Imagine that you’re driving along an unfamiliar road, alone and exasperated. “Where the fuck am I?” you say.
“Fuck yeah I would!”
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“We never wanted to be a gaming company,” says company president Amanda Lannert. Yet Jellyvision–which began its corporate life in 1989 as a company named Learn Television, producing educational films such as The Mind’s Treasure Chest–was a crazy success as a gaming company. Only three years ago it employed 70 people and was producing best-sellers such as You Don’t Know Jack and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? You Don’t Know Jack, which debuted in 1995, used a smart-ass game-show host to propel players through a trivia game that’s like Jeopardy on amphetamines, more Norman Lear than King Lear. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, based on the TV show, became the fastest-selling CD-ROM in history. But Jellyvision saw investment veering toward gaming systems such as Xbox and GameCube. “These games,” says Lannert, “sell platforms and guns and girls.”
“It’s so not HAL,” Gottlieb says, referring to the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I mean, the idea of human beings talking to machines and machines talking to human beings is an old idea. It’s been around science fiction for a long time. It was begun to be thought of in a much more practical way in the 50s–these guys in AI who were like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna figure out how to make these computers be more like human beings.’ Like there’s some way of getting there. And that approach, which is a computer-science approach, is really what’s dominated the efforts to make machines more humanlike.
Gottlieb seems genuinely baffled that he and his company are out front in developing this kind of man-machine interaction. “You look at the demos and it’s like, doesn’t it seem so obvious?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. “Producing them is hard, doing them well. But the end result for the user is so simple, which is the same as You Don’t Know Jack. That’s the way it should be. It should be hard for the people who are producing it and really easy for the people who are experiencing it.”
Gottlieb thinks Jellyvision’s interactive designs might play a role in society soon. “We hope that what we’re doing is pioneering a new form of communication that is as fundamental as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, Web sites,” he says. “We think that interactive conversation–or whatever it ends up being called–fits in that pantheon. And how many more of those are there?”
