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From one multimedia word-serf to another: Stop your whining!
By CARINA CHOCANO
Samuel Johnson once wrote, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." The good Doctor would probably have greatly respected Michael Crichton, even if the only words spoken by the characters in his last movie were "Hurry!" and "Run!", because they were the most expensive "Hurry!" and "Run!" ever written.
If Johnson were alive and living on the West Coast today, he might be interested in writing for multimedia.
I read Paul Roberts' article in the May Harper's, "Virtual Grub Street: Sorrows of a Multimedia Hack," the day after returning from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, a three-day sensory blowout complete with huffing fog machines, thumping mockeries of rock songs, bikini-clad women assaulting passersby with press kits, a pair of dwarves slathered in green makeup and wearing silver jumpsuits, and a never-ending sea of products bearing an uncanny resemblance to one another. It was a rollicking geek show, in both senses, and it made Roberts, by contrast, seem like a guy patrolling the sidewalk in a horse-hair loincloth and hand-lettered sandwich board, preaching literary apocalypse to a crowd of twitching, lobotomized infidels.
A self-proclaimed hack in the electronic age, Roberts paints a dismal portrait of himself huddled in his humble "hoffice" (home office), sharpening the axe for the executioner of literature. Roberts pounds out "essays" (cursory blurbs) for what sound like CD-ROM encyclopedias for a living. His assignments run between 40 and 200 words, take virtually nothing out of him, and have him riding high on the dollar like the birthday boy at the pony ranch.
This situation, apparently, really sucks.
One of Roberts' main points is that literature as we know it will be rendered obsolete by this brave new medium, and that when the dismal future arrives he will have "participated in his own obsolescence." It's an oft-heard lamentation which always strikes me as ironic, especially from the keyboard of someone who so accurately and hilariously manages to lampoon both what is expected of him as a "writer" and the self-aggrandizing absurdity surrounding an industry that, by most inside accounts, is struggling to stay afloat.
Among the most glaring examples of the industry's collective delusions are the now-infamous non-disclosure agreements it doles out like after-dinner mints. Practically anyone who has overheard the word "interactive" at a bus stop has been forced to sign one. As Roberts explains, "The more excited a company is about a project under development, the more paranoid its staff becomes that a single leak might let a rival go to market first with a similar product. I'm still not sure if these fears are valid or simply an extension of the militaristic paranoia and manic team-spiritedness that have long energized the software industry."
Having toiled for a year and a half in a now defunct CD-ROM sweatshop, I can safely say it is the latter. So paranoid were the executives where I worked that when I was summoned to my job interview, I was given the address, but not the name, of the company where I was to report. As employees, we incurred hysterical recriminations for tossing even the most innocuous of documents in the recycling bin, and were praised for spending otherwise productive days presiding over the shredder, like an underpaid legion of Fawn Halls. Cameras were forbidden in the digitizing room, lest it should become public knowledge that we worked on Macintoshes. Outside the bunker, we couldn't say CD-ROM. We couldn't say interactive. We couldn't say games.
I ask you.
If E3 proved anything, it's that no amount of secrecy can prevent the cookie-cutter results of an industry that creates by committee, critiques by focus-testing, and is driven by money. For the most part, the products showcased at E3 were depressingly uninspired and similar to one another. Even in the young children's game market, where whimsy has slightly freer reign, you will encounter dozens of products which feature talking bears/ducks/rodents/frogs that teach kids math/science/reading "the fun way" (read: puzzles and songs).
Which is to say that this is an industry, not a forum for personal expression, and certainly not literature. But Roberts just doesn't get it. "We writers needn't be experts so much as filters whose task is to absorb and compress great gobs of information into small, easily digestible, on-screen chunks," Roberts laments. "If the emergence of the so-called new media has clarified anything, it's just how malleable literary standards and professional expectations are...The famously high wages for writers -- anywhere from $18 to $30 an hour -- are based on the expectation that we will extrude texts with machine-like efficiency." Low professional expectations and high wages -- how this constitutes a problem eludes me. And I entirely fail to see what literary standards have to do with it.
Biting his nails over the coming literary apocalypse, Roberts writes, "Nonlinearity might seem like little more than channel surfing, but its proponents -- ranging from wealthy software gurus to tenured English professors -- champion it as an authentic yet functional postmodern form, a critical break from the age-old rigidily linear format of the printed page." Of course he's right, but it isn't as bleak as all that. A wealthy software guru wants to push software, get interviewed by Wired, and get free stuff in the mail. A tenured English professor wants to get interviewed by Wired, earn bigger book advances and sell out lecture tours. When the dust settles, and everyone remembers that they still read Vogue in the bathtub, Stephen King on the beach, and Joyce on the bus, everyone will calm down.
As a writer working successfully in multimedia, I am, for the first time, liberated from my day job and the petrified dung-heap of my self-pity. As with Roberts, the writing I do is simple. Like him, I make more money than I've ever made. Unlike him, I am ecstatic at the freedom this has afforded me to apply my literary standards to my own work. When Robert complains about the the "pleasurelessness" of writing for multimedia, and praises "conventional writing" for "providing me with an intellectual challenge...letting me attempt a mastery of language and form...allowing me to tell stories," I have to wonder, who does he work for? The indulgent Mistress Medusa? No one I've ever heard of has ever been asked, let alone hired, to "produce true works of art," or to "concern themsleves with story structure, themes, or any of the other, more celebrated elements of traditional writing."
"Traditional" writing, like all art, is self-generated, self-motivated and subject to the random approval or disapproval of an invisible audience. It is not funded by computer manufacturers or focus-tested on sports fans. It is not expected to make a return on a multi-million dollar investment. And it certainly doesn't pay up to $500 a day.
As a writer of children's games, I'm quite often asked to participate in the creation of characters, encouraged to be playful with language, asked to join in design meetings, even asked to pitch ideas and develop concepts. It's really not so bad.
So, while Roberts' self-esteem sags around his ankles, and his disgust swells like a ballpark frank, my elation soars. As far as I can see, the industry as it stands today is a cow, though quite possibly a British one. And before it gets strait-jacketed and ushered away to rest and mull things over, I plan to milk it, not just for money, but for time. To write.
It's like Maugham said: "Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five." And without the other five, you can't be a writer.
Carina Chocano graduated from Northwestern University in 1990, and has spent countless hours at Kinko's since. Currently, she writes scripts for CD-Rom games that will help mold the minds of the young children of America.
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