Dramatic Interactors - Computers as Theatre - page 140

artifacts. Why? First, the fact that they are representations is the key to un-
derstanding what we can do with them. Second, their special status as rep-
resentations affects our emotions about them, enabling experiences that are,
in the main, much more pleasurable than those we regularly feel in real life.
The distinguishing characteristic of the emotions we feel in a representa-
tional context is that there is no threat of pain or harm in the real world . 16
Further, engagement entails a kind of playfulness: the ability to fool
around, to spin out “what if” scenarios. Such “playful” behavior is easy to
see in the way that people use photo editing suites and document creation
software. The key quality that a system must possess in order to foster this
kind of engagement is reversibility; that is, the ability to take something
back. In the age of the Internet, taking something back once it is published
is nearly impossible. We and our children need to understand that; fooling
around is playful, but publishing is forever.
Engagement is what happens when one is able to give oneself over to
a representational action, comfortably and unambiguously. It involves a
kind of complicity. We agree to think and feel in terms of both the content
and conventions of a mimetic context. In return, we gain a plethora of new
possibilities for action and a kind of emotional guarantee. One reason why
people are amenable to constraints is the desire to gain these benefi ts.
Engagement is only possible when one can rely on the system to main-
tain the representational context. A person should not be forced to interact
with the system qua system; indeed, any awareness of the system as a dis-
tinct, “real” entity would explode the mimetic illusion, just as a clear view
of the stage manager calling cues would disrupt the “willing suspension of
disbelief” for the audience of a traditional play. Engagement means that a
person can experience a mimetic world directly, without mediation or dis-
traction. Harking back to the slogan “the representation is all there is,” we
can see that designers are often engaged in the wrong activity: that is, rep-
resenting what the computer is doing. The proper object of interaction de-
sign is what the interactor is doing and experiencing—the action. Thinking
about things this way automatically avoids the trap doors into meta-level
transactions with “the system.”
16. This principle suggests that activities like running a nuclear reactor or launching a space-
craft—things with real potential in the real world—should be taken off the table when we
talk about dramatic interaction. For example, the control system on a nuclear reactor involves
many, many representations of the state and operations of various system components, but in
the context of real-world consequence, these representational affordances are much more about
human factors and tele-operations than they are about the pleasure of interaction.