Dramatic Foundations - Computers as Theatre - page 71

Other kinds of failures in human-computer interaction can also be seen
as failures on the level of thought. One of my favorite examples comes
from early text adventure games. Quite often, the parser did not “know”
all of the words that were used in the text representation of the story. So
a person might read the sentence, “Hargax slashed the dragon with his
broadsword.” The person might then type “take the broadsword,” and the
“game” might respond, “I DON'T KNOW THE WORD 'BROADSWORD'.”
The inference that one would make is that the game “agent” is severely
brain-damaged, since the agent that produces language and the agent that
comprehends it are assumed to be one and the same. This is the inverse of
the problem described in the last paragraph; rather than “knowing” more
than it represented, the agent represented more than it “knew.” Both kinds
of errors are attributable to a glitch in the formal-material relationship be-
tween language and thought.
Character and Agency
Aristotle maintains that the object of (i.e., what is being imitated by) a drama
is action, not persons: “We maintain that Tragedy is primarily an imitation
of action, and that it is mainly for the sake of the action that it imitates the
personal agents” ( Poetics 1450b, 1-5). In drama, character may be defi ned as
bundles of traits, predispositions, and choices that, taken together, form co-
herent agents. Characters are the agents of the actions that, taken together,
form the plot . This defi nition emphasizes the primacy of action.
In order to apply the same defi nition to human-computer interaction,
we must fi rst demonstrate that agents are in fact part of such representa-
tions, and second, that there are functional and structural similarities be-
tween such agents and dramatic characters.
In a purely Aristotelean sense, an agent is one who takes action. In-
terestingly, Aristotle admits of the possibility of a play without characters,
but a play without action cannot exist ( Poetics 1450a, 22-25). This suggests
that agency as part of a representation need not be strictly embodied in
“characters” as we normally think of them; i.e., representations of humans.
Using the broadest defi nition, all computer programs that perform actions
that are perceived by people can be said to exhibit agency in some form.
The real argument is whether that agency is a “free-fl oating” aspect of what
is going on, or whether it is captured in “characters”—coalesced notions of
the sources of agency.
The answer, I believe, is that even when representations do not explic-
itly include such “characters,” their existence is implied. At the grossest level,