New Terrain in Interaction Design - Computers as Theatre - page 200

games like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online , provide constraints
through theme, style, and environments and the nature of possible actions
(quests, battles, etc.), as well as authoring affordances and constraints for
creating characters. Such an architecture affords the interactor a greater de-
gree of freedom in the construction of the whole action, moving the balance
of power between the two classes of authors more toward the interactor
and forcing the designer to rely more on the force of material causality. The
fractal nature of dramatic interaction (see Figure 3.8) appears as an artifact
of the nature of the interactive environment—generally speaking, what is
possible within it. The characteristics of the environment infl uence the con-
struction of plots inductively (see Figure 6.6).
From Lines to Fields: Clues from the Medieval Theatre
To begin, let's look back at some theatre history. Staging techniques from
Medieval Theatre suggest interesting dramatic architectures. The vast ma-
jority of early Medieval plays (10th to 13th centuries) were liturgical in
nature and performed within the church. The platea , or place, served as a
generalized acting area. Around the platea were arranged several mansions
(also called sedes or loci ) that represented locations for scenes, foreshadowed
by the stations of the cross. The actors moved from one mansion to another,
using as much of the platea as necessary to perform the scene. Existing ar-
chitectural features of the church lent themselves to particular mansions;
Figure 6.6. Freytag's spider. If we think of dramatic interaction not in
terms of two-dimensional Freytag, but as a work that holds the potential for
many dramatic traversals through a space, we can see multiple Freytag-like
shapes unfolding from the same beginning point.