Dramatic Interactors - Computers as Theatre - page 142

back to pick up the results a day or two later. Although they were telling
the computer what to do quite exactly, during the hours of waiting for the
computer to “crunch” those numbers, programmers were not experiencing
a feeling of agency. Today, imploring a system to do something in highly
constrained, formal language can engender a similar feeling that somebody
(or something) else is in control.
First-person sensory qualities are as important as the sense of agency in cre-
ating satisfying human-computer experiences. Quite simply, the experience of
fi rst-person participation tends to be related to the number, variety, and
integration of sensory modalities involved in the representation. The un-
derlying principle here is mimetic ; that is, a human-computer experience
is more nearly “fi rst-person” when the activity it represents unfolds in the
appropriate sensory modalities. Trends of technical evolution in the out-
put of simulators and games—toward higher resolution graphics and faster
animation, greater sound capabilities, and motion platforms, for example—
seem to confi rm this notion. Likewise, mimetic input devices like force-
feedback controllers, controllers that enable computers to detect motion in
3-space, and affordances for recognizing speech, gestures, and faces pro-
vide a greater sensory palette (and greater “directness”) for the interactor. 18
Sensory fi rst-personness, then, is clearly not limited to the system's
“output”; it includes the modalities that people can employ when they take
action in mimetic worlds. The desire for symmetry between “input” and
“output” modalities is strong. Engagement may be disrupted when an ap-
plication talks to me (especially if it asks me a question) and I can't talk
back, at least until conventions of communication have been successfully
(and hopefully painlessly) communicated. Further, the real-world relation-
ships among modalities affect our expectations in representational worlds
that include them; for instance, greater force applied to the throwing of an
object should make it appear to go farther, surfaces that look bumpy should
feel bumpy, and balloons should make noise when they pop.
When we contemplate the complexity involved in creating fi rst-person
experiences, we are tempted to see them as a luxury and not a necessity.
But we mustn't fall prey to the notion that more is always better, or that our
task is the seemingly impossible one of emulating the sensory and experi-
ential bandwidth of the real world. Artistic selectivity is the countervailing
18. An interesting exception is the “big-pixel” look currently popular in Indie games like Sis-
syfi ght . In this genre, it is likely that lower visual defi nition and imitation of the look of early
games act as signifi ers for the Indie Games movement.