Information Technology Reference
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exchange for this complicity, people experience increased potential for ef-
fective agency, in worlds in which the causal relations among events are not
obscured by the randomness and noise characteristics of open systems (like
“real life”). People may likely push on the edges of a mimetic world as part
of exploration or even in an effort to hack it.
10
Designers need to be fl exible
and to apply new constraints when they observe actions that disturb the
desired structure of experience.
May's analysis suggests that constraints—limitations on the scope and
nature of invention—are essential to creativity. Some constraints on inter-
actors' choices and actions are technically essential to any designed inter-
action. The question is how those constraints should be determined and
expressed. Some explicit techniques for introducing constraints—instruc-
tions, error messages, or unresponsiveness, for instance—can be destructive
of people's
engagement
in the activity by forcing them to “pop out” of the
mimetic context into a meta-context of interface operations.
Constraints can be either
explicit
or
implicit
. Explicit constraints, as in
the case of menus or command languages, are undisguised and directly
available. In terms of what Wardrip-Fruin (2009) calls the “surface”—the
appearance, affordances and behaviors of the delivery system, peripherals,
and controllers—explicit constraints may be straightforwardly expressed
(although one may still have to consult a manual). In game and non-game
environments, explicit constraints may be expressed during the “setup”
phase or in the exposition. Exposition in a game can be as simple as the
descriptive text on a cover or Web site. Implicit constraints, on the other
hand, must be inferred by interactors and players from the behavior of the
software system. Implicit constraints exist in the presence or absence of af-
fordances for making certain kinds of choices or performing certain kinds
of actions. For example, in most combat-based action games (FPS), it is not
possible to negotiate with the enemy.
10. Since I fi rst wrote this topic, subversive game-play has become quite a bit more popular.
Initially, there were scandals over black-market sites for illegitimately acquiring more powerful
characters. The designers of “America's Army” were taken by surprise when players hacked
themselves unforeseen superpowers. Since those days, subversive gaming has been (subver-
sively) legitimized as a genre in its own right.
