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Figure 3.2.
In human-computer interaction, the shaping of potential is
infl uenced by people's real-time choices and actions, pruning possibilities and
creating lines of probability that are different from session to session and person
to person. The “fl ying wedge” can be pointed off in different directions; thus,
the program contains the potential for many whole actions.
styles, and capabilities. Another source may be elements like learning or
randomness that are built into an activity at the level of processing.
Many of the aspects of a play's
enactment
are the result of the rehearsal
process, in which the director (and actors) determine where and when to
move and what sorts of lighting and other technical effects should be pro-
duced. If these inventions were happening in real time rather than in the re-
hearsal process, plays could be seen as being far more “dynamic” in terms
of the actors' relationship to the script. The displacement is temporal, but
so are the constraints. What actors and directors typically cannot do is to
change the order of events or the words spoken by the characters, either in
rehearsal or performance, nor can they invent new ones. A program that
reformulates the potential for action, creating new possibilities and prob-
abilities “on the fl y” as a response to what has gone before, is equivalent
to a playwright changing a plot in real time as a collaboration with the ac-
tors and director and communicating new portions of script to them in real
time through some automagical means. In other words, the way in which
human-computer interaction is more dynamic than drama is in the aspect
of formulating the action, rather than in its enactment.
