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Thu Feb 12 15:43:47 2004
Dear Patricia, It may be that multipath electronic storybooks fall between two chairs. If someone tells you a story, the fact that the sequence is predetermined frees up your mind for certain types of work -- I won't try to spell out the details at this hour, but something along the lines of mapping the story to your own experience, adopting the emotions of the protagonists, filling in certain kinds of details. If you have to participate in determining the direction and outcome of the story yourself, this calls for a very different set of cognitive activities, such as figuring out which pieces of information in the environment / story are relevant for assessing what is likely to happen and what needs to be done next. An electronic storybook with alternative stories is neither fish nor fowl -- you're not sufficiently in control to really feel like activating your decision-making system, and yet you're not sufficiently taken care of by the storyteller to lose yourself in elaboration and empathic identification. A better characterization of both modes would be quite interesting, and the distinction seems to be a very different one from the one I made to Ian about games structured like literary narratives and games that simulate life more generally. Makes me feel I don't really have a grip on these issues -- the concepts aren't very clear. Take the example of Little Red Riding Hood -- if you hear the story, you might enjoy the scene where she fatally delays going to her grandmother's, enjoying the beauty of the forest and picking flowers in a meadow. If you were playing a game, the beauty would have to be in the game itself, and would be expensive to program -- it be there at all unless the programmer really went to a lot of trouble to create something artistic. You could then get lost in the artistic beauty of the program and in that way be distracted from your task, but this wouldn't be the same as the little girl in the story enjoying the beauty of the forest, which could tap into your own experiences of being in the forest and being captivated by its beauty -- and at the same time you would hold in your mind the knowledge that all the while, the wolf was hastening to the grandma's house and soon devouring her. The pathos of this juxtaposition would be inherently difficult to build into a computer game, though perhaps not impossible -- you could be given the choice of running to rescue your grandma, who might or might not be in danger, and the possibility that she was would tinge your experience of the computer art. The main point I'm making is just that the fact that you need to act within the computer game (or branching story) means that you learn differently. In the story, the fact that someone has taken care of the narrative progression means that your mind is freed up to learn something very general, something about the perils of distraction that potentially could be applied to a huge number of circumstances. Perhaps when children insist on hearing the same story again and again they're doing this kind of work. In the computer game, you can't safely generalize because you have no data on whether your decision is even correct, or if it is correct, you don't know whether it was a fluke or not, and even if you're confident it wasn't a fluke, you might tag the strategy as appropriate to a very particular situation in a certain game. An implicit dimension of this is that the type of strategy advocated or made possible by the game could itself be trivial or significant. The significance of the strategies you learn in computer games is currently not very high -- the game designers are lucky if they manage to interest you at all, and aim no higher. By aiming higher I mean a game could present you with situations that would be paradigmatic, and your response to them would be informative in that it could be generalized to similar situations you might encounter in your own life -- a kind of moral. The situation is perhaps parallel to the situation of the early novel, which focused on sensational and immediate fear and gratification -- very few of them are read today, but they had huge audiences in their time. They were generally perceived to be harmful; people thought they taught people -- especially young girls -- notions that would lead to their moral downfall. We could imagine two types of games that would remedy the very narrow and limited validity of the choices made in games: one is games by master authors, a genre that doesn't seem to exist yet (unlike in film); the other is authoritative game representations of real situations, such as the introduction to Fort Bennings in America's Army. Even trite stories may have morals, and a game like America's Army clearly has a very profound moral: it's a lot of fun killing people. In this case, the goal is pragmatic, to get army recruits. The old romances also had morals with far-ranging implications, but their immediate goal was just to arouse interest; the moral would therefore be something along the lines of "Act in the way that gives you the maximum pleasure". This is a logical consequence of a raw appeal to evolved psychology -- the topic I argued in my "Why playing games is usually a waste of time" talk. Incidentally, a student in my class has a younger brother who is an avid Sims Online player; I've asked for details! Best wishes, On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Greenfield, Patricia wrote: > Dear Francis, > Thanks so much for the letter to your colleague. One thing I have been
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 14:42:59 -0600 (CST) Thanks, |