AGDC 2008: Don't be a towel maker

AUSTIN, Texas--At the San Francisco Game Developers Conference in February, renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil delivered a thought-provoking keynote address on what's in store for the gaming industry in the next 20 years. Playing largely to the concept of Moore's Law--which dictates that technological capacities will grow exponentially as costs decline--Kurzweil urged game makers to develop their software to maintain pace with hardware. He also spoke at length about immortality and how humans are on the path to becoming cyborgs, as futurists are wont to do.

That's all fine and well, but what about those 15 years after the next 20? Such was the topic of Bruce Sterling's keynote address on the second day of the Austin Game Developers Conference. A science-fiction writer and futurist by trade, Sterling has been credited as one of the originators of the cyberpunk genre, thanks to his Mirrorshades anthology, first published in 1986. Over the course of his career, Sterling has been honored with a pair of Hugo Awards--one of science fiction's premier honors--one for Bicycle Repairman and the other for Taklamakan.

"I'm not Bruce Sterling," began the man who bore a striking resemblance to Bruce Sterling. "I know you were expecting Bruce Sterling for the keynote today, but he couldn't make it. He sent me instead. Hi. The reason Bruce Sterling couldn't make your event today is because in the year 2043, Bruce Sterling is 89 years old, and he is a bit too frail to get into a time machine and talk to game developers, so he called on me. I'm one of his graduate students."

Such was the setup for Sterling's keynote address, spoken from the perspective of a man directly from the future, with firsthand knowledge of events both past, present, and future. To evidence his claim that he was from the future, Sterling whipped out a handkerchief, which he purported to be a personal computer from the future.

"It's cheap, and it's old, I've had it every day, and it's like the dullest thing in the world." he said. "But you all still think these things are exciting. They don't get it that all computers in 2043 are boring, everyday objects. They don't understand they're like towels."

Following Moore's Law, he commented, "My towel is as good as 320,768 of your best laptops, and it's about five years outdated." He went on explain the functionality of his "personal mediator," saying that the power cables are superconductive fiber, shape-changing threads, and so on. "It's a camera, a phone, can run some old-fashioned virtual-reality apps," he says, before placing the handkerchief over his head to raucous laughter from the crowd.

So do people develop games for this platform? "Of course they do, but they're not the kind that you look at those flat, glass screens you all use today," he said with clear mockery in his voice. Plus, the future has got 70 years of computer games, spanning "all kinds of dead platforms and dead intellectual properties [that] are occasionally revived." Tetris is apparently very popular in 2043.

Sterling then arrived at what he knew the crowd was waiting to hear: What's the next big thing that will make them rich in the future? "Is it going to be the Web apps? Console sales? Massively multiplayer online role-playing games? I don't know why you all can't invent a better word. We just call them crowd games."

So who are the rich guys? "Well, it's the bankers. It's the bankers and the financiers. You know entertainers can make a lot of money, but entertainers can't keep that money. They're not money-management people... So guys who go into this to make money aren't game makers. They're bankers." He then read a game FAQ from 2043, which is heavy on financial terms, marketing speak, and everything else you'd expect to hear in a current-day postearnings conference call from any given publisher.

"Does that sound like fun gameplay to you?" he posed to the crowd. "Financial services are incredibly boring. They are not cool, fun games. For most people, this kind of electronic commerce is a torture game, because you have to keep playing it or you go broke. Are the gaming bankers rich? Extremely."

So what other questions do smart people ask us time travelers? "What is it about the future that I did not see?" Sterling broke it to the crowd of video game makers that computer entertainment is not, in fact, what they do. "Those are just two old-fashioned words that you still use. The word 'computer' in the future just holds you back." Sterling then said that few probably understand the concept of game development as more than just for computers. He pointed out that there has been a shift to consoles, handhelds, and phones, "so you've almost escaped the computer bottle. But really it's not about the bottles. In the future, we don't have bottles. As you can see, I have a towel."

Calling up an old cliche, Sterling noted that the best way to create the future is to invent it. "The best way to understand the future is to study the past," he argued. "Your past once involved a futurist prophecy. A dark and painful prophecy that was made 35 years ago. And that prophecy came in two words: towel designers." Sterling then called up Atari's history, saying that games were fast out of the gates, drawing the attention of corporate overlords in the form of Warner.

In the wake of that buyout, "the geeks" at Atari argued that since they were creating all of the games, they should get a cut of Warner's wealth. Warner's boss, said Sterling, shunned them, arguing that his company owned Atari and "You guys are our towel designers." By that, said Sterling, Warner's boss meant that the people who made the games were just part of a factory, not a creative workshop for artisans.

What the prophecy left out, according to Sterling, was that "someday, the computer entertainment industry would be big, big enough and stodgy enough that it actually would employ towel designers. There would be oceans of money, and huge budgets on an industrial scale. So there would be room enough for armies of nameless creative guys who actually did create towels. Not visionaries, not game changers, not people reforming culture and changing the daily lives of the population."

"Creative disruption, radical innovations, genuine social and technological change: That is the problem with predictable, stockholder-friendly towel factories," he continued. "What kind of game developer is going to do a rude thing like that, ruin a perfectly good towel? It's not someone who fully understands the future. The kind of guy who could do that is a shameless kind of guy. He's got the nerve to understand himself. When he looks into the mirror, he never sees an obedient functionary. You can't chain him to a towel machine, because his head is not a towel factory."