By Scott Rosenberg
The peddlers of a new technology always promise the moon, so why should CD-ROM be any different? If you listen to the multimedia industry, the CD-ROM -- a disk that looks like an audio CD but plays sound, text, pictures and video on a computer -- is the silvery future of publishing, a miraculous medium that's redefining communications and entertainment. Meanwhile, a chorus of been-there-done-that skeptics dismisses it as a technological dead end.
While multimedia houses flood the CD-ROM market -- with encyclopedias, art guides, video games, "interactive movies," how-to manuals, comedy collections and more kids' products than the most acquisitive tyke could ever desire -- doubters deride the format as "yesterday's technology today," a cumbersome, decade-old design that straitjackets anyone trying to work in the medium.
The full story, as usual, is much less extreme and more prosaic. The CD-ROM is neither a world-changing miracle nor a hype-driven rip-off. A CD-ROM is simply a dense data canister -- a little package for a lot of bytes.
Roughly speaking, a byte is a character or a piece of digital information, and a megabyte is a million of them. A CD-ROM can hold 600 or so megabytes. That makes it a low-cost way to mass-produce and sell big heaps of digital anything -- Donald Duck or databases, poetry or pornography.
The bytes themselves are exactly the same as they'd be if they were delivered on floppy disks and then installed on a hard disk drive like the one inside your computer. But you'd need hundreds of floppies to match a single CD, and nobody is about to clear out an expensive hard drive -- which is usually loaded with essential software and data -- just to make room for this week's hot CD game.
We're used to thinking of media as each dedicated to a single kind of artwork or product: for music, vinyl records, audio CDs and cassettes; VHS tapes for video; film stock for movies; books, magazines and newspapers for text. But in the digital world, any medium that stores data can present any kind of information. CD-ROMs mark the first assault of this digital revolution on the mass marketplace (with an estimated 8 million CD-ROM drives installed in the U.S. today, and 14 million predicted by the year's end). For the first time, large numbers of consumers are being sold chameleonic data containers that can be filled with anything that's digitizable.
Many companies are going ahead with CD-ROM publishing programs, regardless of the technology's limitations, because they see it as a "test platform" -- a chance to experiment now with the interactive products of the future. Since 600 megabytes is 600 megabytes, however you physically deliver them, in the future the stuff on a CD-ROM today could easily be sold in some more efficient data containiner -- or, as many observers expect, pumped into the home through a wire along the "information superhighways" the cable and telephone industries are scrambling to define.
In the meantime, the CD-ROM is a 600-megabyte blank slate for designers, authors, developers and programmers to fill. What are they coming up with?
In a developers' conference on the WELL, the Bay Area on-line service, the CD-ROM topic is entitled "The Heartbreak of CD-ROM." The phrase refers mostly to technical drawbacks. But for the rest of us, the heartbreak of CD-ROMs today is how unimaginative most producers have thus far been in making them.
Many of the earliest and most obvious uses of CD-ROM -- for reference works, national phone books, roadmaps and travel guides -- are functional but hardly inspiring. Meanwhile, many of the products that are intended to showcase the special, "non-linear," interactive abilities of the new medium -- the multimedia adventures and learning experiences -- are either less exciting than they promise or don't work properly.
The CD-ROM marketplace -- with anywhere from 6000 to 10,000 titles in print, depending on who's counting -- has odd pockets of oversupply. For reasons that must run deeper than the popularity of "Jurassic Park," prehistoric material has always been a CD-ROM mainstay: "Microsoft Dinosaurs," "Grolier Prehistoria," Creative Multimedia's "Dinosaur Safari," Knowledge Adventure's "3-D Dinosaur Adventure," and many more. A visitor from Mars trying to understand human culture by studying CD-ROMS might conclude that we are a society of dinosaur-worshippers.
If watching grainy videos of T. rexes galumphing across your computer monitor while you read encycopedia entries about their extinction and listen to ominous music doesn't give you a charge, you may need to be a little more intrepid in your search for CD-ROM thrills. After many hours of exploration, I'd suggest the following set of guidelines for shopping for a good CD-ROM.
Repurposing isn't always worthless. Viewing the Voyager Company's CD-ROM of "A Hard Day's Night," for instance, is a substantially different experience from watching the original movie. While the film itself appears in a relatively small square on your computer screen, lots of marginalia -- including all that often unintelligible Liverpudlian dialogue -- is available to you as you watch.
In other words, you gain information and lose picture quality. Too often, though, shovelware doesn't add anything of value -- unless you have a mad desire to do things on your computer that you could do more easily elsewhere. If you're thinking of buying something on CD-ROM that you've seen in other media, find out wht whether the publisher has actually made the product any better.
Recently, the mating orgy between Hollywood and the software industry has led to a new, more rarefied kind of shovelware -- products that result from what MBAs call "synergy" and the rest of us call "spin-offs." The trouble here is that ownership of a particular title, like "Star Trek" or "Jurassic Park," precedes the development of a game or entertainment product. Then a bunch of people sit around a table and try to figure out how to "leverage" the title into a new medium. Naturally, the result is often boring or pointless. That's why original concepts, like Broderbund's "Myst" or Virgin's "Seventh Guest," tend to make better games than "synergy"-inspired spin-offs.
Sometimes the boxes accurately represent the CD-ROM. But publishers are just as likely to cheat a bit -- for example, they'll sell a game by showing beautiful stills from a movie-like video sequence that's actually only 15 seconds long, looks lousy when it's playing and is unlike everything else on the disk. Whenever possible, look at a demonstration of a CD-ROM before buying it.
Consider some small but important design touches incorporated without fanfare into two recent products. Video on CD-ROM usually looks lousy and draws attention to its minuscule size by playing in a square "window" set off from the rest of the screen. In Voyager's "The Society of Mind" -- an expanded version of Marvin Minsky's provocative book about how the mind works -- the designers have elegantly eliminated this problem. In videos of the author addressing the reader, they've made the backdrop the same color as the blank page.
As a result, instead of thinking about how small the video window is, you marvel that Minsky seems to be "walking" around his own paragraphs. Expect to see this trick -- really just an imaginative application of the "blue-screening" technique routinely used in movies and TV -- widely adopted in future CD-ROMs.
One of the most annoying aspects of CD-ROMs is that they take a long time to "load" new material, and you spend too much time staring at a blank screen while the drive whirrs. The creators of 7th Level's "TuneLand," a smart and fun CD-ROM for kids, haven't solved this problem, but they've neatly sidestepped it. When you move from one part of "TuneLand" to another, one of its animated characters stays with you, running or "flying" from one screen to the next. "TuneLand," in other words, never goes completely blank; it has introduced the art of the CD-ROM transition.
Some of the most effective CD-ROMs have been the simplest. Rick Smolan's "From Alice to Ocean" became an early multimedia classic not because it was especially interactive but because its photos of the outback were stunning and it told a powerful story. The same holds for Pedro Meyer's "I Photograph to Remember," a moving account of the deaths of this photographer's parents. These artists didn't wait for the technology to "mature"; they used the tools at hand to create memorable works that people are still appreciating.
Certainly, as the CD-ROM (or whatever digital thingamajig replaces it) evolves it will produce its own masters, too -- innovators without track records in other fields. In the meantime, the CD-ROM industry would do well to listen to creative people who are used to working in other media.
Brian Eno is an artist who has spent much of his career using new technologies in ways their inventors never intended. When he addressed the recent Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles (via video satellite link), he made a playful but important suggestion to the crowd. Mentioning the fun he'd had fooling around with a CD-ROM street map of the entire United States, he urged us to ignore categories like "information" and "entertainment" and take our aesthetic pleasures wherever we find them.
"Information itself," he argued, "can become entertaining. We should use the techniques of information to create entertainment. A lot of the things that are supposed to be information turn out to be far more adventurous and entertaining than a lot of the things meant to be entertainment. Let's just see what's working and build our new art form out of that."
The catalog of available CD-ROMs would be far richer if their producers took that notion to heart.
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