In a squat and ugly office building in north Dallas, an artist at a computer creates drop by drop a pool of blood that seeps from a clown who has been sliced in half. In another cubicle, a technician plays a videotape of a pretty young woman standing in black underwear against a blue background. She puts her foot on a blue box and begins to roll down one stocking. The technician freezes the tape frame by frame and, adjusting controls on a Betacam deck, transfers each frame onto a computer-generated background. The result of the combination is that she, a real person, appears to be undressing in a moody painting of a bedroom.

The artist, the technician, and nine others are working late nights to create Harvester, a computer game that goes where no other game has dared to. It is sickeningly violent and depraved. Although it will not be ready for release until mid-May, Harvester already faces censorship in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In the United States it seems destined to become an important exhibit in the debate over violence in movies, rap music, television, and computer games. I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in individual choice. Harvester is too gory for me.

But despite the gore, there are glimmers of something original here, of bending technology into an entirely new art. I don't mean using computers to compose music or draw, although computers do both very well, because there were musical scores and paintings for centuries before there were computers. I mean an art that could not exist independent of computers. Computers are tools, but are they only tools, with no more artistic potential than an adding machine or a leaf blower? Or are they also a medium like film or paint? Everyone senses that they are a medium - but for creating what? Right now, computer games are as close as anyone has come to answering that question. Computer games are interactive. The players make choices, the computer whirs, and the player must make more choices. Can a game be created in which the player must make choices that have emotional, aesthetic, and moral meaning? That would be how a computer game could become a new art, and Harvester, in its violent, depraved way, does exactly that. Harvester could be to computer games what The Birth of a Nation was to movies. That 1915 masterpiece was the first great movie epic ever made, the first to understand how a movie camera could create a unique art; and in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, it too was sickeningly violent and depraved.

Harvester, which is more than a little reminiscent of Twin Peaks, begins with the player in a small town where people look normal enough on the outside but are bizarre beneath the surface. The player must meet the people, solve various mysteries, and explore strange places on the edge of town. It is impossible not to admire the variety of Harvester's 116 characters, the inventiveness of the places the player visits, the moments of humor (grisly though they may be), the intricacy of the puzzles, and the great complexity of the game. There is also a lot of action. The player begins by fighting animated, imaginary creatures such as giant spiders. But as the game goes on, the enemies become more like humans until, finally, they are humans: not animated drawings of humans but real actors, like the young woman undressing, who appear in the game. Nor do the human characters die antiseptic, electronic deaths. It can take numerous blows to extinguish them, and they spout rivers of blood as limbs and torsos get whacked off. An elderly chess master, once defeated, self-destructs by splitting his skull with an ax, revealing gooey brains and a key. The player must make his alter ego on the screen reach inside the mess and retrieve the key. Elsewhere, a skull and spinal column may or may not be the grisly remains of the player-character's fiancee; to find out, he must pick them up and carry them to the doorkeeper of a mysterious lodge in town. There, as the game's promotional brochure says with truly chilling sprightliness, "you must prove your willingness to break the law. And, possibly become a serial killer!"

At the end of the game, the player-character must choose between an act of extreme violence and an act of mercy. Until now the human characters have been either bad or at least flawed enough for the player to feel some justification for spilling gallons of their blood. But here there are no such sops to conscience. The potential victim is admirable and good. The act of mercy has rewards. The only reward for the act of violence is doing evil. You know what you should do, but the game asks, What are you going to do right now? And this is where Harvester crosses into new territory and becomes something more than just a game. The action takes place within the game, but the moral choice you make is yours. It exists outside the game. It's real.

Harvester, with all its actors, filming, artists, and programmers to pay for, had a budget of about $1 million. It will be published by Merit Studios, a small Dallas company with a list of about fifty game titles and more than $4 million in revenues. They expect Harvester to generate $2.5 million in new revenue. The game was developed by Future Vision, an even smaller company in Dallas that has created two other games and is pretty much betting the company on Harvester. It was written and directed by Gilbert Austin, a graduate of the University of Texas film school who has lived in Austin for all of his 31 years.

Gilbert had liked to play arcade games in high school but hadn't given much thought to computers until he got a job near the end of 1989 as a writer at Origin Systems, the then-independent game company in Austin. The company's successful games included the Ultima and Commander series. Origin's founder, Richard Garriott, is famous in Austin for tooling around town in a black Lamborghini as well as for turning his home into an elaborate house of horrors on Halloween and opening it to the public. Despite his lack of experience, Gilbert rose rapidly in the company. Before he quit in 1993, Gilbert had helped create several successful games for Origin, including the predecessors of the current megahit Wing Commander III.

So complex that it comes on four CD-ROMs and requires more than eight megabytes of RAM to run properly, Wing Commander III is a game buried within a slavish imitation of the movie Star Wars. Its plot is revealed through elaborate cinematic sequences that star Malcolm McDowell and Mark Hamill, who looks somewhat longer in the tooth than he did in Star Wars. But, sandwiched between the movie sequences, the game itself turns out to be nothing more advanced than an elaborate shooting gallery. You are the commander of a squadron of spaceships trying to shoot enemy spacecraft out of the sky. It's a pleasant enough time waster, even an exciting one; but, for all the movie razzle-dazzle, the game has no heart. You might as wen have been shooting tin cans with a BB gun.

Gilbert had wanted to do a horror game because he thought there were no good ones on the market. There were some that featured werewolves or the like, but that was just the trappings of horror without being truly frightening. Future Vision approached Gilbert about creating a game for them and promised him complete freedom. "So," he told me, "I asked myself what a real horror game would be. Was it really possible to scare someone on a computer the way you can scare someone with a movie?" He decided that was impossible: A movie can scare you only because the director has the absolute control of a dictator. He creates suspense by showing you what he wants you to see, exactly the way he wants you to see it and in exactly the order he wants you to see it. There's the door, it's opening, and behind it is ...

"But," Gilbert said, "you can't do that in a game because you can't be a dictator. You just have to set up the world of the game and let the players move around in it on their own. So then I thought, `Is scaring someone the only kind of horror there is?' Well, no, it's not. If you can't scare someone on a computer, what you can do is disturb them." In thirty minutes he had sketched out the basic idea of the game and the ending. "There are other games I admire," he went on, "but none I admire the way I admire film. But this ending really disturbed me. It allowed you to do evil, not just naughty stuff, but stuff that makes you feel disturbed for doing it. And I thought it was a new kind of game, the first one a player would walk away from feeling shaken or disgusted or thoughtful."

Harvester certainly disturbs and disgusts me. What is most disturbing about Harvester is also closest to whatever art on a computer might be. Art engages both the intellect and the emotions, but the emotions most easily aroused by a computer seem to be the negative ones - anger, frustration, hate. Anyone who has worked at all with a computer has felt all three toward the machine itself. Harvester cleverly exploits the computer's ability to arouse those emotions and forces the player to consider whether he might like them after all. Now what? The computer can arouse the negative emotions because they can happen instantly. The first great artist of the computer will be the person who reveals to the player at the computer keyboard a full range of emotions evolving through time. Until then, artistic computer games will continue to depend on distasteful themes similar to the ones in Harvester. We have songs about love and novels about love and movies about love. We still need the first computer game about love.

"That," Gilbert told me, "would be difficult to achieve at this level of technology. If virtual reality comes, then that is a different story. But it's hard to see that level of interactivity in my lifetime." He paused for a moment and then shrugged. "God only knows how to create something interactive."