Violence For Fun Packs In The Players In Cyberworld The Bloodier The Better When It Comes To Virtual-Reality - Violence Offers A Guaranteed Sale

The field engineer straps the virtual-reality headset to my sunburnt forehead and throws the switch. As if God had just shaken his Etch-A-Sketch, the exhibit hall of VR-World ‘95 in San Jose is replaced with the deck of an Imperial Empire star cruiser.

Stormtroopers shoot immediately. The neon pellets sing past, squealing in my ear. The $800 headset from Virtual i-O is magical. The view shifts as I tilt my head, the pitch and yaw controlled by liquid sensors, and the tiny TV screens are as clear as Midwestern daylight.

Stormtroopers spray my blood all over the place, then walk over my corpse.

“Well, you’re dead,” says the field engineer. In the high-tech world, “field engineer” ranks with “used-car salesman.” “Let me help you out.”

He taps the keyboard and my blaster changes into a grenade launcher. Then a shotgun. Then a holocaust pistol.

And suddenly I’m hell’s own vending machine of death, dealing justice in the LucasArts game “Dark Forces,” where Stormtroopers blow apart like Jell-o in a wind tunnel.

“Isn’t this great?” I tell him it’s the best hardware I’ve seen in my life.

But it’s the same game I’ve been playing for 20 years.

Here is the great irony of our times.

We have VR headsets, datagloves, super-high-resolution video, surround sound and head-mounted tracking systems that (finally) can immerse players into a computer-generated arena. We have 64-bit systems, triple-speed CD-ROM, more computing horsepower in a wristwatch than existed in 1950 on the entire planet.

But our games can be summed up in two words: Shooting gallery.

And while the game industry seems to be happy with this lack of variety, one insider wants that changed.

“We are using high-end computers to mimic neolithic behavior,” Celia Pearce told an audience of game programmers recently at VR-World. “Look at the best-games lists. ‘DOOM.’ ‘Heretic.’ ‘Specter.’ It’s the same game, over and over.”

Pearce is no prude. She’s a game developer from Los Angeles who started in 1983, back when only the Department of Defense had virtual reality, and recently made “The Loch Ness Experience” for Iwerks Entertainment.

As an insider, she’s heard the argument for why violent games are the only games that sell. She doesn’t buy it.

“One games manufacturer put it bluntly: ‘We make games to take lunch money away from 14-year-old boys.’ … But just because the market wants crack doesn’t mean we should make more crack.”

Games by nature are violent. Chess, checkers, football and soccer all descended from battle simulations. Our great literature - from Old Testament to Homer - are violent works, full of bloody wars and hot pokers. And the first killer-app for computers was helping the military plan for bloodshed.

But that doesn’t excuse the game rut.

“It’s laziness,” Pearce said. “Race, shoot, kick. It’s a formula. We have all these wonderful tools at our disposal, but we don’t use our imaginations.”

Some games broke the formula. They even (gasp!) made money.

Broderbund’s “MYST” is one. A slide show that calls itself a mystery, “MYST” takes hundreds of hours and never breaks a sweat. It is among the five top-selling games of all time.

“Sim City” and “7th Guest” are others. And on the Internet, multi-user dimension games - or MUDs invite players to play a role, cooperate to solve problems and create new worlds.

Pearce proposes smarter games with alternative action. She once made a list of 101 things you could do with a projectile besides kill someone - a list game manufacturers could use.

But for now - great headsets and all - the industry produces content for troglodytes. The most powerful computers in history do nothing but make entrails look more realistic when they’re splattered on the wall.

Which, for an industry that runs on imagination, shows damned little of it.

“If we’re going to create worlds that offer an escape, let’s create a world we want to be in. Let’s not keep creating worlds more violent than the one we already live in.”