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Here's a new bit of jargon, something you will all no doubt be familiar
with. Gazzamathics. The origin of this word is a fellow with whom I used to
work called Garry who was something of a sales and marketing expert - a thug
in a suit. We were running a small bike courier company at the time and he
was prone to driving down Greenhill Road pointing to the rows of office buildings
there and saying things like "Y'know mate, there's gotta be two hundred
businesses here - and I reckon they'd shift about $200 worth of freight each
per month. So say we get 25 percent of that pie we'd be making oh $10,000
per month". He'd then go on to extrapolate these figures ad infinitum
until we were all as rich as, um, well, a rich thing.
On the surface this all seems to be reasonable but if you actually get stuck
in with the fingernails of common sense you reveal the essentially spurious
nature of such calculations.
Now, I've seen a few projections in my time and have developed a keen nose
for Gazzamathics. Believe me, once you recognise the smell you can smell it
everywhere. Take the multimedia industry for an example, please. Before you
go anywhere near multimedia you have to get a few bits of jargon under your
hat. Multimedia is the first one. Multimedia is the combination of text, graphics,
moving picture and sound - usually generated or displayed on a computer. By
that definition the closing credits of Superman the Movie were multimedia.
But we all know what we mean, right? We must be talking about CD-Rom. If not
CD-Rom then internet or some other delivery system. For some people multimedia
implies interactive. Most CD-Roms are little more than glorified 'choose your
own adventures', glorified slide shows, or games. Games offer the highest
levels of interactivity. So perhaps multimedia is really just a fancy way
of saying games. No, but when it boils down, who cares.
An attach rate is something I'd never heard of before but in context it makes
quite a deal of sense. The PC market is looking at an attach rate of 37 percent.
Okay! Translation: 37 percent of personal computers sold last year had CD-Roms
attached to them. Cool jargon eh? There are now more CD-Rom drives than television
sets being sold. If this is just because we all already have at least one
television set in our homes and just don't need more is besides the point.
A few more stats. There will be 100 million CD-Rom drives out there in hungry
consumer-land by the end of the year. These figures I must add came from a
talk by a 'respected publisher'. Apparently every person with a CD-Rom will
buy about 10 titles each year at an average cost of $20 per title. Are we
having fun yet? A process of simple Gazzamathics can then be applied to generate
the figure $20 billion; the guestimated (or gazzamated - mate!) size of the
global multimedia industry.
Now the bad news. Apparently 96 percent of CD-Rom titles are hopelessly unsuccessful.
The obvious implication is that 4 percent of the CD-Rom titles are scooping
the lion's share of that $20 billion carcass. How do they do it?
Well according to Mr 'Reputable Publisher' and his ilk, the golden rules are
quite simple:
1) Expect to starve and get eager young college grads to work like bastards
for free in anticipation of a share of the pie later on.
2) Sign up with a reputable publisher - natch!
3) Beg, borrow or buy a brand name. I'm not talking about a small one either.
To make it big you have to be Disney or Warner or the like.
4) Keep in mind that your audience is a teenage boy living in Idaho. Great!
5) Remember that it's packaging that sells, not quality.
6) Burn Creative Nation, as the last thing the industry needs is an $80 million
dollar shot in the arm.
7) Flee the film industry, it has nothing to offer the real multimedia maker.
This same genius then went on to explain that there's really more money in
localising other people's product, that is, in converting the text to other
languages rather than actually producing content of our own. Apparently no-one
else thinks we're the clever country. We just have to settle down and come
to terms with the "fact" that Hollywood owns popular culture and:
"there ain't nuthin' we can do 'bout it".
So what does this really mean? A whole bunch of useless stats backed up by
the flimsiest of logic and delivered by a philistine in a suit do not a conference
make. AIMIA (the Australian Interactive Multimedia Industry Association) did
a surprisingly credible job of putting together a diverse range of talent
for this conference, but by and large the place was chock full of suits and
multimedia wannabes, all snuffling about for a gulp of the Creative Nation
cash. There were a few "content developers" there - and I blame
the PR industry for such terms.
Pretty soon all filmmakers, writers, photographers, poets, software developers
and game designers will simply just be content developers. And believe me,
content is really the new buzz word. While there are people out there willing
to fork out huge sums of cash to put lame shit onto CD-Rom, there will be
a tidal-like swell of people, mostly former desktop publishers, who can't
wait to fill up 600 megs of plastic with trite, hard-to-interact with rubbish.
One example of the kind of shit being touted as the cutting-edge of multimedia
was a combination Laser Disk and DOS based software package designed to teach
people how to use the aperture settings on their 35mm camera. Great huh? For
starters, the stupid thing is klutzy, for seconds, just how hard is it to
set the f-stop correctly on a camera anyway? Depth-of-field is a concept that
takes less than 10 minutes to grasp and certainly didn't need a ton of money
thrown at a retarded teaching system designed for an outdated, user unfriendly
system. For less money each student could buy a camera and 10 rolls of film
and work it out themselves.
The first question to ask yourself when producing some sort of multimedia
product is: "Is this the best way to do what I want to do?" So many
people are producing CD-Roms because they can, not because they are better.
Other CD-Rom titles demonstrated shoddy acting in front of lame blue screens,
user interfaces which turned basic controls into some kind of Where's Wally
adventure, and subject matter best suited for one of those old books you dig
up in your grandparent's attic - and decide to leave there.
I did see some incredible stuff at the AIMIA Conference though. Apple's quicktime
VR and quickdraw 3D impressed a crowd eager to be impressed by Mr Frank Casanova,
head of Apple's Advanced Research team. Mark Snoswell showed us some user
interface concepts which should have been obvious but I'd never seen before.
Buttons that jiggle excitedly as the mouse moves near them. We were given
a sneak preview of the new Journeyman project which was very impressive and
inspired me to start working on some sort of game myself - just as soon as
I finish my book, my next film and a worldwide web site devoted to furthering
political unrest in the USA.
Down in the exhibition hall a diverse clutch of technology/ art folks had
propped up their wares. ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology,
had a stand running its new web site and showing off a few groovy CD-Rom titles.
Silicon Graphics had a bloody great Onyx reality engine which made it easy
to show off the new graphics engine developed by Adelaide based Emergent Software.
Emergent is developing a game of some description which currently uses all
the grunt of a supercomputer to handle the interaction. I'm prepared to be
impressed.
Apple had its usual bunch of casual looking people there explaining why people
would be better off developing content for e-world instead of the internet
at large. The most compelling reason is that as a developer you get paid every
time someone accesses your site. How this will still work as prices for access
to e-world come down is anyone's guess though. I had a fiddle and sucessfully
managed to connect via e-world to the computer back at my studio with no dificulty,
so at least it works. Telstra and (sic) Microsloth were there, too, showing
us the Info-superthingo the Bill Gates way. I looked, I fiddled, I sniggered
and then I left. Sorry Bill.
Philips showed off its CD-i full-length movies at ultra high resolution on
a CD and I think this impressed more than anything. The image quality was
awesome - no more 32,000 colour limits here folks 16.8 million colours all
the way in crystal clear, non-interlaced full-motion beauty. I can see these
little beauties in video stores just in time for video stores to become obsolete
in the wake of video-on-demand services. Ooops.
There were a few other toy makers there too; Kodak was showing off its digital
cameras, while various multimedia content developers hawked their talent (or
lack thereof).
By and large the conference was a good chance to catch up with people and
chat about what a cool place the future is going to be. The challenge for
everyone involved in the multimedia industry now is to give the creative people
as free a hand as possible and let them churn out a wealth of stuff as they
dip their toes into the new media pool. Very little really good product is
going to emerge for a while yet - not until the delivery mechanisms get just
that much faster and user interfaces get just that much smarter. The average
public toilet hand-drier has a better user interface than most multimedia
at the moment, a point made by Frank Cassanova as he sat in front of his Powermac
and waved his hands at it in vain.
Computers have been powerful enough to handle most business applications for
almost 10 years now. I mean, how much grunt does it take to drive a spreadsheet
or a word processor? The real challenge is to make computers smarter so that
people can behave dumber. The growth of services like internet are going to
provide global forums for people to work, play and generally collaborate,
and we are still only seeing the first few glimpses of what such massive collaboration
can produce.
Innovations such as the world view project p; which allows you to spin
a globe while standing in front of a screen upon which are projected realtime
satellite images of the earth to any level of detail, right down to street
level - are going to fundamentally alter our perception of the earth. The
evolution of the so-called time-compact-globe is almost upon us. What will
the world be like when over a billion people are on-line? How will societies
change when newborn babies are able to share their first conscious experiences
with others on-line? These are questions we should be pondering now, not "how
can I turn this kids book into a CD-Rom"? Zoom out a little and take
in the bigger picture. We have the tools to start doing this now and in a
few years time we will wonder how we ever got by with tools this primitive.
In life, just as in a mandelbrot set, all the exciting stuff happens on the
edge where the limits are tested. If there were to be a credo for the new
media it would be along the lines of: Don't imitate, don't regurgitate, just
create. And spend someone else's money doing it, then put it into the public
domain. Bugger the teenagers of Idaho and the suits who serve them.
Dave Sag is director of Virtual Artists Pty. Ltd., a company that
spends most of its time finding new and interesting things to do with all
of its pretty looky toys.
dave@va.com.au
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~davesag/
Pull out quotes
The challenge for everyone involved in the multimedia industry now is to give
the creative people as free a hand as possible and let them churn out a wealth
of stuff as they dip their toes into the new media pool.
The first question to ask yourself when producing some sort of multimedia
product is: "Is this the best way to do what I want to do?" So many
people are producing CD-Roms because they can, not because they are better.
© David Sag MESH#6 Winter, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts