Design Heuristics - Computers as Theatre - page 169

Scherer has compelling evidence of “listeners' ability to accurately iden-
tify a speaker's emotion from voice cues alone.” He has identifi ed some of
the acoustical components of various emotional expressions through voice.
These acoustical components can be both recognized and reproduced, giv-
ing us the ability to infer emotion in a general way from acoustics alone.
So if speech is an affordance, we can learn a lot about the emotion of both
players and NPCs, even when the words may not be entirely intelligible.
DESIGN HEURISTIC
Explore new methods for enabling emotional expression
and communication among agents.
Thinking about Thought
While the element of Thought cannot be provided entirely by the author,
the design of the world and its denizens—or the application and its affor-
dances—materially constrain Thought in a variety of ways. Up the ladder
of material causality, Thought is the result of the successive shaping of En-
actment, Pattern, and Language. In this regard, exposition plays an impor-
tant role. It may be provided implicitly during the early action, providing
a way for interactors to discover “physical” and behavioral aspects of a
mimetic world, characters, and past events. Patterns emerge as the action
unfolds, and communication affordances and conventions become clear.
These are the obvious sources.
Perhaps not so obvious (unless the design is specifi cally political) are
the assumptions made by the designer, consciously or not, that infl uence
each of these elements and also play directly into the thought processes of
the interactor. Mary Flanagan addresses many of these in her book Critical
Play (2009):
As a cultural medium, games carry embedded beliefs within their sys-
tems of representation and their structures, whether game designers in-
tend these ideologies or not. In media effects research, this is referred
to as “incidental learning” from media messages. For example, The Sims
computer game is said to teach consumer consumption, a fundamental
value of capitalism. Sims players are encouraged, even required, to earn
money so they can spend and acquire goods. Grand Theft Auto was not
created as an educational game, but nonetheless does impart a world
view, and while the game portrays its world as physically similar to our