Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Plot
Character
Thought
Language
Pattern
Enactment
Figure 2.3.
Causal relations among elements of quantitative structure.
cause of all those below it, and each element is the material cause of all
those above it. As you move up the list of elements from the bottom, you
can see how each level is a successive refi nement—a
shaping
—of the materi-
als offered by the previous level. The following sections expand upon the
defi nitions of each of the elements in ascending order.
In his essay “A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games,”
Michael Mateas proposes two additional lines of causal relations from the
player's perspective. On the side of material casuality Mateas adds “Mate-
rial for Action,” and on the formal side he adds “User Intention.” In terms
of “Material for Action,” Mateas argues that affordances are necessary, but
not suffi cient. “. . . the interface must 'cry out' for the action to be taken.
There should be a naturalness to the afforded action that makes it the obvi-
ous thing to do” (Mateas, 2004). This, I think, is an excellent heuristic for
the deployment of material causation to constrain (or nudge) interactors
into directions that are more likely to yield dramatically satisfying experi-
ences. The idea that the player's intention serves as a force of formal causa-
tion also hits the mark. We will explore these ideas further in the section
on Human-Computer Interaction as Mediated Collaboration in Chapter 4.
Aristotle described the fundamental material element of drama as “specta-
cle”—all that is seen. In the
Poetics
, he also refers to this element as “perfor-
mance,” which provides some basis for expanding the defi nition to include
other senses as well. Some scholars place the auditory sense in the second
level because of its association with music and melody; but, as I will argue
in the next section, it is more likely that the notion of melody pertains to
the
patterning
of sound rather than to the auditory channel itself.
