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case with the game “Prom Week” created in 2013 by students and professors
at the Center for Games and Playable Media at U.C. Santa Cruz.
1
The authorship of the designer(s) is of a different order than the cre-
ative inputs of the player; the designer authors the world and its affor-
dances, while the player creates a distinct path through the game world
that can be said to be the player's “plot.” This is a stronger force than the
reader-response theory, but weaker than the authorship of the designer(s).
As Wardrip-Fruin (2009) points out, without players there is no game.
To explicate the diagram shown in Figure 4.1, I want to walk you
through it in terms of the four causes (in gray). In Chapter 2, we discussed
the
effi cient cause
as the author and her tools. In human-computer interac-
tion, the “authorship” of the interactor's particular experience is shared in
MEDIATED COLLABORATION
SIGNIFICANCE, MEANING, SUCCESS
CATHARSIS, PLEASURE, SUBVERSION
END CAUSE
A whole action with a
pleasurable shape
A whole action with
personal relevance
PLOT
Affordances for character creation;
surrounding cast of characters
CHARACTER
Formulation of a coherent
character (or agent)
Surprise, reversal;
environment, situated context
THOUGHT
Strategies and tactics;
personal meaning
Dialogue, parsing, inferring;
responsiveness
LANGUAGE
Consequential player inputs;
communication with characters
Linearity, interruption, temporal
limitations, “levels” (games)
PAT T ERN
Tempo; arrangement of materials;
order of interactions
Palette of materials; affordances
for interaction by player(s)
ENACTMENT
Senses: vision, hearing, kinesthesia,
etc.; user-created materials
EFFICIENT CAUSE
DESIGNER
COMPUTATION, REPRESENTATION
AUTHOR
TOOLS
INTERACTOR, PLAYER
AFFORDANCES FOR INTERACTION
Figure 4.1.
A model of mediated collaboration between “designer” and
“player” (or “interactor”). For both collaborators, the formal-material
relationships between elements remain constant.
1. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, personal communication, 2013.
