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Both academics and practitioners
working with games and digital narratives have written about
the concepts interactivity and interaction in
relation to digital art forms such as games, interactive
drama, and hypertext fictions (see for instance Pearce 1997,
Murray 1997, Ryan 1997). Unfortunately, most have tended to
define these concepts in normative and discursive ways that
render them useless for the concrete analysis of a digital
work. A story of statements such as “a high degree of
interaction is more rewarding than a low degree of
interaction," have so vitiated the terms interaction
and interactivity that some theorists have explicitly
discarded the associated concepts (see for instance Aarseth
1997, 2002 and Manovich 2001), although their theories
implicitly discuss interactive functions.
Nevertheless,
practising academics working with interactive works of art
and entertainment must necessarily address their interactive
aspects. Fruitful approaches to interaction must neither
abandon the concepts nor break interactive functions into
many tiny sub-functions (for an example of this approach,
see Manninen 2000). This article attempts to help develop a
useful understanding of the general functions and
characteristics of interactivity and
interaction and broaden the paradigms of interaction
that exist today. I begin by revisiting the concept and its
use in several disciplines (primarily game studies and
literary studies) in order to understand what exactly has
been meant and implied by these words. I then propose a set
of working definitions and a primitive grammar of
interactivity, which can provide concrete guidelines during
the analysis of an interactive digital work, and I widen the
concept to encompass forms of interaction other than the
communicative and conversational forms. Finally, I propose a
categorisation of interactive texts based on their
differences in scope of action.[1]
Historical
use of the concept
Literary theorists addressed
interactive texts as early as 1984, when Anthony Niesz &
Norman Holland discussed a text-adventure game in an article
in Critical Inquiry, enthusiastically claiming that
print literature does not “yield the sense of true
dialogue that one gets from computerized interactive
fiction" (Niesz & Holland 1984, p. 113). In 1989 Richard
Ziegfield confronted the “new literary genre" of
“interactive fictions” (Ziegfield, 1989). In his
article, he made a very basic distinction between simple
(predetermined) versus complex (simulated) interactivity as
part of a longer analysis of the characteristics of this
genre, including its advantages to adventurous
authors.
A few years
later, Brenda Laurel in Computers as Theatre (Laurel
1991) classified interaction using three parameters:
frequency, range and significance. In other words, how often
can the user interact? How much interaction takes place via
the system? How deep is the interaction; does it influence
the development or structure of the system? Most
importantly, Laurel turned the discussion away from the
technical aspects of interaction and instead asked whether
interaction make us feel that we are part of a
representation or not, thus drawing attention to the
importance of the user’s reception of an
interactive work.
Michael
Joyce, in his essay collection Of Two Minds (Joyce
1995), distinguished between “truly interactive”
hypertexts and a non-formulated opposite (Joyce 1995, p.
203). To Joyce, the critical distinction was the ability to
influence the "materiality" of text versus simple choice
making. It was Joyce who introduced the useful distinction
between explorative and constructive
hypertexts: texts that can only be traversed, and those that
can be added to (see for instance Joyce 1988, or Joyce 1995,
p. 177-180). Joyce also poignantly argued that for the
writer and reader of hypertexts, “the issues at hand
are not technological, but, rather, aesthetic, not what
and where we shall read but how and why” (Joyce
1995, p. 183, my emphasis). Like Laurel he thus foregrounded
the importance of meaning-making and motivation in the
understanding of the workings of an interactive
text.
The same
year, in the article “Transforming Mirrors”
(Rokeby 1995), artist David Rokeby took a closer
look at interactive artworks, discussing what
“significant interaction” consists of (in an
implicit comparison to meaningless interaction). He
emphasised that in the end, what counts for the artist is to
make people believe they can interact and influence
the work in question.
Marie-Laure
Ryan in her article "Interactive drama: Narrativity in a
highly interactive environment" (Ryan 1997) distinguished
between works with low and high interactivity, that is,
interactivity that leaves "no mark" in comparison to
interaction that turns you into the "co-author of the
plot".[2]
She also introduced a number of different schemes useful in
identifying different forms of interactive story structures;
these are further developed in her later book Narrative
as Virtual Reality (Ryan 2001). She is one of the few
people who have tried to graphically represent what
different forms of interactive structures or
“patterns” may look like. Mark Bernstein is
another pattern mapper, presenting several hypertext
structures in his article “Patterns of Hypertext”
(Bernstein 1998).
In 1997,
game designer Celia Pearce published The Interactive
Book, in which she distinguished between gratuitous and
meaningful interaction. The former is the interaction you
have with a cash dispenser; the latter is the interaction
you have with digital pieces of work that gives you the
"feeling you make sense". One of the sensible criteria for
making sense is to let the user know that her choices of
interaction have consequences. Hence, gratuitous interaction
has no consequence or pertinence to the further experience
of a work. Meaningful interaction does.
Another
milestone in the body of literature on digital aesthetics,
interaction, and narrativity is Janet Murray’s
Hamlet on the Holodeck, also from 1997. In this book,
she proposed that we use the concept of agency rather
than interactivity, as something that "goes beyond
participation and activity" (Murray 1997, p.128). When we
discuss whether something is interactive, she argued that we
are actually referring to the computer’s ability to be
procedural and participatory. From the designer’s
perspective, she abandoned the notion of “writing”
and instead suggested "scripting the interactor": that when
we design an interactive piece of work we think in terms of
how to implement agency and how to make the user react to
it.
Espen
Aarseth's seminal work Cybertext – Perspectives on
Ergodic Literature (also published in 1997) discarded
the concept of interactivity, but nevertheless defined an
ergodic work as one that requires a “non-trivial
effort” of the reader in order to be read or used. That
is, conscious choice and concrete engagement with the
materiality of the text in some form is necessary to produce
it. This could also be described
as a process of interaction between text, text-producing
machinery, and operator (Aarseth 1997, p. 21), and Aarseth
has in general been influential in pinpointing the necessity
of taking the text-producing machinery into account
when looking at these non-trivial or ergodic
texts.
K.K Nygaard,
M. Wiibroe and P. Bøgh Andersen in 2001 broke with
the tradition specifying “good” and
“bad” interaction. In the article “Games and
Stories” they made a tripartite distinction between
different levels of interaction (Nygaard, Wiibroe and
Bøgh Andersen 2001) in 3D
environments.[3]
They discuss the level of story interaction (influence on
the turn-out of the story, characters), the level of plot
interaction (influence on the access to information and when
to get it) and finally, they introduce a level of kinetic
interaction, which is the form of interaction that enables
an avatar’s movement through a simulated world.
Newer works in the field have
tried to examine the concept of interaction, not in relation
to specific works or from a merely aesthetic point of view,
but in relation to specific historical or scientific
contexts. Notably, media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo in the
article “From cybernation to interaction: a
contribution toward the archaeology of interactivity”
(Huhtamo 1998) discussed the rise of the use of the word
interaction and shrewdly pointed out that as term and
marketing gimmick it was not used before the early
1990's.[4]
Huhtamo also traced some basic perspectives on interaction
(here primarily understood as a human-system relation)
further back and related it to the history of automation. He
identified an age-old dichotomy in our understanding of the
automat (the machine): we have perceived it either as a
system, which allows control of and intervention into human
activity (an automated system, a dehumanising machine), or
as a system function, which relieves us of the triviality of
repeated actions (an activity initiated by man, an extension
of him). Hence, the process of interacting with the machine
can be understood as an either liberating or restrictive
activity, giving us, the humans, more control of the world
or taking it away from us. Thus, interaction as activity either allows us control
– or allows the control of us.[5]
Jens F.
Jensen's recent articles (see for instance Jens F. Jensen
1997, 2001) have provided a much needed framework within
which to understand the concept of interaction, by
identifying the trends in the major disciplines that inform
various uses of the concept; these will be further discussed
below.
Today,
theoretical examinations of the concepts of interactivity
and interaction continue. As just one example, scholars in
the field of Communication and Media Studies have introduced
useful concepts such as “computer-mediated
interactivity” (Mayer 1998) and
“cyber-interactivity” (McMillan 2002), and applied
a critical understanding to the use of the concept (see
Mayer 1998, Kiousis 2002).
A
disciplinary framework
The definitions of interaction
presented thus far are primarily concerned with the
interaction between user and work; they explicitly or
implicitly operate with interactivity as indicating
the ability to affect the text or artwork in question.[6] This reading of interactivity is not necessarily exactly
similar to that of other research traditions, and it is
important to be aware of the possible differences in the
application of the word within various disciplines, both
when approaching literature in the field and when applying
it oneself. Jens F. Jensen (Jensen 1997) has identified
three concepts of interaction at play in the disciplines of
Sociology, Media & Communication Studies, and
Informatics (HCI or Human -Computer Studies). Jensen mainly
discusses the concept in its “relational” sense;
that is, he focuses on the entities among whom interaction
occurs. He points out that whereas interaction in the
sociological sense is defined as a relation between human
and human, within media studies the concept of interaction
refers to the relation between receiver and the media
message (and the pseudo-dialogic instances of these, as when
we actually talk to the television screen, often referred to
as parasocial interaction) and, finally, within the
tradition of Human-Computer Studies, interaction is thought
of as the relation between human and machine. This
observation is also supported and sketched in an article by
Jonathan Steuer (Steuer 1995).
However, a
discipline that Jensen does not refer to (as his initial
study was written several years ago) is ludology or computer
game studies. This discipline differentiates itself from
those previously mentioned, in that it defines
interaction in terms of the possibility of user
action; therefore the interactive parties are posited as, on
the one hand, the player, and on the other hand, the game
world or game system itself and the rules governing the
possible interaction with it. A radical ludologist might
claim that the game world should ideally be readily
accessible to the player at all times; an essential property
of games is the ability to exert control over the game
environment. The high value placed on player control has
sometimes led to a commensurately dismissive attitude
towards game elements that are not interactive, such as
cutscenes (narrative inserts in the game, explaining what
happens “in the story” of the game
world).
Sheizaf
Rafaeli, a communication studies scholar, has an interesting
definition of interactivity, which can help make the game
studies concept of interactivity more clear:
Interactivity is a variable characteristic of communication
settings. Formally stated, interactivity is an expression
of the extent that in a given
series of communication exchanges, any third (or later)
transmission (or message) is related to the degree to
which previous exchanges referred to even earlier
transmissions. (Rafaeli, 1988, p. 111)
In a communicative context,
Rafaeli describes interactivity as an experience of
causality and temporality: what is exchanged in the process
of interacting depends on what has previously been
exchanged. This meshes smoothly with the game-oriented
understanding of interaction as continued user activity,
that is, a series of interesting choices that ideally affect
the user’s subsequent choices and ultimately, the
outcome of the game (for more on the importance of
“interesting choices”, see for instance Rollings
& Morris 2000).
Modifying
definitions
Now that we have noted the ways
different disciplines think of interactivity and
interaction, let us turn again to Jens F. Jensen's broad and
useful distinction between interaction and interactivity
(Jensen, 2001), two concepts that are often used
interchangeably. For our purposes
we can, with Jensen, understand interaction as the
actions of two or more agents (or agent-like entities)
observed to be mutually interdependent. (Jensen 2001,
p.34)
However,
in order to avoid falling into a “conversational
trap”, thinking of the agents as humans engaged in
dialogue, we need to understand the agents in question not
necessarily as humans or human-like entities with a wish to
communicate, but as agents in a more neutral sense. They are
autonomous entities with the ability to influence other
(forms of) agents and/or initiate action. This broadening of
the concept of agents further allows the incorporation of an
understanding of interaction that is not necessarily
communicative, but rather manipulative or navigational (as
is the case with interaction in most computer games). The
moment in which interaction takes place can then be
described as an activity or event, during which one active
agent interacts with another agent capable of initiating
action, in a specific interactive setting.
Interactivity, by extension, can then be employed as a general term that
describes the potential of an entire media form. Jens. F.
Jensen defines interactivity as the measure of a
medium’s potential ability to let the user exert an
influence on the content/or form of the mediated
communication. (Jensen 2001, p.38)
This is not far from Steuer, who
back in 1994 defined interactivity as
the extent to which
users can participate in modifying the form and content
of a mediated environment in real time (Steuer 1994, pp.
67)
Jensen’s definition of
interactivity is useful because it encompasses the
possibility of affecting both content and form (thus
incorporating many of the versions of interactivity put
forward in the literature reviewed), and simultaneously
implies an interpretation of interactivity as a
medium’s potential ability to allow a user to exert
influence. Hence, this definition does not assume that
interactivity is a prerequisite for mediated communication,
and we thus avoid the temptation to return to normative
validations (as we would if we defined interactivity as an
essential property of digital media, or as an intrinsic
characteristic of a specific genre of art or literature).
Furthermore, the definition supports scalar measurement of
the extent of interaction in a work, a valuable capability
in light of the heterogeneous scales applied in much
literature in the field. Steuer’s definition adds
further usefulness by including “modification in real
time” as a defining feature. Since we wish also to
analyse digital works in which multiple users interact with
each other and a virtual environment in real time, it is
helpful to include it in a working definition of what
interactivity could imply today.[7]
Let us then, for our purposes, define interactivity as
the measure of a
medium’s potential ability to let the user exert an
influence on the content/or form of the mediated
communication in real time.
The importance of being able to
interact in real time and the importance of real time
interaction in creating a feeling of presence have been
addressed in an illuminating way by Lombard & Ditton
(Lombard & Ditton 1997). They have analysed factors that
create feelings of telepresence: experienced user
presence in a represented or simulated digital environment
and the belief in the social nature of present agents and
system. Building on Rafaeli’s definition among others,
they identify interactivity as one of the factors that helps
create the feeling of telepresence:
There are two aspects of interactivity that are especially
important: the number of previous user inputs that are
acknowledged in the current response of the technology
[Rafaeli, 1988, 1990] and the speed (or lag time)
of the response to user input. A computer which appears
to have no memory of recent events in an interaction, or
one that is excessively slow in responding, should be
less likely to evoke the illusion that the medium is a
social entity.
We can then conclude that
technologically successful interactivity, regardless
of scope, is interactivity that takes place in an
environment that swiftly responds to the user’s input
and seems to contain a memory of the user’s previous
(inter) actions. This definition incorporates the meaningful
interaction as defined by Celia Pearce (see above), and is
also potentially useful from the perspective of story
generation. Experiencing an interactive system, such as a
game world, as a system that presents one with a series of
interesting and non-trivial choices, is an experience of
interaction in time; by virtue of this, one
could argue, that in retrospect one’s experience as a
user is always already a story of the successfulness
or failures of one's actions.
Furthermore, it is important to
make distinctions between who is interacting (what
type of agents), and what the agents involved in an
interactive event are interacting with (for instance the
world of a game system, another human, or the computer as a
tool), in order to make clear and analytically applicable
distinctions between various interactive functions. I
propose we make a clear distinction between the
agents involved in an interactive event, the form of
interaction through which they exert influence on each
other or the present environment, and the scope of
interaction they are allowed. Finally, continuing from
the definition of interactivity just presented (and inspired
by the paradigm of interaction from game studies), I suggest
we add a fourth perspective on interaction, our experience
of interaction-in-time. This could encompass the
experience of being able to interact in real time, the
system’s memory of this interaction, and the way in
which system memory relates to our experience of presence
and influence on the interactive environment as a series of
continuous choices and actions.
Scope of interaction: categories of interactive texts
I have elsewhere (Klastrup 2002,
2003) dealt with the typical forms of interaction
identifiable in digital environments, including manipulation
and navigation (interaction with the system or the
environment) and information retrieval and social
interaction (mainly communicative interaction). Readers
interested in familiarising themselves with my study of
these forms may consult those sources. Here I will primarily
focus on an analysis of the scope of
action.
Personal
experience will likely have taught most of us that the
concept of interaction can easily be abused, such as
when toy stores advertise for “interactive toys”
whose interactivity consists of pressing a sound button on
their belly. However, this misuse or abuse of the word tells
us a great deal about what people expect interaction to be.
An example of critics using the term in a partial and
limited way can be observed at the website of the IP Top
Awards (http://www.iptop.com/). On the site, the jury
outlines the criteria they applied when choosing the
nominees for the European fact sites with the "Best of
European Interactive content":
- Is interaction
between users and the site stimulated? Are message
boards, email forms available?
- Can a user contact
the staff of the site directly? Is there a possibility to
phone/fax?
- Can users interact
with other users? Via message boards and/or mailing
lists?
- Does the site provide
newsletters? Can users react to these newsletters? Are
these reactions published?
(http://www.iptop.com/categories.htm)
The jury’s definition of
interaction borders on an understanding simply of
interaction as communication. They emphasise the way sites
enables the users to be heard - and listened to. The
possibilities of shaping content or interacting with objects
on the sites are completely absent. Perhaps this is not
surprising, since news sites need to produce content (news)
that cannot be altered by the users (otherwise the sites
would probably lose their credibility very quickly).
However, users’ commentaries, as a supplement to the
on-site content, are valued, as they produce more content
and furthermore show s the site
owners’ willingness to let the voices of their readers
be heard (signalling values such as “freedom of
speech” and “democratic dialogue”).
Interaction
in the world of factual websites is often judged in the same
way as the IP Top jury do, explicitly or implicitly: it is a
question of enhancing communication and catering for the
interests the reader communicates to the site. The user of
these sites, on her side, does not want to make a lot of
choices in order to reach the wanted information or in order
to communicate with the site. Thus, expectations of what one
should be able “to do” on a fact site are pretty
clear, both in the minds of producers and users.
Interactions
within fictional environments are however intrinsically
different. Users of digital works tend to want as much
(challenging) user action to take place as possible, whereas
the developers might want to restrict interaction to better
control the player's experience of the world or story in
question. Depending on one’s familiarity with these
types of texts, the user (from a normative point of view)
might consider more or less interaction as a positive asset
in the work she engages with, and hence be somewhat
oblivious as to whether more or less interaction actually
functions well in the work at hand.
This tension
between on one hand wanting as much user interaction as
possible, and on the other hand wanting to restrict it,
becomes clear in games or digital stories with a didactic
purpose: the teacher (developer) will want to ensure that
the student using the material gets to know certain
information at certain times (for instance, students might
need to know how to divide before they can solve the
division puzzle). In this case, a positive outcome depends
on the teacher being able to control when and how the
students can interact with the material given. Less
interactive parts of a digital work might also be a
necessary part of many games: cutscenes can serve to inform
the players about the universe in which they move, display
important features of the gameplay, or inform the player of
important developments taking place in other parts of the
world that she does not currently have access to. Thus, the
need for more or less interaction depends on genre and
design intentions and the quality of it should be evaluated
accordingly. Hence, we should always aim at relating our
judgement of the quality or scope of interaction to the
specific function of it in the work and genre in question.
Static, pseudo-dynamic and dynamic
“texts”
Sites such as Amazon and the
sites (news, commercial, marketing) that receive the IP Top
awards offer their users a form of static interaction that
make possible only choice-interaction, a mode of
interaction in which the reader is offered the choice
between (for instance) looking at this book or that book.
The choice-interaction or explorative-interaction
(cf. Michael Joyce) also characterises most hyperfictions
(for example, do you want to read link a, b or c?).
However,
some site or game designs, such as Amazon or the Danish game
Blackout, use certain rhetorical moves to cleverly
mask this basically static form of interaction as well as
the fact that you are always dealing with pre-written
text.[8]
Small programmes that put your name or your choice of words
into a text make it look customized, regardless of
the fact that all the contextual and adjoining text is the
same for every user of the site. Common gimmicks observable
at commercial sites include addressing you by your name when
you enter (quite common in online bookstores). The combined
mail- and website story Online Caroline seemingly
sends very personalised mail s to the user,
but in fact only changes a very few words in the standard
e-mail that all the story participants eventually receive
(Walker 2002, Cole 2001). Hence, on an overall scale, we
need to recognise works that are pseudo-dynamic: texts that imply that you as
an individual user have a specific effect on the work, but
which are in fact static interactive texts, whose
form and content are on the whole predefined and already
fleshed out, allowing little space for the presence and
choices of the individual user.
Finally,
there are texts, or perhaps rather environments, that do not
limit their possibilities of interaction to
choices in a menu or a questionnaire, but which truly adjust
their actual content to the individual user's preferences
and actions. These texts are dynamic. They do not
contain a complete and predesigned content,
but present a framework for interaction and events.
Codeworks (to use a term coined by artist John
Cayley) that produce content according to the behaviour of
the user are one example (for instance by following a
user’s surfing patterns and then, processing this
pattern, presenting her with relevant info
“grabbed” from the internet). Another example is a
simulated environment such as that of action- and
skill-games: the game session you create by manipulating
game objects in a game environment as simple as
Tetris should in principle be able to be different
from the sessions other users perform. Finally, the most
striking examples may be found in the multi-user world. In a
world like EverQuest, each visit is never the same as
the previous visit, as the world itself is constantly
updated and other users come and go at random around you.
While a game world system can put some restrictions on your
behaviour, social interaction in a multi-user environment
can never be fully scripted in advance. You cannot program
people.
Actual and “perceived”
interaction
Looking at interaction at play in
the different works should make it obvious that we must take
into account the difference between the perceived
interactional mode of a text and the actual
interactional possibilities of the text, which is often only
revealed after two or more readings or uses.
We trade subjectivity for
participation and the illusion of control; our control
may appear absolute, but the domain of that control is
externally defined. We are engaged, but exercise no power
over the filtering language of interaction embedded in
the interface. Rather than broadcasting content,
interactive media have the power to broadcast modes of
perception and action (Rokeby, 1995, p. 154)
As David Rokeby argues, the
content of interactive media is often not control, but the
illusion of control that we as players believe we
have. Making a distinction between how a user perceives an
interactive piece and how the piece actually functions
(behind the level of presentation) might enable us to make a
more clear-cut distinction among the scope of actions in
interactive texts. First,
we need to make a basic distinction between interaction
possibilities on the level of code and interaction
possibilities as feigned through the user interface and
perceived by the user. It is not only a question of being
led to believe that one as a user has a lot of influence on
the text at hand, as is the case in Online Caroline.
There might actually be a number of interaction
possibilities in a specific piece of work, which the user of
the work might not discover at all, due to the
programming of the interface. This was the case with some of
the first hypertext novels such as afternoon (Joyce
1987), in which some links are invisible and have to be
found by randomly clicking on words in the text. This
distinction between interaction as perceived and interaction
as programmed can also be formulated as a difference between
interaction that achieves its effects on respectively a
semiotic and a non-semiotic level (semiotic here understood
as that which relates to the production of meaning and
content).
If we are
looking at a piece of work from a narrative point of view,
we can say that interaction can have an effect on either the
level of presentation of story or the level of story
content. Interaction
on the level of presentation means the ability to change the
sequence of events, for instance when and how often they are
presented or if they are presented at all. Interaction on
the level of story content means the ability to not only
change the events themselves, but the entire universe in
which they take place. However, both levels - presentation
and story - inform the level of interpretation: the final
interactive activity performed by the user.
In contrast,
if we analyse a work as a simulated world (the text as game
system), interaction does not necessarily need to have or
create meaning on a higher level; it can simply be surface
interaction or fabric interaction. Surface
interaction involves manipulating objects in the world
and navigating through the world by choosing the direction
and style of movement (moving on the surface).
Fabric interaction indicates the user’s ability
to manipulate the world itself, its fabric, for
instance by adding her own objects (houses, clothes, etc)
and ultimately by changing the rules of its physics the
world or game system itself. (Striking examples include
virtual worlds such as MOOs, which typically allow users to
build and expand the world, by way of adding code, both to
the database and to programming of a specific object).
Whereas the distinction between level of presentation
(“discourse”) and level of story definitely makes
sense when we are talking about narrative texts, the
surface/fabric distinction is a much needed addition, when
we are analysing graphical and navigable environments in
which the production of story or the recreation of authorial
intention is not necessarily an essential part of the
interactive activities.
To conclude,
in different forms of interactive texts, different levels of
influence can be identified. One must examine both how the
text is configured on the level of code and how it on a
higher level seemingly allows its reader to engage with it.
Ultimately, analysing an interactive work is much a question
of discovering its architecture of interaction: what
functions of interaction it offers and how it
“programs” its users to use these functions
through interaction with the environment and perhaps also
other users. A thorough analysis of this architecture
requires an awareness of all available forms of building
material, from paint to bricks.
Three
interactive genres and the future study of interaction
Part of the analysis of the
grammar of an interactive piece of work is the
identification of the scope of interaction in the work, both
as it is presented to the user and as it functions on the
level of code. We can now condense the variations of scope
previously discussed into a typology of three basic forms of
interactive texts or genres:
Type of text
|
Interaction
|
|
static-interactive texts
-
content fully programmed, manipulable sequences
|
on level of presentation or
surface
|
|
pseudo-dynamic interactive texts
- mainly programmed content, but with certain gaps
to be filled by data such as individual user
information, so as to maintain the illusion of
adjustability
|
mainly
on the level of presentation or surface
|
|
dynamic interactive texts
- content emergent, mainly programmed to adjust the
actual rendering of text and content according to
the choices and movements of the users
|
on
the level of story content or fabric
|
Fig. 1. A typology of
interactive texts
This article has argued that in
order to analyse digital texts with interactive functions,
we need concepts that can explain the interactive
elements of these texts and their relation to
each other. In an analysis we can apply several perspectives
on interactive functions. We need to distinguish between
interaction in a communicative sense (the more traditional
understanding) and interaction in a game world sense, and to
be aware of the importance of both these paradigms of
interaction to the user’s experience. We can look for
forms of (inter)actions, the agents that can
actively affect other agents within the framework of the
interactive environment, and the scope of interaction
presented in the work. Finally, in a thorough analysis, we
can then relate these aspects of interaction to the
experience and implementation of interaction-in-time.
Here I have particularly focused on aspects related to the
scope of text, the interactive genres and the
various ways in which they present their possibilities of
interaction.
Interaction is still an appropriate word to describe some frequently
occurring features of computer-mediated communicative
environments and texts. Rather than trying to propose an
entirely new term to explain what interactive digital art
and entertainment do, I have found it more rewarding
to direct attention towards defining and refining the
understanding of interaction, and building on this, to
identify the several functions of interaction in specific
works. Thus I hope to have avoided a normative discussion of
the usefulness and application of the term in general. I
have also pointed out that when dealing with a normatively
contested field of study as that of interactivity, it
is necessary to reflect critically on the implications of
one’s own approach. What do we think of as an
action and how does that inform the way we think of
inter-actions? What is the role of code in relation
to the way we perceive an interactive work? How does the way
we use the word interaction relate to a paradigmatic
understanding of what the word refers to? Realising the
senses in which we think of interaction and what we
mean by interactivity will always be a good starting
point for any analysis of a work with interactive functions.
The
author wishes to thank Julianne Chatelain for kindly
revising and proof-reading this
article.
[1]It should be noted that this article is part of a larger
research project, which attempts to rethink and revise the
concept of interaction so as to be able to apply it more
concretely to especially multi-user worlds and
games.
[2] This article was published in a special issue of
Modern Fiction Studies, which focused on digital
fiction and was guest edited by Katherine Hayles.
[3] The article was published in an anthology named):
Virtual Interaction: Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D
Worlds (Ed. Qvortrup, Lars), focusing on interaction in
3D environments.
[4] This article was published in the anthology The
Digital Dialectic (Ed. Lunenberg, 1999).
[5] The question of interaction, not as activity, but rather
as “interpassivity” or a new form of control has
been raised in recent articles by for instance Laetitia
Wilson (Wilson 2003) and Mark Andrejvic (Andrejvic
2001).
[6] For a work that relates this aspect of interactivity to
interactivity in a broader sense, that is: interactivity
between medium-user, medium-society and user-society, see
Klaus Bruhn Jensen’s article “Interactivities.
Constituents of a Model of Computer Media and
Communication” (Bruhn Jensen, 2000)
[7] Indeed, both the expectation and the awareness of being
able to interact with others in real time is an essential
characteristics of multi-user game- and entertainment
environments.
[8] For a thorough analysis of the Blackout game see
Klastrup, 1999.
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