Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
angry and dissatisfi ed. Such conversations persist today, at ACM SIGCHI,
South by Southwest Interactive, the Game Developers' Conference, and
many others. It has also become the topic of dozens—if not hundreds—of
topics. The conversation has become much more diversifi ed and nuanced,
but the nature of interactivity continues to generate new theories and con-
troversies (see, for example, Dubberly et al. 2009).
In the past, I posited that interactivity exists on a continuum that could
be characterized by three variables: frequency (how often one could inter-
act), range (how many choices were available), and signifi cance (how much
the choices really affected matters) (Laurel 1986a and b). In his book
Ex-
pressive Processing
(2009), Noah Wardrip-Fruin gives us a good test for sig-
nifi cance: “What changes to the state of the system and infl uence on future
operations can be produced by this interaction” (p. 75). A not-so-interactive
computer game judged by these standards would only let you do some-
thing once in a while, only give you a few things to choose from, and the
things you could choose wouldn't make much difference to the whole ac-
tion (or produce signifi cant changes to the state of the underlying system).
A very interactive computer game (or desktop or fl ight simulator) would
let you do something that really mattered at any time, and it could be any-
thing you could think of.
But these variables provide only part of the picture. There is another,
more rudimentary measure of interactivity: You either feel yourself to be
participating in the ongoing action of the representation or you don't. Suc-
cessful orchestration of the variables of frequency, range, and signifi cance
can help to create this feeling, but it can also arise from other sources—for
instance, sensory immersion and the tight coupling of kinsethetic input and
visual response. If a representation of the surface of the moon lets you walk
around and look at things, then it probably feels pretty damned interactive,
whether your virtual excursion has any consequences or not. It's enabling
a person to act within a representation that's important. Optimizing fre-
quency, range, and signifi cance in human choice-making will remain inad-
equate as long as we conceive of the human as sitting on the other side of
some barrier, poking at the representation with a joystick or a mouse or a
virtual hand. You can demonstrate Zeno's paradox
9
on the “user” side of
9. Zeno's paradox (called the theory of limits in mathematics) says that you can never get from
here to there because you can only get halfway, then halfway of halfway, etc. Mathematics
offers a solution; so does common sense. But the paradox is compelling enough to have inter-
ested logicians and mathematicians for centuries.
