It's already happening, albeit in the crudest of ways. Boot up a computer program called the Axe, for instance, and you can jam along with Stevie Wonder's hit song Superstition. "Anyone can play music and have a really satisfying experience," says Eran Egozy, co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., software company specializing in "jamware." By moving your mouse around on a compass-like grid, you can play faster, slower, higher and lower notes — but never out of tune. "You're always in time, in key and playing the right notes," says Egozy, who admits that, mellifluous as it is, "it's not John Coltrane." Still, like flight simulators that let you pilot a jumbo jet, Harmonix's music simulator, he says, "takes the hard part away from music, the mechanical part. We're giving you the fun of it without having to work for it." Who says you have to suffer if you want to sing the blues?

Or consider the completely nonlinear narrative of your average shoot-'em-up "twitch" game, such as Quake II or Tomb Raider. (Twitch games test reflexes rather than brains.) Players are dropped down in a game and proceed, level by level, learning the skills they need to survive in this new place and acquiring knowledge that leads them to the end, to closure that is as satisfying and complete as the epilogue to a 500-page thriller. Why watch The Terminator when you can be the Terminator, tapping into your own fight-or-flight feedback loop and blasting and stun-gunning your way to the happily ever after? Imagine when more cerebral entertainments such as Riven (the sequel to the best-selling CD-ROM game Myst) are the program equals of TV. Instead of sitting back and watching the Seinfeld characters interact with one another, you could hang out with them. Follow Kramer around until you get bored, then hook up with George.

Artists too will emerge stronger and better in the 2K Millennium. Entertainment in this century has been mass-produced and broadcast, rigidly controlled and protected. Media have centralized into the hands of the few; Hollywood studios, television networks and recording companies carefully distribute the stuff, cranking out a relatively modest amount of material that will be seen by everyone on the globe. But in the next century anyone will be able to create a movie, music, literature, a magazine or a video game and distribute it as bits over the network to billions. At least in theory. Brilliant Digital is marketing a developers' tool kit that makes it relatively simple to cobble together your own interactive cartoons. "You don't need any programming experience," insists Cheri Grand, a company spokeswoman. "I could create a Heather Locklear character, animate her and do whatever I want with her." Traditional Hollywood studios, she notes, have lots of overhead and immense production costs. "Not us. Everything is done inside the computer." Deus ex machina. Amen.

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