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toward dramatic shapes in a variety of traversals through the physical (and
dramatic) space.
Too cute for you? We might use the very same technological affordances
to turn the space into a journey through geographical or evolutionary biol-
ogy, the experience of nested ecosystems, or the mathematics of increas-
ingly complex natural shapes. We might explore how the gardens came to
be and how they have changed. I'm not talking about a virtual tour guide.
I'm talking about mixed reality technologies working in concert to transform the
experience of a place, including the actions one may take in it. These are not new
ideas so much as more realizable ideas with the panoply of affordances we
have today.
Another heuristic suggests that we consider groups of interactors with
common goals as collective characters for which group dynamics serve as
traits. In citizen science and participatory computing we have seen just
such collective characters forming up. Putting aside for a moment the very
real work that must be done in data science to realize such projects at scale,
we can almost see citizen scientists as characters without a plot. What is
the central action? How can we predispose it to take on a dramatic shape?
It may not merely be to collect or even to connect, but rather to see in ways
that make action clear .
With the unfolding of dramatic interaction over both time and space,
we see our little Freytag triangle casting some new shadows.
Extending the Geometry of Dramatic Interaction
The original version of this topic focused on a two-dimensional notion of
dramatic action: the Freytag triangle and subsequent elaborations (see Fig-
ures 3.3 and 3.7). In Chapter 4, we examined the ways in which the fi nal plot
of a dramatic interaction is a mediated collaboration between designer(s)
and interactor(s). We focused on techniques for shaping the plot so that
the interactor is predisposed to complete an action that is, in retrospect,
dramatic in nature, knowing that we cannot control outcomes precisely. We
know that the ways we design the experience include the degree of con-
straint on the fi nal outcome for the interactor. So, for example, in the form
of computer games, the old branching tree structures used by early games
required the designer to defi ne the contents of each node. Each possible
consequence for an interactor's choice was highly constrained, resulting in
greater formal control for the designer. Other architectures, represented by
 
 
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