Monday, June 8, 1998
Stately, plump Cyberswine gazes out across a cartoon world, ready to kick some serious toon butt. Cyberswine is both the name and the protagonist of a full-length animated movie, "Part machine. Part cop. Full boar," according to the trailer. You won't find it (him) on film, though — the movie is 100% digital bits, burned onto CD-ROMs and downloadable from the Net, and now showing at a computer near you.

	Louis Armstrong Lucille Ball The Beatles Marlon Brando Coco Chanel Charlie Chaplin Le Corbusier Bob Dylan T.S. Eliot Aretha Franklin Martha Graham Jim Henson James Joyce Pablo Picasso Rodgers & Hammerstein Bart Simpson Frank Sinatra Steven Spielberg Igor Stravinsky Oprah Winfrey Categories Leaders/Revol. Builders/Titans Scientists/Thinkers Heroes/Icons

This is not just old pork cooked up in a new kitchen, however. Cyberswine, produced by Los Angeles-based Brilliant Digital Entertainment, is one of the first "Multipath Movies" — animated stories that let the viewer direct the action. You get to stroll down a narrative path of your choosing: stick with Cyberswine, or peel off and follow the action from the perspective of one of his pals. Don't dig the pig's vibes? Click on an icon in the corner of the screen, and tweak his character to make him more clever, anxious, aggressive or caring. You can also change the camera angle. Or not — one of the options in a Multipath Movie is to just say no to interactivity: you can sit back and watch.

But just watching... that's s-o-o Bi-Millennial, don't you think? We're about to close a century in which two of the biggest advancements in entertainment — movies and television — defined the passive, coach-potato experience. The future promises to liberate us from the tyranny of artists who would suck us into the swirling maw of their moving pictures, music and books. If we can extrapolate from cybercave-wall stuff like Cyberswine, the next thousand years of storytelling will put us in the director's seat. The descendants of video games, interactive TV, online environments like muds and moos (where Net folks cavort in text-based worlds) and hypertext will vest the power to create in the viewers' hands.

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