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| sneedle flipsock |
essay: Crawford's theory of interactivity |
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1 March 2004
We're in the middle of a revolution that's driven by interactivity, says games designer Chris Crawford, and it'll be a few centuries before we really understand what happened. Such is Crawford's reputation in the games industry, people happily sat on floors and steps in a crowded seminar room at the University of Melbourne to hear him talk, without notes, for almost 1.5 hours. The revolution is about more than adopting and using computers and telecommunication technology. Crawford identified four applications that caused sudden leaps forward—spreadsheets, word processing, games and the Internet—and says they have one thing in common. The heart and soul of the revolutionVisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers (the Apple II), gave users the ability to change a number or formula and immediately see the effect on related figures. With the first true word processor (Mac Write in 1984), for the first time a writer could see on screen how a document would look when printed, and could quickly make minor or substantial changes without having to laboriously retype or reset the text. The graphics and sound in early computer games, clumsy and tinny by today's standards, were less important than the 'gameplay' or entertainment value they offered. Using arrow keys, the spacebar and assorted letters on the keyboard, you could make things happen instantly on-screen. If you "take away the personal websites with photos of people's dogs, and the rantings and ravings of bloggers," said Crawford, "the total information content on the Internet is less than you can get in any good library." Nevertheless, the Internet is enormously popular and useful because it is easily accessible: you don't need to go on a prolonged, difficult hunt through books and files to find the nugget of information on page 373 of volume two on the top shelf. The common factor in these four examples is interactivity, the immediacy of a computer system's response to the user's input. Interactivity, to Crawford, is like conversation, "a cyclic process in which two intelligent agents listen, think and speak." Software designers tend to pay too much attention to the speaking part and insufficient attention to the listening part, but to Crawford all three elements are necessary for a satisfying interaction. Designing for interactionIn software design, Crawford's first rule is to ask, "What does the user do?" Answers to this question form a list of "verbs that allow the user to do interesting things." As an example, Crawford said Microsoft Word's menus, dialogue boxes and toolbars contain at least 360 verbs, such as 'select a font', and even more objects, such as 200 fonts to choose from. The designer then identifies which verbs are computable: that is, they can be expressed in a programming language. The list is further whittled by deciding which elements can be fitted into the program. Much of human communication contains deliberate ambiguity: you might ask a friend to make you some lunch, but you probably wouldn't give detailed instructions about how to do it. Based on previous knowledge and the context, your friend would be able to anticipate what sort of lunch you might like, then offer some specific suggestions about the type of food. Crawford says software should behave in a similar way, anticipating the user's needs and wishes. However, computer programmers tend to avoid anticipation where ambiguity is involved: they need empirical data to deduce how much risk a user is willing to take. Quick, helpful error response and correction can build trust in a computer system and Crawford says we are more likely to delegate responsibility to a computer program when we trust it to do what we want. "The more you make it seem that the anticipatory algorithm is under the user's control, the more likely people are to accept it," he observed. "An awful lot of sins in software design are covered up by people's willingness to put up with crap." The concepts of play and interaction are closely related. As well as being fun, play is educational. Think of kittens chasing and wrestling each other: they are learning hunting and other survival skills. Similarly, when you get hold of a new piece of technology, you don't normally read the manual first: you turn the gadget on and play with the buttons to find out what happens. Because of this common user behavior, even 'serious' software can't afford to discourage play and providing good feedback is crucial if the software is to be usable. According to Crawford, error messages should not say merely 'you stupid user' or 'nope, can't do that'—instead, they should anticipate what the user wants to do, clarify the situation and offer options. Unfolding the possibilitiesAncient Greeks taught many people to read and write, and thus stimulated thinking and conversation at all levels of their society. The results are still evident today in philosophy, rationalism, logical syllogism and other ways of understanding the world. In 500 years historians will look mostly at how computers changed society, not at changes in individual platforms and technologies, Crawford says. "The real change is they way they are changing our thinking." Computers are now encouraging what Crawford calls "subjunctive thinking", the constant examining of possible scenarios: if we do this, then that will happen... but if we do that, then something else will happen. This paradigm shift, says Crawford, will be the long-term effect of the computer revolution. Chris Crawford started designing computer games at Atari in 1979 and had a hand in developing several of the best games of the 1980s and 90s. In 1982 he wrote the classic The Art of Computer Game Design, the first of his several influential books on the subject. He now works freelance, a condition he describes as "self-unemployed". Since the 1970s Crawford has seen the games industry become a training ground for software developers. They start their careers in games, work intensively for a few years, then burn out and move into other industries—taking with them an ingrained understanding that "interactivity is the heart and soul of the computer revolution."
Chris Crawford visited Australia in February 2004 as a guest of XMediaLab and was a keynote speaker at the Interactive Entertainment Workshop. The University of Melbourne seminar was hosted by the university's Department of Information Systems. For more about subjunctive thinking and related ideas, see Chris Crawford's web site. |
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