Industry Draws on Area’s Talent : The growth of interactive computer technology has created demand for artists who can produce software that is both entertaining and educational.
Recently in Burbank I visited an artist in his studio, 1990s style. Jim Bumgardner motioned me to a chair where I could look over his shoulder at the computer monitor on his workbench.
Southern California is now the hot spot in the home computer industry, especially Universal City, La Crescenta and Burbank. Bumgardner is in the middle of the action, creating sophisticated computer software.
Games, for want of a fancier word, are where it’s at. While infopundits rhapsodize about an infosociety that is hungry for information, it’s well to remember that, for the present, 90% of the software sold is still--games. And things that feel like games.
Bumgardner, who was trained as a composer, is taking matters to a higher level, and he has won awards as a sort of producer-director of CD-ROMs. His compact disk work includes “Desert Storm” (the player re-fights the Gulf War), “The View From Earth” (explores the solar system) and “How Computers Work” (learns just that--it’s the best such disk on the market). While he switched on his various Macintosh machines, I saw that the walls of his windowless cubicle on Olive Avenue were decorated with Idaho stuff: postcards, posters, windup plastic potatoes. It’s an inside joke, he explained. Idaho is the nickname of a computer programming system he has created for his employer, Time Warner Interactive.
From a source I couldn’t see came a pleasant piano solo. Then, on the monitor, various elegant, richly colored moving patterns and letters appeared, matching the notes I was hearing. A delightful effect. Glenn Gould? I decided I wouldn’t mind a very big dose of this electronic son et lumiere and even began to fantasize that I was learning to read music as I watched the synchronized letters on the screen. It looked like “Fantasia.”
What I didn’t notice was that Bumgardner had reached out of my line of sight, and he was playing the music. The computer was turning notes, their duration and volume into images. He seemed to be having as much fun as his guest. “I’m incredibly lucky to have this job,” he said. “I’m paid to play, basically.”
Bumgardner ventured a theory of why the flow that used to carry the creative types north from Burbank to San Jose Airport now runs in the reverse direction.
“They’re coming here for that human-generated element,” he said. “The amount of that in PacMan wouldn’t fill a teaspoon. But you need gallons of it” for the new interactive medium.
His professional development is a compact version of what’s happening industrywide. As a music major at Cal Arts in Valencia, Class of 1984, he had, as one might expect, an anti-technology streak. Then “a class in counterpoint got me going to K mart to get a computer. Why should I do all that time-consuming stuff when I could write a program to do that?” he recalled. A computer can do counterpoint, but it’s not very good beyond that.
On a computer, “I could get 98% of a Gregorian chant and emulate the style of Palestrina,” Bumgardner said, “but only 20% of anything like Bach and 10% of the quality of Mozart. Musically, we’ve evolved. Jazz is much more complex than Palestrina. There’s no set of instructions for jazz. I tried to pile up the instructions. I obsessed for 36 hours straight. Someone’s just got to play jazz.”
That’s a neat explanation of why filmland, with its artistic types, is rising to the top in computerized software. What you see on the screen is what the artists dared to think.
Bumgardner said he has created entertainment programs that computer users enjoy because his games let players feel they’re controlling their destinies. “They want to get to a point where they cease to be controlled by the program and become the author.”
The new challenge Bumgardner has recently taken on is to “provide ease of use and ease of learning so that you can ignore the specific content--which might be educational--and parents can send their kids electronically to France, in French because they learn as they go, or Mathland, where fun is math.”
Bumgardner used the e-word, educational, which isn’t seen much on disk packages--it scares off sales. But it’s concealed in a lot of what’s going on. In best-selling “Math Blaster,” children ages 6 to 12 have to learn fractions to save earth from the Trash Alien.
Steven Spielberg’s business foray into educational software in Knowledge Adventure of La Crescenta shows that the muse has been firmly enrolled on the faculty.
Bumgardner’s personal plans for the future changes from day to day. Right now he’s interested in simulating human flight, like Superman’s. “I’d like to make a place where people could go to fly together with their friends and it wouldn’t seem like they were using a computer,” he said.
