Information Technology Reference
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means for representing the whole spectrum of activity, from the ridiculous
to the sublime.
Another objection to a theatrical approach is that theatre by its very na-
ture is “fuzzy,” while serious applications of computers require crystal clar-
ity. The connotation of fuzziness probably derives from drama's emphasis
on emotion—subjective experience—while serious productivity is seen to
require undiluted objectivity. Yet such “serious” tasks as formatting a paper
for publication or designing a business plan for a new product can involve
a far greater degree of subjectivity (in terms of creativity and evaluation,
for instance) than “objective” skill and action (cutting and pasting, typing,
and mousing around). At the farthest extreme, the notion that serious ap-
plications require objectivity, clarity, and precision is used as a rationale for
rejecting natural-language interaction because the success of machine un-
derstanding, at least in leading contemporary approaches, is probabilistic,
whereas the understanding of symbolic logic (in mathematical or numerical
representations) is seen to be unambiguous.
Yet people often drown in precision because of the complexity and
artifi ciality of its expression (both lexical and syntactic). From the gamer
grappling with a parser to the inexperienced Linux user trying to “alias”
a complicated e-mail address, people experience the requirement for preci-
sion as troublesome. This is no secret; the problem is commonly acknowl-
edged and wrestled with by most interface designers (see, for example,
Rubinstein and Hersh 1984, Chapter 6). What may stop them from making
a foray into the world of dramatic representation is the view that drama
is fundamentally imprecise and therefore prone to error (both in terms of
interpretation and subsequent action), while people require 100% success in
all of their communications with computers. My experience suggests that,
in the vast majority of contexts, this simply isn't true.
The imprecision of dramatic representation is the price people pay—of-
ten quite enthusiastically—in order to gain a kind of lifelikeness, including
the possibility of surprise and delight. When “imprecision” works, it delivers
a degree of success that is, in balance against the effort required to achieve it,
an order of magnitude more rewarding than the precision of programming,
at least for the non-programmer. When it doesn't work (as in the case of a
parser error), how it is experienced depends heavily upon how the system
handles the failure. “I DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT WORD” disrupts fl ow
and frustrates people; an in-context response based on the most probable
interpretation imitates a normal conversational failure and opens the way to
methods of repair that are quite natural to use (see Brennan 1990b).
