"Mr. Television" It was a gimmick, a futuristic toy, a fad, found in few homes. Then one day, a phenomenal show came along and suddenly the whole world was watching... A new medium had arrived!

The toy was television back in 1938, and the show was Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater", and it is widely credited with putting TV on the map as a mass medium. (That's why they called Uncle Miltie "Mr. Television"). In fact, some early TV programming was entirely too successful - The "Admiral Broadway Review" was cancelled after 19 weeks in 1949 because Admiral couldn't manufacture TVs fast enough to meet demand. Today everyone wonders when the Internet will graduate from cult status into a true mass medium.

Today everyone wonders when the Internet will graduate from cult status into a true mass medium. But where are the shows? The kind you must tune in every week, or feel left out when they talk around the water cooler about what was on last night?

Suppose somebody invented a new kind of show, one that had all the entertainment value of good TV, but was fully interactive. with all the variety of "The Ed Sullivan Show", but which allowed you to get up on stage and swivel your hips next to Elvis. A show like "Cheers", except you could have a drink with Norm, and they actually do all know your name.

This was the dream behind the Browseteria, the flagship VRML site of the blue wolf network. As John Barrows, President of the blue wolf network, and visionary creator of "The Browseteria" said, the web will be "...more than anything else a place to be entertained. We just want to have fun. Internet doesn't change people. We are still the same old clods.... couch potatoism will simply take on a new meaning." But first, "...the Web must be more like what common folks are used to - TV - so that they can enter the unknown with a trusted friend.

The Browseteria may not turn out to be the "Texaco Star Theater" of the internet, but when the history of web entertainment is written, it will no doubt rate a mention as the one of the first, and certainly one of the most ambitious, entertainment-oriented sites on the web.

Webcentricity
the blue wolf network was founded by Barrows in 1995 specifically to develop compelling, interactive, and entertaining Web content using the latest multi-media Internet tools. This content would be original to the web, and tailored to the properties that make the medium unique. In fact, Barrows coined a name for this new kind of media: webcentricity. webcentricity is entertainment that exploits the unique properties of the web

As he defines it, webcentricity is entertainment that exploits the unique properties of the web. It's intimate, interactive. It's original to the web, and designed with the web in mind. Most of all, it's entertaining. As Barrows says, "Why were we seeing just flat pages of text slapped up on a screen, poor re-creations of print magazines, with a confusion of hyperlinks, existing only because the creator could make them. People aren't designing content which takes advantage of the medium."

"Content provider" That's what they call the people who make the words, pictures, and stories you see on computers, and the euphemism is telling. In no other medium is creativity and entertainment held in such low esteem that it's seen merely as baggage for technology - rather as if you would buy a book for it's fabulous binding.

A striking feature of many internet sites is their incestuous, self-referential quality. The most popular sites are often places with links to other sites, which in turn have links to other sites, which link to the site you started from, like a dog chasing it's own tail. This is what gives many sites their weirdly impersonal feel, like a bus terminal of the mind. In entertainment terms, it's as if you tuned in "Seinfeld" and watched Jerry and Kramer watching another show on their TV.

The Browseteria concept.
To produce original entertainment for the internet, you need artists To produce original entertainment for the internet, you need artists. And to tackle the daunting technical challenges of using Real Audio, Streaming Video, in a VRML 1.0 environment, you need technicians. Barrows got both, but it wasn't easy.

Barrows says "At first there was the shock expressed by the current occupants of Cyberspace (boys with no dates on the weekend) that their private club was being invaded by "newbies", so walls went up and it became a place where only techno-geeks dared to tread (techno-geeks, as it turned out are not terribly creative).

When Barrows told programmers what he was hoping to do, the usual response was "You can't do that!" The site was already many months in development when a chance referral led him someone undaunted by the challenge - Keith Cooley, owner CoolWare of Palo Alto, CA.

The artistic challenges were just as steep. The original concept of the Browseteria was as a bar where the characters meet and interact with the user. (In fact, an early version was called "Mondo Bongo", the name of the bar.). Barrow's needed to find entertainers who knew how to build and develop characters, using pictures and words. He decided to turn to people who had been pursuing solutions to the same problem in another medium: cartoonists.

Two cartoonists were hired to flesh out a cast of character, Norman Dog and Caryn Leschen, both respected cartoonists who work and live in San Francisco.

Dog, the creator of the long-running alternative comic "Bad Habits", caught Barrows attention with his web site "Norman Dog's Interactive Cartoon Fun-House!" , which contains an "interactive" cartoon, "YOU Rule The World!". Leschen is creator of the bi-weekly strip "Ask Aunt Violet". How do you tell a joke in 3-D?

In the first days of working on what became the Browseteria, the artists really had no clear idea how you make a character work in this environment. How do you tell a joke in 3-D? Can you have a soap opera if you characters can't move, and can only talk one at a time, at the users choice? How do you construct a narrative when the user is in the driver's seat? Would we use line art? 3-D models? Could they move and interact? How do you make them real, and fun?

Leschen took the assignment of creating an ongoing cyber-soap, "Pthalo Theater". It featured an international cast of characters who meet in cyberspace.

Meanwhile, Dog tended toward simpler "gag" characters and political satire. Some are meant to be the kind of people you might meet in a real bar, including "The Bad Joke Guy" (who tries to tell a you joke but screws it up), or "The Karaoke Guy" (who sings horrifyingly off-key renditions of popular favorites). Others attempt to spoof the nature of the medium. For example, since you have to "click" on a character to activate them, Dog says "I decided that it might be amusing if a character hated being "touched" ("The Hostile Guy"), or perhaps enjoyed it to much ("The Sensuous Woman") It soon became clear that VRML 1.0 was going to put serious limits on how much mobility and interactivity the space would offer

It soon became clear that VRML 1.0 was going to put serious limits on how much mobility and interactively the space would offer. The characters evolved into 2-D art pasted on planes in the 3-D space. A mouse click would activate a Real Audio file, and the character would tell a joke/sing/talk. Some of these pre-recorded bits were brief, though others (especially the "Pthalo Theater", which has a continuing storyline) were quite lengthy, more like a radio show.

To produce original music for the Browseteria, Barrows hired Mike Hutchison. He composed and performed the music of the "Browetrio", the internet's first virtual jazz group, as well as incidental music for a variety of projects.

Since the characters were dependent on the Real Audio monologues to define them, voice actors became critical. This is especially true of the political character. Originally, Barrows tried to use union voice actors. Possibly from fear of a bad precedent in this new field, the union asked shockingly high rates - higher even than for multimedia work. In the end, a few talented amateur voices were used, mainly Bill Brent and Ronnie Ruedrich, though anyone wandering by was drafted to voice a character, with the artists doing some voices, and even Barrows pitching in to do the voice of the Blue Wolf - appropriately, playing bartender in his virtual kingdom.

To fill out the site, Barrows also acquired rights to many hours of audio & video material never before available on the web, including Film (no r) (short animated films from the Ringling School), Radio Redux (NPR's Joe Frank), Disk O' Tech (music reviews), Spin Goddess (womyn's alterative rock radio), Up Against the Wall (interactive video interview with visual artists), Hot Spot (interactive video interviews with celebs), Poetry In Motion (Poems from prisoners), Danceteria (modern dance and interviews with choreographers), as well as the character-based features Politics as Usual (Featuring Clinton, Dole, Perot, Chet, Skink, et al.), Blue's Joint (the main floor), Browsetrio, and Pthalo Ptheater.

The response
The Browseteria went "on the air" in March of 1995, and the response was immediate and powerful - from those who could get in. As a cutting-edge site using all the latest internet goodies, not everyone was able to access it. (In fact, the none of the cartoonists have been able to access the site to this day - they have Macs!)

"Irreverent, trend-setting, bleeding edge entertainment... what happens when cool people with cool toys share the Web's digital wealth." (c/net). "Not any old website... an entertainment universe... Unquestionably precocious." (Magellan). "Like television pioneers of fifty years before... an online laboratory of invention and innovation." (Timecast). "...a visually poetic, alternative, humor-filled environment." (ComputerLife Online).

Viewers: A person who identified him/herself as "R" confided, "After downloading all the needed plug-ins, setting 'em all up, then spending an hour trying to find the site again because of course I didn't bookmark it, I found it fun, interesting, entertaining, and a complete waste of time! MORE PLEASE! With sites like this the net will never be dull!"

"JD" said, "The site is great fun while being a complete waste of time. Keep doing whatever it is you do and keep me informed!"

"Hey, the Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg reading Howl in RA) thing was the closest I've gotten to an epiphany on this computer," said Jack Ruttan from Montreal.

"Thanks for putting such content on the net. That's what the net is for." (Jim Meyer)

"Just hit ya'lls site and WOW!"

The Future
Almost as soon as the Browseteria went live, VRML 2.0 became available, which raised a problem: do you re-design the Browseteria to incorporate the new features of VRML 2.0? In the end, Barrows decided to keep the Browseteria as it is, and exploit the new features of VRML 2,0 in his new site "Madame Celeste", which is designed to take full advantage of VRML 2,0 animation, 3-D, and interactivity, using CosmoPlayer as the browser. the standards are evolving so fast that material can become extinct before it even hits the air

This points to one of the biggest difficulties in developing web entertainment - the standards are evolving so fast that material can become extinct before it even hits the air. Until standards become less volatile, it will be hard to make progress in decoding the grammar of interactive entertainment. For all the novelty of the web, and the shiny new technology that is surely to come, people still basically just want to sit around the campfire and share a story.