couple of CompressoVision features based on the current understanding of the technology, and I believe the answer is "Yes." I cannot offer proof that CDAV is sufficient. I'm going on intuition. So I have 3 things to do: 1. Move the technology along 2. Produce the features 3. Champion the product I do #1 just by living every day. Reading their specs, talking to them, planning for the future. That's fun and easy. The next step in #2 is to write the scripts for Dial "C" for CompressoVision and Alien Springs, Wyoming. Sometime soon I need to go away for a while and work on those. And #3. H is coming out Monday for meetings with me to discuss how we want to do it, or as H says "learn how to use each other." Another useful thing might be to compile a book of the sayings of Mr. Fun. It could be an important book because the introduction of CompressoVision will be the next to the last significant event in the social evolution of Man. One thing I left out, H has a music video program, of which not a single detail has been revealed to me, which I want to work on. Lets get political. Why is interactive video important? Why is it important to us that RCA not squash this new technology? Why do we think this is it, when the videodisc, with the same expectations, proved that it was not? (And how could RCA have gotten this far without knowing?) (How could they go so long without asking?) Part of the answer is that this really is hard. The videodisc guys thought they had it figured out and they were wrong. Even having a hit (Dragon's Lair) is not proof that you are right! How dare we think that we are right when they were wrong? What do we have in our technology that makes CDAV different enough from videodisc that we can predict success? I can toss all these hard questions at myself, and my intuition still tells me I'm right. But where are the arguments? How do you convince the doubter? I just received a document from H called SyntheVision by RCA. I think that "Synthe" is nearly as dumb as "Compresso." But the important thing is not whatever name it ends up with, but the need for a specific identity. H picked that up. Good for her. There are lots of other things I like about the document. Parts of it resemble my Quest into the Unknown notebooks (currently available in 1 1/2 volumes. Starting soon, Volume III: Your Finest Hour) or my RCA Mystery Meetings. But she's unfocused, and worse than that, she doesn't answer the questions: Why is it important? Why will it be profitable? Why will this be better for RCA than the CED? And on top of that, some of her paragraphs are too long, and she does too much three dot stuff... She knows it's going to be hard, and she's summoning great powers to her aid. (Other RCA operating divisions and companies, ISV, Mom, Sarnoff's Ghost.) I think it is too early for that. We must be real clear on what we are doing, and have unshakable confidence in our creative judgment. We must establish a set of SyntheValues or CompressoValues, and then try to impress those values on the rest of the world. The difficulty of course is that this product presentation process is happening now, and we have not agreed on a set of values yet. That's OK. The product approval cycle is a LONG one. There is lots of time within the cycle to make corrections. (That's part of the reason that it is so long.) We have to avoid panicking under the incremental deadline pressure, and keep focused. If we lose focus then we cannot keep it under control. And if we cannot control it, then we cannot get the outcome* we want. *In this context, outcome is extremely important. Crockford cannot fix it in the script. The downside of that is, when you get to the end, it might not be fun. In summoning the great powers this early, H is simply maintaining the long standing RCA Labs policy that got us here in the first place. We don't want to give up control yet. We don't even have it yet, and the great powers will not help us get it. How can I help? [drawing] LFL Alien Springs "Goofy" Alien #1 graphic November 19, 1985 H and I have worked out a new set of deliverables for Phase I. To meet them, I am required to do the following: Provide a written report on a new home entertainment medium, with speculation on why it will be important. Provide a written report on user interfaces. Provide a proposal for the next phase of this project, including objectives, schedules, and budgets. Provide a written report on a technique for extracting mattes from digitized images of models. Provide a written report suggesting a different approach to implementing the audio section of CDAV:APP. and Dreamspace. I have about one week per report. H will have to sell this back to RCA. I'm sure that she can. I am really worried about the audio part of the system. There is some brilliance on the video side, but not on the audio side. I heard some demos. Admittedly, they weren't polished demos, and the system is still incomplete. But what I heard in the audio was bad. I want to find a constructive way to get them to revisit audio. And I think I found a way. I'm going to propose a chip called APP. I don't care if they build the chip or even take the proposal seriously. The idea I really want to get across is that they need brilliance in the audio section. So instead of raving "It must be better!" I will instead give a technical plan for doing it. Then I want them to question my plan, and say "No, you do it this way..." And then they will know. So I'm proposing a hacked up VDP1. It runs a similar flavor of microcode. It has DAC's on-board. It has clocks. The pixel averager is replaced with something else, maybe some sort of Fourier Transformer. I'm not sure of that part. I just want some chunk of stuff in the heart of the device that is based on powerful ideas. Telephone quality is not nearly good enough. We need this to sound great. COMPRESSO LESS THAN A WORD MORE THAN A SYLLABLE I have been calling it CompressoVision because I had to distinguish my uses of the CDAV technology from the technology itself. I found that to be useful in thinking about the whole system. The Lab Guys can't do that, and so have trouble in evaluating in context the relative importance of the technology and what they call "applications." Nobody is going to want to possess the box for its own sake, even if it has a great black enamel finish or a real oak veneer.* People will want the box only for the things it can do with a play disk. If people could enjoy a disk without the box, then they would. The box is an expensive inconvenience. The technology is not inherently desirable. It has value only because it can deliver desirable experiences. *Or even teak or walnut. I chose "Compresso" because it could be readily understood by the guys at the labs, and because there is little danger of it being taken too seriously. November 21, 1985 CROCKFORD'S THEORY ON COMPUTERS (cont.) Here is a capsule review from InfoWorld (11/18/85) used without permission. [**] ATARI 520 ST (Atari) - The Atari 520 ST, although dazzling, is still unfinished because it lacks enough software and hardware support; this makes it, for the moment, an expensive home computer. Its power and quality construction, however, show great promise for it to become a powerful and inexpensive business computer. According to this review, a home computer needs less software, less support, less "finish" than a business computer. THAT IS NOT TRUE! The business computer comes with a powerful profit motivation for making itself effective. You literally have to pay people to use it. The home computer exists only to enrich people's lives. Improving people's lives qualitatively requires much more care, more investment, more caring, than doing word processors and spreadsheets. The people at home need, deserve the best. A home computer is not an unfinished business computer. It is much, much better. It has to. Or "It's in the closet for you!" WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF OFF OF THE TRACK All along I've been trying to keep everyone on the track, because that's how you have the best time. But what if they insist on putting themselves into a corner that we cannot get them out of? How about this: We interrupt this program. We put a TV News Guy on the screen. He tells us of the launching of nuclear warheads. We hear Civil Defense sirens, and then it goes black. And it stays black for awhile. People will be wondering what that was about, was it real? Couldn't be real. And then President Reagan comes on and gives the Star Wars speech. (But if you listen carefully, you can still hear sirens in the background.) What it comes down to is, if you really want to die, then we'll give it to you, and how. "Nuke 'em 'til they glow in the dark." November 26, 1985 "The one thing we don't want to do with Windows is to create over expectations," says Bill Gates, Microsoft's Chairman. - InfoWorld, November 25, 1985 No danger of that, Bill. Somehow, the RCA guys have allowed themselves to be convinced that Microsoft has an important role in their CDAV box. The greatest menace is that MS-DOS and Windows make you think about the box as though it is a computer. And if you do that, then you won't get the experiences that we want. "I am not a computer. I am an interactive presentation [drawing] medium for the home." -- CompressoVision I've been thinking about getting a new pen. That's better. OK, how about a feature based on the "Take On Me" video. An Interdimensional Love Story. I'm not sure of what it's about, except that you can alter reality with window-like portals. You can fold the world, alter time, join coast to coast, past to present. I have a feeling about it, but nothing specific. This one may be less story oriented than my other shows. It may be examining a relationship, inspecting it, may be changing it. We can explore fantasies like the inevitability of TRUE love. Nothing at all like "touch it and die," right folks? Turkey Day, 1985 This morning (or afternoon Pacific Time) millions of TV sets were tuned into NBC (RCA's own network) to watch, that's right, BERT CONVY with Phylicia Ayers-Allen and Pat Sajak (who seems like a decent-enough guy, I must say) hosting live coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Tomorrow the Compulsory Gift Shopping Frenzy Period officially begins. And once again shoppers will face that unbearable frustration: There are still no CompressoVision Boxes on shelves. Even all the money of the RCA Laboratories cannot purchase a single CompressoVision Box this Christmas. I didn't watch the show myself. (Jane and I were in the kitchen making cookies.) But according to TV Guide, this year's parade is identical to last year's except for the debut of a 75 foot Betty Boop balloon and 5 new floats: Cinderella, Robot Man, Masters of the Universe, Rainbow Brite, and Monopoly. Also featured is Miss America 1986 Susan Akin, who will never appear naked in Penthouse, swear to God. (There should be some sort of year-to-year compression scheme that would allow NBC to transmit the 3-hour event in under a 1/2 hour. Talk about broadcast applications of technology!) The Future is Interactive Lots of people seem to think that's true. We seem to. RCA Labs seems to, The Board of Directors at RCA seems to think so, too. I'm imagining some high-powered, long-range planning committee that does some crystal ball gazing pays off some sleazy consultants, clips articles from the Wall Street Journal and in-flight magazines, and sifts, searches, extracts, abstracts, compiles, condenses, and reports the inescapable conclusion: The Videogame Market is Dogshit. The Computer Market is Dogshit. The Home Video Market is strong but volatile. It is difficult to predict (witness the CED fiasco. They competed against Laserdisc. They forgot that they were really competing against all uses of the family TV set.) To maintain market share, we must maintain technical leadership (which we currently do not have in any area). Therefore Let's go interactive! That's what I'd conclude if I was them. Nobody knows what interactive means. It's like saying "Let's do something Great!" Except that "interactive" seems more definite that "Great." It's not. November 29, 1985 AUDIOPHILES: Who Needs Them? During my span of years I have visited the homes of a number of audiophiles. The experience varies with the intensity of their obsession, but in most ways it is always the same. It is not like listening to music. It is a demonstration. They work at it too hard. They will be busy graphic equalizing or watching levels. I suppose this is like interactive music for them, but the interactions are not meaningful in my view. The stuff they hear is stuff I want to be unaware of. They hear signal to noise, dynamic range, flat 20 to 20 KHz, separation. Sometimes I think they can't hear the music at all. Music exists only to test the performance of the audio machines. In a way, I'm glad that RCA killed off the QUAD market. Those demos were REALLY dull. I bring this up because I just bought a Compact Audio player. I started by visiting a number of stores, but nothing demanded to be taken home. Then one day Jane and I happened to be in the Emporium, and I asked a salesman to explain to me the differences in the features of the various players. I described my problem to him like this: "When I bought my microwave oven, I got a top- of-the-line model with sensors and programming, and the only feature I use is the timer. This time, I don't want to pay for any features that I won't use. So what features are important?" Well, audio performance is dictated by the CD standard, so whatever you get, it's going to be great. I like that. So there's a variation of $300.00 or so for other features. Things like remote control, programming (various levels), control panels and displays, box shape, and CD-ROM capability. I ended up getting the smallest box that they had. It doesn't have motorized disk loading. I have to do that myself. I can handle that. But I plugged it in and it looks great. I mean it sounds great. It looks silly, a tiny little box. But I think it's OK. There was another box with the same features, but it was as large as the standard audio component. About the same price. It's for people who don't want it to look silly. I think it should be the same for CompressoVision Boxes. I want everybody making them: RCA, Sony, Philips, Gold Star, Samsung, and everybody else. And they'll all be different. Most manufacturers will have several models, like RCA's VCRs. They will all play my Feature Play Disks. Someone will save $20.00 by taking out Compact Audio capability. You'll see it built into VCRs, TVs, and BoomBoxes. I'd like to see a 5" inch cube. Someone will include an AM/FM radio. Some stupid fool will build it into a computer. I hope it's not us. At least not right away. I see our current activity as establishing a standard. The objective, to permit the diversity listed above, and yet guarantee that every player will play every disk. We need to define standard ways of extending the base configuration. Even if the base unit won't have a modem or MIDI port, we need to have a standard way of using them on the top-of-the-line boxes. The future's getting better already. NO CPU One thing I want to propose is that we don't include a standard CPU AT ALL! Doing that would FORCE people to realize that this really isn't a computer in disguise. Instead, I would use a second VDP1, and program it to behave like a simple specialized CPU. The Huffmann decoder would disassemble the instructions, and FIFOs would implement stacks and stuff. The softmachine would have to be very simple, RISC-like. That's fine. I suspect that VDP1, using specialized languages, could out- perform the standard CPU's running C or Pascal. But the important thing is how it makes you think about the box. No one would ever consider a computer that used VDP1 as the CPU. But it will do well for my features. It costs more than an 86, but I don't want an 86. It will cost about the same as anything I would want. If the goal was to cut costs, we'd put in a 6502, which is under a dollar. December 1, 1985 The Tale of Nathaniel the Toad Once upon a time there was a small toad named Nathaniel. Nathaniel was despised by everyone who knew him. Not because he was a toad, or because he pulled the wings and legs off of flies before he ate them, but because he could not be trusted. One day at the forest tavern, where all the small forest creatures went nightly to get drunk, Nathaniel announced that he was never going to pay back the money he had borrowed from his little woodland friends. And he borrowed large sums of money from just everyone. So they killed him. And then they pulled his legs and arms off and ate him. THE END. The Tale of the Tale I was looking through one of my old notebooks and came across this toad story that I wrote seven years ago. It is a great little story, and so I decided to share it with the people I work with. And everyone's first reaction was "What does it mean?" They are so used to my writings having multiple levels of meaning that they couldn't understand this little cautionary tale that means nothing at all. So I told Noah that it was really about him. Emotional Space Scene: A college campus. You are walking through it. How does it feel? That depends on you. It will feel different depending on who you are: a high school kid scoping out a potential school, a student on the first day of class, during finals, next semester, and an alumnus checking out the old school. A single person could have all those feelings at different times during his life. There is more involved here than passage through time. This is a different kind of passage. The walk and its scenery can be identical each time, but the experience, the feelings, the emotional content of the walk can be very different each time. We don't even have to be traveling to take one of these trips. It can be looking through the photo album, or hearing "our song" again. It is seeing something familiar in a new way. The raw video that we can display will have any emotional content filtered out. We must somehow give the viewer the emotional raw material with which to interpret the video. This material may be in the form of story and characters. It is the emotion space that I want to explore, not some phony computerized physical space. December 4, 1985 The Golden Age of CompressoVision That's what we're looking at. It will be a period of reckless experimentation with inadequate budgets. For me, the most interesting experiments will be about models of interaction. We'll do shows which benefit from participation of lots of people. They don't necessarily each have their own joystick, the important interactions are between the people, CompressoVision providing the context. We'll do shows which are intensely private. We'll do dramatic shows. We'll do musicals. We'll do bizarre weird stuff. It will be like the Golden Age of Television. You start off with all this weird stuff because no one knows what works. The easiest way to describe television before there was television is to say it is like movies in the home, or like Radio with pictures, but it is neither. So while everyone is scrambling around trying to figure it out, let's have a golden age. Great Moments in the History of CompressoVision If I had been with Vladimir Zworykin during the first practical demonstration of the iconoscope, I would have said, "Hey, Vladimir! Now we can all be on TV." It's show time again. I've been asked to come up with a couple more shows. I think these shows should have these qualities: high entertainment value extremely CDAV dependent demonstrate a new interaction model easily reduced to a demo cheap Suppose we did Alien Springs as a cartoon? December 7, 1985 I've come to a major fork in the road, and I have no alternative except to go both ways at once. (What a guy!) The left fork is acting as trail guide for the RCA guys, making them at home in that region between what they want and what they need. The right fork is to go into the Unknown and get the lowdown on what I've been trying to do all along. Steve calls it "Facing the Devil." I think that there are two sets of laws. (Hold onto your hat. Here come some serious non sequiturs are coming up.) First, the laws of nature. This included the physics and science, the theory of life as a biochemical activity, everything. Second, the laws of man. This might even generalize to the laws of life, or the laws of intelligence, but I doubt it. People are pretty unique. If you try to measure our progress by just the first laws, then you will miss some interesting stuff. I'll explain this later. It will make sense. I couldn't say it if it wasn't true. _Round Eddie, Coroner_ You are special assistant to the world's fattest forensic medical examiner, exceeding his jurisdiction again, hot on the trail of another case. _R. Samson Smith, Armchair Detective_ Pull up a chair with the world's number one couch potato sleuth. Together, armed only with a remote control, you'll solve real crimes from facts gleaned from your TV set. _DIAL-A-RATING_ Adult entertainment for Mom. She can set the dial for just the amount of sleaze she needs. Choose from G, PG, PG-13, R, or get crazy and slam it all the way to XXX when nobody's looking! Mom's in control! December 8, 1985 I've been telling the RCA Guys that there is no Santa Claus. (Apparently, Bill Gates has been telling them that he and Santa are pals.) They have budgeted money for letters to Santa. That has been in the works for some time now. The first drafts are almost done. They're behind schedule because they weren't sure what to wish for. They wanted me to help them make sure that they wish for the right stuff. And then I tell them that there is no Santa, and boy do they get upset! They say that they already paid for postage. I laugh at that. I tell them that their parents have always lied to them: There is no Santa. Santa is just your father in his underwear pulling gifts out of the attic while you sleep. I thought I was doing them a favor. "YOU BETTER NOT LAUGH" - Mr. Claus "I LAUGH AT DANGER" - Uncle Doug Well we know where we're going But we don't know where we've been And we know what we're knowing But we can't say what we've seen And we're not little children And we know what we want And the future is certain Give us time to work it out - "Road to Nowhere" Talking Heads Little Creatures I said that CompressoVision's competition includes television, so let's see what's on the tube tonight: Hey! It's another night for CBS! After a strong lead-in from 60 Minutes, it's All Star Party for "Dutch" Reagan (no joke!). Partiers include Steve 'n' Eydie, Dean Martin, Frank ("Have yourself a merry little Christmas") Sinatra, Monty Hall, Charlton Heston. Also, they team Ben Vereen with Emanuel Lewis, what a line-up! I can't sleep just thinking about it! Next: The All New 10th Annual Circus of the Stars, with your favorites, Dick Clark, Bea Arthur, and Merv Griffin! Guess they couldn't get Bert Convy. The ad boasts "Dozens of Stars!" but I don't recognize most of the names in the bill- of-fare. Who are these "stars"? Ami Foster? Scott Hamilton? Lauri Hendler? Lara Jill Miller? Tony O'Dell? Peter Reckell? Alfonso Ribeiro? Cory Yothers? Tina Yothers? Kim Zimmer? Am I really out of touch? Should I know who these guys are? Too bad EWOKS aren't on tonight. I'm reading Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He presents the whole body of mythology as many tellings of the same adventure. I'm pretty early yet, but I am already struck with the similarity between his outline and my own Quest Into the Unknown. Important clues include: I first conceived of this as a quest, and not as an engineering exercise. I invented Mr. Fun, my destiny personified, Hollywood Trismegistus. It feels a little funny, reading about the structure of recent events in my life in a book of mythology. I'm trying to understand or at least recognize the feeling, because I think it is an important clue. And I want to read on, find out what happens next ... December 9, 1985 I need to do a paper on why this stuff. It should be convincing. They should be able to pass it around and say "that's why we're doing this." It is bad because we don't really know. I can give them my Unknown Theory, but that isn't going to make them very comfortable. It is going to be fun and important, because the interaction will be fun and important. What is interaction? That's it, isn't it. Not hardware, not technology. Not even software, at least, not in the sense they think about it. We say "experience," but they don't understand that. They don't understand "interaction" either, but it comes closest to something they can be comfortable with. You can be astute and watch for every clue, or you can sit back and just let it flow over you. After all, the best part is enjoying the ride regardless of the outcome. -- Jonathan Lynne Writer/Director of Clue From what I hear, they sleazed it. Could be real bad. Ah, but that's what Your New Medium (my mid-project report) was about. And they didn't get it. I tried in 5 parts to show that "interactive" is not clearly defined, and gave a few examples of apparent non-interactions that give warm interactive experiences. And they didn't get it. Well, that's OK. It is weird stuff. This is frustrating. I think they know now that they are talking about a new medium, with a new way of telling stories. Since the major twist here is that it is an INTERACTIVE medium, they should be especially open to speculations on interactivity. But they are instead all hung-up on their computer graphics and software. How can I get through? Part of the problem is that I still can't see all the way to the end. But I can't get them to even brainstorm with me. This subject is too soft for engineers, apparently. These are intelligent people. How can I help them? What do they need? How can I do that and still give them what they think they want? Maybe this is it: They are used to working in the Laws of Science. I'm working in the Laws of Man. Unexplored Territory, at that. They still think videogames are fun. How could they possibly get it? When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse Out of the corner of my eye I turned to look but it was gone I can't put my finger on it now The child is grown The dream is gone -- "Comfortably Numb" Pink Floyd The Wall Here comes the new horizon It's comin' 'round the bend And with it comes the future The past comes to an end. And beyond the ancient rainbow, There's something new to see And life will be beautiful For folks like you and me. -- I wrote this one. December 10, 1985 OK, LET'S LIGHTEN UP, HERE December 11, 1985 A day passes like nothing. Let's talk about compression. If you look at a video signal, it looks something like this [drawing] Note that audio takes up an insignificant part of the signal. OK. Now they compress the video, and they do such a good job that it almost fits in an audio channel! (That channel is a compact disc.) OK, video fills the audio channel. Where do we put the audio? Oops. This is a major gotcha. The reason is that audio doesn't compress! You have to get super heroic to save 50%. Greater savings come at [drawing] significant degradation. We get degradation in the video, but you can't see it from across the living room. In audio, it is different. Quick we need a rationalization! Try this: You can go to still pictures, and use the whole channel for Hi-Fi. Or you can do silent movies. [drawing] Or you can select the mix you need. But look more carefully: I cannot get what I need. I need high quality audio and as much video bandwidth as I can get and I need them at the same time! The CD-ROM based system for CDAV CANNOT WORK! I talked to B of the DroidWorks hoping to discover a secret technique for compressing audio. There is none. The ideal would have been [drawing] but it doesn't, because audio doesn't compress, and I think it is EXTREMELY important to have Hi-Fi and not Lo-Fi. The only way to get significant compression is to go Lo-Fi. The only arguable point here is the unacceptability of Lo-Fi. If you think that Lo-Fi is OK, then it will work. I don't think it works. If RCA thinks it works, then they should at least drop STEREO from their list of capabilities. Let's get reasonable. So, what I'm saying is, we need a device with at least twice the bandwidth and capacity of CD-ROM or we DON'T HAVE A PRODUCT! It's like they say, The audience is listening. Do we want to do these shows with stinking audio? Videogame quality audio? Can we sell that? Suppose a show is an hour long. Do you want to go an hour without listenable music? Do we want to say now, a year and a half before we have a functioning prototype, that there will be no interactive music video programs? What kind of future does this box have? Can these guys pull it off? Hey, take it easy, Doug. Why it's Robert Young. You seem tense, uneasy. I'm just worried about the RCA project, Mr. Young. Maybe the thing that's making you edgy is caffeine. What? Try some Sanka. It's real coffee. And tastes it. But, Mr. Young... Here, try a cup! It's decaffeinated. I don't drink coffee. I don't even drink Coke. But I'm not taking any sort of drugs or medication. I'm sleeping well, and I'm eating OK. Oh, then mind if I have a cup? Oh, sure thing, Mr. Young. Just try not to spill any on my... Sorry, here let me take care of that. So, if changing your coffee won't fix it, then what are you going to do? I'm not sure, Mr. Young, but I think I should go on doing the best that I can. I'll give the Guys at RCA the best advice I can give them. And maybe I can keep the project going long enough to look Mr. Fun in the Face. Well, looks like my job here is through. So long, Doug. See ya, Mr. Young. And thanks. For everything. December 11, 1985 MOM: The Goddess of Home Entertainment Our good friend Chip is an engineer, and he gets this stuff. But he is accustomed to considering unusual ideas, and can play "Science for Fun." He has always understood who I meant by Mom. For me, this Mom character has been the strongest image or instrument for getting and staying clear on what CompressoVision should do. And now I'm sure that she's a real mythological figure, a Goddess, and her temple is the living room, and her altar is the Home Entertainment Center. The Electric Anima. I think when I say Mom to the RCA Guys, they think about their own wives and mothers, and there's no way they could ever be made to want one of these boxes. They know how to make a Nerdbox. They don't know how to make a Mombox. And I make them uncomfortable by reminding them of that. December 13, 1985 FRIDAY THE 13TH: The Night That Doug Came Home It's the end of another day, and I'm home, dumping it down in the book. For a while I was exploring in areas that could uncover some important truths about the human experience. Lately, I've just been concerned about how to get simple stuff past G. Well, you know that. You've seen it in these pages. The lab is in failure mode, but I'm not. I'm going to have my fucking deliverables done on time, and in the big showdown in January, I'm going to challenge them to be successful. I am no longer interested in what makes them uncomfortable. As far as I'm concerned, they either get it or give in. It is their problem and none of my own. I have the Goddess and Sarnoff's Ghost on my side. All they have on their side is ME. Take it or leave it. December 17, 1985 I am working on the report called "Instant Fun, While You Wait." It is to meet the deliverable called "Provide a written report on a new home entertainment medium, with speculations on why it belongs in everyone's home." I am writing it is the form of a speech, and I intend to deliver it at the ISV Conference next month. ISV stands for "Independent Software Vendor." I keep telling them to call us "Software Producers" instead. I think the language you use is very important, it controls your thoughts. To think about something in a different way, call it by a different name. The paper is about half finished. It will be about 13 - 20 minutes long. It will focus on CompressoVision, and on why we need to figure out the interactivity stuff. It is sort of a preview of what I hope to find in the deep forest when I go to stare the devil in the face. December 18, 1985 MODERN MYTHOLOGY Jane and I drive in together every day on the freeway. It is usually slow. But, hey! It's Marin! Jane has recently been talking about the Good Freeway and the Bad Freeway as though they were real personalities. As she explains it, The Bad Freeway wants the Good Freeway to be bad, but she won't, so the Bad Freeway pushes her out of the way and takes her place. Well, that's interesting. I asked Jane if perhaps the two freeways were sisters, and so validate some of Bettelheim's stuff. Jane said no, because the Bad Freeway is a boy. OK, well, is the Bad Freeway her brother, or someone in her family? Jane says no. How do they know each other? They don't. And here's the big revelation: The Bad Freeway lives in San Rafael. December 22, 1985 I've had it wrong from the beginning! It's not CompressoVision! That box doesn't compress: it expands! It expands CDAV encoded discs into near-living color. It expands your consciousness when used as directed. That's right, it's EXPANDOVISION. Yeah. This changes everything! It is EXPANDO which is more than a syllable and less than a word. (If you put it all together, it would be ExpressoVision.) Alright, I'll be honest with you. I haven't done this at all like RCA wanted and expected. OK, now it's out in the open. They wanted me to get down in the bits with them and come up with exciting hacks. And I probably would have, except that while waiting for hardware to arrive (which took forever and still isn't fully functional) I figured out another approach. Even though I have an excellent understanding of CDAV and its applications, I looked in a more general direction. I still constrained myself with the CDAV constraints, but I investigated what-it-should-be-like instead of how-it-should- be-done. I still don't have what-it-should-be-like nailed down. I might never. But it is considerably more interesting. And will turn out to have greater value. Even if the RCA Guys can't get it to market (and at this moment I think they can't) I will at least have learned something. In any case, RCA cannot be successful without answers to the questions I'm asking. Without that it's just another new technology. BETTER GRAPHICS MAKE A BETTER GAME. -- Ron Gilbert What is it that we want to do to people? On one level we want to take their money. But that isn't very satisfying and it still doesn't answer the question. We want to entertain them. But what does that mean? To distract them from issues in their own lives? A glimpse of vicarious meaning? Do we make them feel good? Push their buttons while they are pressing ours? People have a right to the pursuit of happiness. ExpandoVision is just another way to exercise that right. Do we want to make them better people? There could be an educational message. (Not could. There will. Recognizing that, we can make sure it is a positive one.) By educational, I don't mean the year cellophane was invented or the physics of a bouncing ball. I mean how to be successful in living your life. That is one of the uses of the hero myth. That myth continues in film and TV. That's what the Fairy Tale does for kids, says Bettelheim. PRESENTED IN EXPANDOVISION. In the show DIAL "E" FOR EXPANDOVISION the picturephone pirate box is really Pandora's Box! After being warned of consequences to opening it, you open it any way, releasing evil. I need to read up on that myth. The important interactions in Dial "E" aren't in the track and its deflections. It is at the VERY BEGINNING, when you commit the Pandora Act. That is the thing you can never do in a movie. This is different because YOU DID IT. This makes sense to me. Now I need a myth for Alien Springs. December 25, 1985 This Christmas, it's PANDORA'S EXPANDOVISION BOX ...it is certainly a variety of Pandora's box -- that divine gift of the gods to a beautiful woman, filled with the seeds of all the troubles and blessings of existence, but also provided with the sustaining virtue, hope. By this the dreamer crosses to the other shore. And by a like miracle, so will each whose work is the difficult, dangerous task of self-discovery and self-development to be portered across the ocean of life. -- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces For behold, the Kingdom of Mr. Fun is within you. -- Luke 17:21 December 27, 1985 CONSTRAINTS I've been talking all along about constraints. Mostly, I've been talking about the constraints placed upon the ExpandoVision Producer by the limitations in the medium. But there is another set, even more important. Those are the ones that are placed on the participants. Folks have talked about the desirability of being able to do ANYTHING you want in an ExpandoVision Experience. But I say "no way." And here's why. I contend that the Kingdom of Fun is already within the player. We normally live in a domain of so many choices, that FUN becomes elusive. When we play a game (I mean a REAL game) we accept a set of rules which, when used as directed, will tend to limit us to fun choices. We need the constraints to shut out the noise, to help us focus, to discover within ourselves the capacity for enjoyment. In the recreational context, you must have the proper constraints or it won't be fun. You have free choice every day. THE TROUBLE WITH KIDS is that they are so ignorant. And so producers of video material for kids are always trying to educate them. That is a problem because we as a society are really bad at education (somehow we manage to learn, anyway). Kids are better at having fun. They already have most of the fun constraints in place, because they are not permitted to make Grownup World choices. In an ExpandoPlay for kids, they will need a context which gives them a role of significance in the wider world. Just in the same way a fairy tale teaches kids how to cope with grownups by dealing with giants and wicked step-mothers, so these shows will have to give other important clues. And I mean clues, not facts. December 31, 1985 NEW YEAR'S EVE: The Pandora Story Pandora was the first human woman, our common mother, Gaia in mortal form. The Greeks should have called her Eve, but they were too stupid. Thomas Bulfinch explains: The ancient pagans, not having the information on the subject which we derive from the pages of Scripture, had their own way of telling the story... The story begins with the Titan brothers: Prometheus, and his dumber brother Epimetheus. You know the story of Prometheus, how he gave fire to the humans so that they could cook their meat, and how he was falsely accused of some minor sexual indiscretion and chained to a rock where a nasty bird ate his liver every day. And he was the smart one. Well, according to Hesiod, the original misogynist, Zeus wanted to get back at the men for the fire episode, so he directed Vulcan to make them a woman out of dirt and stuff. The whole pantheon pitched in, and they ended up with a Joan Collins-type named Pandora. Prometheus warned Epimetheus to beware Greek Gods bearing gifts. But Epimetheus married Pandora anyway, possibly because she was so hot looking, and possibly because he was intimidated by Zeus, who was the God of Intimidation. And that was supposed to make mankind sad and miserable forever. And then it gets worse: Pandora's Box. It may have been a jar. It may have been given to Pandora by the Gods with instructions to never open it. It may have been Epimetheus's, containing gifts for the men which hadn't been passed out yet because creation wasn't quite finished yet. It may have been filled with all manner of terrors and misfortunes. It did contain a little hope. And it was opened by Pandora, or perhaps by Epimetheus, and the terrors were released and the gifts were lost, and all that was left was a little hope. After that, the humans were too busy with their own problems to challenge the gods. It's like Crazy Hesiod says: So women are a curse to mortal men -- As Zeus ordained -- partners in evil deeds. You don't hear much about Pandora anymore. That's partly because she is over shadowed by Eve. You remember Eve. In response to her stunt with Original Sin, God Almighty inflicted Adam and Eve and all of their children (even including us) with the worst punishment of which He could conceive: Life as we know it. There is also a dark, sexist aspect to the Pandora story, in which all of the problems of Men are blamed on the Race of Women. I think that that part of the myth is too stupid to be taken seriously, but hardened feminists like Kate Millett see Pandora's Box as really being Pandora's Genitalia, and so find the seeds of millennia of exploitation of women. What a bummer! Personally, I don't interpret it as a trouble with women story, or even as a creation story. I see it as a story about curiosity and action, and in particular that the outcome is nothing like the intent. It's like the aborigines of New South Wales, and how in the beginning God told the guys to stay clear of a certain hollow tree in which bees made a nest. So the guys say OK, but the women want the honey. So one of the women hits the tree with an ax and Death flies out in the form of a bat. And that's why we die: He touches us with his wings. Or take the Algonquin Indians. The Great Hare gave us a present, nicely wrapped, of immortality. All you have to do is DON'T OPEN IT. But the First Ancestor's Wife wanted to take a peek at it. And as she moved the wrappings, immortality flew away. I don't know why it's always women who do this stuff in these stories. Certainly, we shouldn't blame it on Modern Women. Even if we believed the stories. The thing I'm fascinated by is the Act itself, of a compelling curiosity, of a disregard for danger, in a setting in the home. And the relation between action and outcome is unexpected yet irresistible. That is what I imagine ExpandoVision to be. January 1, 1986 Jack-in-the-Box demo. The simplest form of Pandora's Box is the Jack-in-the-Box. So it of course makes sense that we do a simple demo of it. The participant will be looking at a gentle display, the colors shifting and the tune "Pop Goes the Weasel" playing as she rotates the GO-OMATIC dial. When she gets to the POP, the scariest monster you could ever imagine jumps onto the screen with a terrifying scream and he throws his fist through the glass which shatters as he reaches for you. BOO! This is basic stuff. Peek-a-boo is the first game we learn. VIDEO SPACE Imagine an array of boxes, suspended in space. Each has video images on its faces. Somehow we can move between them, and can even enter them. You enter by moving into the picture, until it fills the screen and starts moving. You would be in some sort of abstract adventureland. The video space giving a sort of world view, a binding context for the contents of the boxes. To do this we need the highly expressive, intuitive 3-D controller. Zimmerman's Glove, for example. It shouldn't be a joystick, because it is not the piloting a spaceship. It is more like astral projection. It is like when you stick your hand out of the window of a moving car, and ride the currents up and down. The point here is not to teach the dynamics of an airfoil (come on, guys). It is an intuitive way to control flight. January 3, 1986 There are some experiences that you cannot have with a TV set. You can't really get a sense of falling while sitting in your Lay-z-Guy Rocker/Recliner. You can't feel real exhilaration. You can't feel real pain. You can't taste or smell. This is obvious stuff but it tends to be forgotten. There are some sounds which are thrilling. Assuming that the audio section is implemented properly, we can produce interesting noise. But with that exception, anything interesting in the video experience is going to be in the viewer, not in the video environment itself. I have gotten objections to my theories of outcome, suggestions that it is not fair, or not what we really want. But do you remember the time you were saying What do you want to do? I don't know, what do _you_ want to do? You didn't start having fun until you picked an activity and put the constraints on. When you had available all the possibilities in the world, you were bored and frustrated. When you gave up most of the possibilities, you became focused and ready for fun. There are inherent biases in media. (This is familiar ground, but it is worth going over again.) There are messages that cannot be transmitted without distortion or loss. For example, we can watch a character with whom we identify lose a loved one, and we will feel something and even cry. But that feeling is not the same one you would feel if you lost a loved one. Not even close. So we have these media constraints. The way I interpret the constraints is that we cannot give the participant any new, rich, deep, moving life experiences. This is just TV. All we really have to work with is the emotional material which is already in the participant. Some of this material is from the individual's experiences, some is from the culture and the collective unconscious. That material is in there already. What we do is provide the constraints, the context, the motivation, for discovering it and connecting to it. We do this by interpreting the interactions and keeping the participant on the track. If she gets off the track, then she won't get there. This is not the MicroWorld. It had been suggested, and I think RCA is acting on this model, that the ultimate experience is the MicroWorld, a computer-sustained playland where you can do anything you want. I don't believe in that anymore. MicroWorld is not the place to be. I'm into Creative Constraints, now. Even in my Freedom shows (FreeFlight, DreamSpace), there are constraints. I make you feel free by taking cares away. The constraints prevent you from acting on whatever MicroWorld cares you might be considering. It's almost like meditation. There won't ever be a MicroWorld without constraints. The position I've taken is that instead of complaining about them, I will embrace them and use them to structure the experience. And maybe that is what Socratic education is about. The questions constrain the student, restrict him, force him to focus, to concentrate, until he discovers something. The knowledge was already in there. You just need a way to cut out the noise so that you can find it. Crockford's Paradox is concerned with the relationship between these constraints and the participant's actions. The constraints say that the participant has no choices. The interactivity of the system gives the participant the tools with which to select choices. I must resolve this paradox. Let's look at its components. The first is that experience is structured by constraints. The second is that interaction is the selection of choices. The paradox can be resolved by saying that the choices are constrained, but what do we really have? The purpose of the interaction is to move the participant through the constraints, into the experience. Because, the Pandora Act is an essential part of "getting it," and you cannot commit the Pandora Act unless you can act. The whole thing is like a ritual. You have a thing you must do. You can choose not to, but then the rain won't fall, or the grain won't grow, or you won't get your thighs in shape. Maybe I can't answer it in a general way. The real question is what does the participant do? That is likely to be different for each program. In Dial "E" you playback videophone messages. In Alien Springs you drive a GO-OMATIC Alien Cab. In FreeFlight you fly. Who knows what you do in the Music show. Suppose you are watching Jane Fonda's Workout. You could do jumping jacks while she is doing squats. You have that right. But why? Is freedom just another word for something dumb to do? You can just sit on the couch and ogle Jane and her friends in their tight Danskins, but you won't receive the program's calisthenic benefit. You won't "get it." And the same is true for ExpandoVision. To get the maximum benefit of fun or pathos or whatever you're in it for, you must go along with the program. And if you can't, then don't waste your time with it. Go out and shoot some baskets or take a hike. That is where it makes sense to exercise your freedom of choice. [drawing] While I was trying to figure this out, GE bought RCA. CASTLE SHOW It might be fun to do something with Castles. We could set up a moving camera in a castle, it would be the setting for some sort of metaphysical timewarp show. We would drag you through halls, unveiling dark secrets. The sounds would be really interesting. I just need a reason to be there. Not dungeons and dragons. This is Douglas Crockford stepping out of character to say that this is the end of Volume II of the Quest into the Unknown: The Gathering Storm. Be sure to watch for Volume III: Your Finest Hour. We came a long way in this volume. For example, we changed the name from CompressoVision to ExpandoVision. Thanks to my many readers for encouragement and advice. I'll try to remember your names on Mr. Fun night. Until then, Douglas Crockford Marin County January 3, 1986 3:02 P.M. PST