Crawford conversationally defines “Interactivity” as follows:
“A cyclic process in which two actors listen, think, and speak.”
Taken on its own Crawford’s definition does appear to be restrictive. However, I have to admit his definition does a pretty good job at being a useful working definition. What I have issues with however, are some of the examples he provided to illustrate his point.
In my opinion, Crawford only seemed to consider live conversation (and that too certain kinds of conversation) as worthy of being labelled as interactive. He proceeds to dismiss books, movies and plays as non-interactive by nature or of such limited interactivity that it is to be disregarded.
To be honest, his pompous attitude infuriates me and I believe he has grossly overlooked some important issues relating to interactivity. Primarily he has missed out on discussing the time-scale of interaction. Crawford makes an assumption that the cyclic process that he describes must take place over a perceptible space of time, something from a time of a couple of seconds to at most an hour. Although his definition makes no such assumption, it runs through his examples and unsurprisingly it leads (or rather forces him) to roundly dismiss books. We discussed STAR WARS books and fan fiction enough in class to rubbish his arguments about books being non-interactive. He may be right about movies and most plays in a sense that they are more participatory in nature rather than interactive.
Although he writes in the year 2002, Crawford has quite obviously missed out personal blogs and online news media from his discussion of interactivity. This is quite a pity considering that he might be able to expand his scope from considering only “direct conversation” as interactive. He has also missed out on reality TV shows. With such omissions, he has not been able to back up his definition strongly. On a personal level, I feel his definition is a very precise and useful if taken without the assumptions of Crawford.
4 comments:
I think Crawford would be very happy to hear that his "pompous attitude infuriates" you... is that an example of interaction? :P
I agree, as we discussed in class, the whole issue of time scale is very important, and one which Crawford doesn't really address. We should discuss this more in the next few weeks.
Oops. I just noticed that I was signed in on my wife's Google account when I left that last comment. That should be from Andy, not Karin.
So, the original comment was:
Chris Crawford has been banging on about the same ideas for at least 15 years... He's firmly convinced that he can develop (or has already) a virtual actor capable of true emotional conversations in videogames... But the very things that make a character in a narrative interesting make them boring in an interactive. Those very things are character traits.
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