I have never been much of a game player. I got into this business for the fun of programming,
but I never really could see why somebody would want to spend hours making a program do
something, when you could be writing the actual program itself. That is probably one of the
reasons I managed to avoid dealing with spreadsheets for the first decade of the PC revolution.
20 years ago, I was writing spreadsheets (although nobody called them by that name then).
But recently my wife finally bagged her archaic Mac Plus, and came over to the Intel Inside side
of the street. All she ever used the Mac for was to play games, and so I have been forced to load
up my second disk drive with these non professional applications for her to use. I observe that
most of these games now come on CD, and of course, they all make funny obnoxious noises, and
sprites dance around the screen, and (since I refuse to install a joy stick) the keyboard gets
pounded and the mouse gets wiggled and what impresses me as a programmer is how much
sophistication has gone into these game programs and what a huge black hole of programmer
effort these applications must be.
When I bought my home system a couple of years ago, my beloved entreated me to get the silly
speakers along with the CD drive. She wanted the extra cost Bose surround sound, and I settled
for the standard off the shelf bookcase size with a working range of about 2000Hz. But, as
seems to be always the case, she appeared to be right. More and more stuff is coming available
in this format, and some of it actually does make use of the speakers. I have gone out and bought
some useful, tasteful, and educational multimedia applications. Actually, sometimes I did this
accidentally, because I observe that more and more Real applications are coming with
multimedia sections for introducing you to the application and helping you to use it better. Also,
I am being sent CDs in the mail now, that are advertisements in multimedia format.
The advertising CDs are so far pretty crummy. They usually start up with a crescendo of
orchestral sound, some sort of screen fireworks, and then a movie of a talking head, telling you in
excruciatingly boring ways why you should buy their product. After the guy talking head
finishes his spiel, you generally get some sort of menu to select from, although there is usually
such a jumble of background crud all over the screen that you can't really find the click points.
Each sub menu is generally another talking head, often a lady talking head, rambling on about
some other boring aspect of their crummy product. More often you get a chart show in the sub
menus that you have to read, so now you are not only bored by the product, and bored by the
form presentation, but must bore yourself reading the content of the really really boring pitch.
Last year I bought a tax program to review for this journal (never got around to it because it was
so boring) and it starts off with another movie talking head telling you more than you want to
know about this product that you have just bought. So now I have paid somebody to bore the
socks off of me. But this sort of thing does have some potential merits. If the multimedia
presentation can somehow be hooked to the help screens, and if the material was something more
than talking heads, like maybe screen shots of how the application is supposed to perform a
particular operation, it seems to me that there might be some use here. I have not yet seen that
sort of feature in any of the apps that I have obtained.
A few months ago, I reviewed a product which was a US Atlas, and World Atlas. Mostly these
products just show a rather low resolution map of some forsaken part of the planet, but they do
play the state and country anthems, and a little waving flag goes up the flagpole when you select
a country. It is kind of neat -- Once!
The best product I have seen is, of course, Microsoft Encarta. For those of us used to the
(hardcover) Encyclopedia Britannica, it comes up a little short. But I have had need to use
Encarta for reference material several times recently, and it had a lot of what I was looking for.
It has a rather good index to the material, and the content is quite sophisticated. Where it makes
sense, it uses sound bites, like for composers and such. It does have the odd movie clip of
historical events and such where that makes sense. My only objection is it uses some weird
sound effects as you transition between topics, and I find them rather annoying.
I also recently tried the Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia, and while it seems to be an adequate
product, it pales in comparison with Encarta. There are virtually no sound effects at all with this
product, and where there are sound bytes, they are cheesy and cheap. It does have the interesting
feature that illustrations can be blown up somewhat larger on the screen than the default.
I understand that the Britannica now does have its own CD format, for only about $800, so I have
passed on that.
There is a rather interesting book out now named "I sing the body electronic", by Fred Moody
(Penguin books) in which the author lives with the Encarta development team as they go on to
their next product, a children's encyclopedia named Explorapedia. What I found most
interesting about the book is that even Microsoft does not really know just what multimedia is or
should be. They do know that they have more development resources to throw against the wall
than anybody else in the publishing business, and so whatever does stick will probably be better
than whatever the competition can generate. "The simple fact that computer technology made it
possible to blend text with animation and video did not make such a blend inherently better than
any of these media by themselves." Essentially, something on multimedia should bring
something to the party that a book, or a film, itself cannot do. The hard part is figuring out just
what that is. Grolier didn't get there with their encyclopedia, and Microsoft, I hate to say it,
came closer to whatever that creative thing is to make me prefer the Microsoft product hands
down over the other ones that I have seen.
That brings up a gripe. All of these silly products use only a corner of the screen. Admittedly, I
have a 17" screen, set to 1024X768, and the images may well fill up a standard VGA screen, but
by golly, I paid an extra mumble hundred dollars for the larger real estate, and these products, all
of which are windows based, ought to recognize the system they are running on and conform to
it. (I am sure a Mac product would...)
And finally, just to let off a little more steam, this multimedia stuff will clearly be offered in as
part of more and more applications. But I question if the gentle user himself ever going to create
this stuff. Word processors have been with us for about 15 years in my personal experience, and
it is still the case that graphics are used very rarely in the material I see coming out of our offices.
We just got a color printer a few months ago, but unless you are prepared to print all your copies
on it, you can't get the stuff duplicated at any reasonable cost. So very few documents use color.
And now sound, and video? How many of us are going to set up a TV studio to merge their little
darling's fiddle playing with a grainy camcorder image of the newest advances in the #14 purple
widget manufacturing process? It certainly can be done, even on a PC, and not very expensively,
but who among us has the artistic experience to put something like this together and not make it
seem just like a home movie out of the 50's? And how many companies are going to pay for the
time it will take for people to learn how to use all this stuff? I think multimedia will have a solid
piece of commercial applications, and a rather small niche elsewhere.
It was interesting that in the Moody book, it was made very clear that the tools that Microsoft is
developing to make multimedia possible, are going to be kept to themselves, and are not going to
be sold to the outside world. We here are going to be stuck with whatever it is Windows can do
for you, whereas they have whole libraries of widgets that can add this creative value to their
products, widgets that would be impossible for anybody outside of Microsoft to develop.
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