Milia 99 Cannes 8>11 February

Milia was very active again this year (6750 visitors from 54 countries, 352 stands) - increasing the game makers presence in a seperate area of the show called Hall Riviera. They also ran (really bad) advertising in several major games magazines.

Sony had its latest addition to the Playstation - a tiny device permitting to download bits of games to play on the road and then plug it back in to carry on the console. Nothing surprising there. They were right next door to Sega's Dreamcast stand - technically fantastic but nothing really to retain my attention. Apparently Nintendo announced that it will also be present next year.

Significantly the Microsoft stand was in this area and used Milia as the platform to announce its latest DirectX component - a Midi based music system called DirectMusic that permits controlling the aspects of a sound in relation to the actions of the user ...You can upgrade your DirectX player for free.

My favourite stand (as a whole the area really seemed dull to me) was of a Polish company called Techland. They had a really good tool for home music makers. Another one ? Yes, and its good. It enables you to put beats with a click of the mouse specifying their periodicity and above all features a really simple editor for making 3d sound .... and its cheap ....

Overall I understand why the Milia are trying to have more games publishers and developers because that is where the money is (the games industry grossed more than Hollywood last year) but I didnt think it really worked - its kind of schizophrenic, it would be better i think to focus on their core competence of multimedia - a different kind of play .....

Digitalogue were in the main hall again this year promoting John Maeda's new projects - the last in the Reactive Book series and a very promising looking "game" called 123D developed on the Net Yaroze for the Playstation. This promises to be the first really experimental project out on Playstation (although it seems that the Net Yaroze has been discontinued ... ?). Should be out in the summer of 1999 - check their website for updates - they will soon have an english language version of their web and the ability to order products directly. For me they remain the most interesting company out there.

The artist-provocateur Fred Forest had a piece on the SESAM stand - remember he was the first to auction a piece of virtual art at the Druout Auction house (the equivalent of Sothebys) in Paris. The SESAM is a French organisation charged with protecting authors rights in multimedia. He made a piece composed of millions of pixels scanned from other peoples works that decomposed slowly if nobody touched it - it was a nice play with the idea of authorship and copyright.

Another artist working on the Net is Tuomo Tammenpää from Mindworks. His NEED project is a very funny look at consumer mechanisms - no i am not mentioning it just because of the free lollipop he gave me - i really like it ...

Apple once again had their Chiat & Day Think Different ads taking up the whole of the advertising space on the seafront (a really nice one of John Lennon & Yoko Ono in bed) and a huge inflatable iMac throned just outside the entrance. The stand was crowded and well organised. The company announced its Mac OS Runtime for Java (MRJ) 2.1 which, they say, runs up to 500% faster than versions previously available for Macintosh.

The Milia awards this year were held at the beginning of the event rather than at the end - i imagine that this was so that the winners could be approached for deals ...The really exciting news here was that AudioRom won the entertainment/leisure category in the Milia d'Or awards.

Its an exciting step forward for interactive music - and there are just so many products emerging - just on the Playstation there are Baby Universe, Bust a Groove, Parappa the Rapper, Sub, Music, Pop'n'Music (japan only). But AudioRom is different because it comes out of the meeting of music, design and multimedia - not just in product or practice but in attitude. It is not the result of a million dollar company investing - it is the result of passion and club knowledge.

Another interesting musical product was in the New Talent Pavilion called Revamp - by Tim Brook and team from the Royal College of Art in London. An innovative graphic interface and above all the ability to play together over a TCP/IP (internet or local) connection. Play together .... suddenly a new sense of the word play emerges.

It was Josh Portway of Realworld who made the observation that seems so obvious now - musicians play (together or alone). He pointed out that maybe music was a much better artistic or conceptual basis for multimedia than for film. He himself has also made a very nice interactive music making tool that one will be able to download from the Realworld site around the middle of March.

Another useful observation he made (and he knows what he is talking about because he made a major contribution to Ceremony of Innocence, a prize-winning CD-ROM story project from Realworld) is that good interaction involves the body.

Nowhere was this clearer than Cube's project shown on the Creative Multimedia from Finland stand.

The original is installed in the Sports Museum of Helsinki and uses a running carpet. This version uses an exercise bike to power your character who is running against national sports hero Lasse Viren. People were attracted by the simplicity and the physicality of this "game". Also fundamental was its humour - you play Elmo, the archetypal Finnish male fat and pink, the commentary changes depending on your running and had the Finnish people clutching their sides ...

While not yet implemented the system is simple to adapt to a multiplayer mode - even working over the internet by using a CD-ROM for the graphics and sound and simply transmitting the information on the speed.

On-line gaming had been predicted last year to be the next big thing and this year it really is happening. The leader in these games is Quake II (the famous "death matches") but Starcraft, a science fiction game, claims to have had 32 000 people playing online at the same time.

Conviviality, community - those old buzz words of the Internet that never really happened - well, it seems they are happening in these fantasy worlds. Right now its a lot about fighting, mirroring the world - maybe it always will be. But the musical vision seems to be fast gaining ground. When all is said and done, is play what you do in cyberspace ?

I am reminded of Jaron Lanier - the pioneer of virtual reality and still relevant visionary developing virtual reality and the dataglove in order to be able to play musical instruments (he now does a live performance of this - see the Cybertheatre section of the Nirvanet website...) and of Charles Schultz, the creator of Snoopy, who never called his work "work" but "play"..