New Terrain in Interaction Design - Computers as Theatre - page 209

who had been “popular” at the beginning of the week to “unpopular” by
the end. 9 The effl orescence of economies around games—legal and not so
much—provides many examples of emergence.
As we saw in the example of the inclusion of cameras in smartphones,
infrastructures and logistics may be repurposed by users for emergent outcomes .
The Arab Awakening began in late 2010 with major unrest in Tunisia (with
antecedent causes going back decades, if not centuries). The revolution in
Tunisia can be seen as a regional tipping point. As of 2013, governments
have been overthrown in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, while a major
civil war continues in Syria. Most people and governments did not foresee
the repurposing of Twitter and Facebook as tools to support and document
civil unrest and brutal violence. These media also played critical roles in
the strategic and tactical unfolding of the uprisings. Targeted governments
tried, mostly without success, to shut down public access to these tools in
particular and to the Internet in general. A gentler example of repurposing
infrastructure and logistics are systems and applications that can create 3D
models of public spaces from large collections of photographs, as opposed
to wire-framing or prescribed photographic or videographic methods for
data capture.
For centuries, randomness has proven to be a great tool in the design
of games. Rob reminds me of the use of octagonal dice to emulate a kind of
“contained randomness” (see Figure 6.9) A trick here is to design to the ran-
domness : that is, to create rules or consequences that emerge from any roll
of the die. In this pocket universe of possibilities, consequences of random-
ness can be recombined for emergent outcomes within a rule-based system.
This is not an unfamiliar method to most game designers—after all, it was
used in Dungeons and Dragons with great success. One may also design to
randomness in Nature, 10 for example, the outcomes of predator-prey rela-
tionships or the course of an invasive species as it travels through a forest
or prairie. What might it change? What resistance might it meet?
Lessons from Biology
In this section we present three sets of ideas drawn from biology: symbio-
sis, symbiogenesis, and nested ecosystems. All suggest ways of thinking
9. Don't you wish you could have done that in high school?
10. I capitalize the word “Nature” in the tradition of natural philosophy and the tradition of
the Royal Society including Newton, Locke, and Jefferson.