PROFESSOR: We're going to start with the discussion portion,
just to give a little context to the reading
that we've been doing.
I am a big fan of having designers think about artifacts
through the lens of criticism every now and then,
and I have a background in games criticism.
I did that for about 10 years in parallel
with my illustrious academic career
when I was still in Sweden.
So I also teach games criticism to unrelated students
here at MIT.
And when it comes how to do critiques
of interactive artifacts, there's
still a lot of uncertainty about how to best do it,
and how and why it needs to be different from criticism
of film or literature, or any of these things
that we've been doing analysis of since for it.
And one of the approaches is a method
called interaction criticism.
It's not specifically designed for games
or playful interactive experiences,
but just interactive, non-production-related
artifacts in general.
And the things we've been reading today
is, one, from the originator himself, Jeff Bardzell.
So we're trying to give an introduction to the method
and the theory behind it.
And the other one is him and two other interaction design
and media studies scholars trying
to apply interaction criticism to a particular cultural
artifact, and through different senses
and seeing what they come up with,
and whether that's interesting and fruitful.
So with that said, let's start with the one
called Interaction Criticism, an Introduction to the Practice,
and put keywords on the whiteboard.
OK, so maybe we want to start with--
it doesn't matter which one of these--
but subjective.
Who put that there?
AUDIENCE: Hello.
PROFESSOR: OK, hello.
AUDIENCE: OK, so one of the interesting things
from this paper I noticed is that when
you talk about criticism, it's someone's judgment on a thing,
and that judgment can often be subjective.
And so a lot of the discussion in this paper
is reconciling the clearly subjective nature of criticism,
but in a way that, they say, is judgments
that are subjective, but non-perspectival.
Is that how you pronounce that?
PROFESSOR: I think they probably just made up the word,
so it's your call.
AUDIENCE: I know what they mean, which ties into perspectives.
But the idea is that the judgment
itself comes from, they focus on critics that are experts
in their fields, and the judgments themselves come
from experts who know about many similar types of interaction, I
would say.
I don't want to say games, because it doesn't say games.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, no, it clearly sort of skirts.
So just to interrupt a little bit.
Specifically, [INAUDIBLE] is one of the people who
are applying it in the second paper,
has said that the only professional practice
of interaction criticism is games criticism.
We don't have any other sort of interactive art form that's
sort of strong enough to have people get paid
to do this kind of criticism.
So for better or worse, that's kind
of what we have to look to as an example.
But especially Bardzell, I think,
it's very critical to how games criticism is currently done,
and thinks that there's a lot to learn
from other critical practices, and he
comes from a background in those areas.
So yeah, he's not going to talk about games,
but they're sort of hovering in there.
AUDIENCE: And he also mentions, I guess,
also that they're not talking about amateur critics,
like the people who go on Amazon or on Steam and rate whatever
they want to rate.
Because that could be subjective but very
based on that person's own experience
without trying to see things in a broader context.
PROFESSOR: So to begin with, what
do we think of this idea of a somehow
more rigorous objectivity?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, that's [INAUDIBLE]..
PROFESSOR: Reflections on that?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I put aesthetics.
And so it's very similar to what we're talking about right now,
which I find that, throughout the readings that we've
been doing, design is in the middle of science and art.
So a lot of times there's a temptation
to do things very scientifically,
but that fails when aesthetics come into play, because they're
very subjective.
And so that's why we need criticism.
That's what they're kind of saying.
PROFESSOR: Right, so we don't have a choice but to rely
on our subjectivity , because there's no other rules given
to us for how to evaluate this kind of stuff.
It's not just describable.
That misses some important point.
By the way, I would say that Bardzell doesn't
think of design as something in between science and art,
but rather something distinctly different from both.
So he wants it to be its own thing.
But yes, clearly, all the sources that he
is borrowing on when he's creating
this method coming from one or the other, so there's that.
But yes, and those were the word pair I was thinking of,
when I said we could start in either end.
But then what goes into this expertise
that he talks about how?
Do we justify that someone's subjective opinion of something
is more, weighs heavier than someone else's?
What makes up for the difference between a critic
and someone on Amazon?
AUDIENCE: Well, knowledge about the field
and having a very broad experience,
and I guess the people who you are critiquing,
or who are reading the critiques,
knowing that you have that broad experience.
Someone that got an espresso machine off Amazon
might leave a terrible review being like, oh,
it didn't just instantly make me coffee, one star,
because they don't understand how the espresso machine works,
or what the different grades might be,
or how any of the different pieces of the process work.
Whereas the critic who will have value behind what they say
understands the whole field, and how this helps,
and what place it has, and what the context
of it, and like other good works in the field are.
PROFESSOR: Right.
So a good example, so this is one
of those things that are often highlighted in design
educations, and I probably have said the word a couple of times
during the semester as well.
So the way we educate ourselves in design
is often looking at what has been
established as good examples.
And they're good just because someone decided they were good.
There's nothing in nature determining
that they're good other than ourselves and our community,
but that has an important role, I would say,
within games criticism.
There's nothing that speaks as loud as having
this almost data-based knowledge of the history of video games
when you get interviewed for writing
for a website or a journal, or something, magazine,
I should say.
That's what they question you on,
do you know about this and that, and that
is the most important criteria for whether you're
going to get the job or not.
AUDIENCE: It's, do you know the history?
PROFESSOR: Yes.
And that is one of the things that Bardzell would say
is the problem with games criticism.
What do you think could be potentially
an issue with that kind of filter
for who gets to be a critic?
AUDIENCE: I'm not playing games to know the history of games.
PROFESSOR: Right.
But yeah, they actually expect you to not just know it,
but have played it.
So the most well-played, if we can make up a word
based on well-read, so the most well-played people
tend to get the jobs as critics.
But is there a problem with that?
And what would that--
and now we're sort of off the paper already,
but we'll get back to it.
AUDIENCE: There's sort of a disconnect between someone
who has played a lot of games, with someone
who has played no games.
PROFESSOR: Yes.
But, yes.
AUDIENCE: Well, I mean, it was a good point.
It would be difficult for the folks who played a lot of games
to be able to even translate their thoughts to someone who's
never played those games.
PROFESSOR: Oh, that's what you were saying.
So yes, you will be a little bit like, let's say, a jazz
critic that just listens to--
AUDIENCE: Coltrane.
PROFESSOR: Well, not even--
Coltrane is for the masses.
They're beyond Coltrane.
They might be talking above the heads of most people,
so there's a disconnect with the audience.
So that might just make the criticism very insular
and not really sort of reach the audience
who might be interested in evaluation
of these cultural artifacts.
So that, I think, is a very good point.
Anything else along those lines?
AUDIENCE: So what a fix to accommodate
for that be to ask for a writing sample
and actually judge whether or not
that person can communicate at multiple levels of an audience?
PROFESSOR: Actually, the most important skill
is not being a very knowledgeable gamer,
but being a good writer.
Because without that skill, you get nowhere.
And no one's going to read you, basically,
because you write like a robot, or something.
AUDIENCE: Actually, I want to say even the converse might
actually be true, of trying to look for people who don't sort
of toe the line of traditional game criticism
and become a lot more sought after and invited now.
So folks who are expressly stating opinions
from or analyzing games are coming up
from the lens of something that's
not like traditional games criticism.
It seems, in this click-hungry media
landscape, seemed actually to be a lot more interesting to read.
So they're good writers, and they're
bringing a new perspective.
PROFESSOR: And I think for, among other things,
one important reason is that there is an existing
hegemony around the field of what a good game is and should
be that may be based on assumptions about gender
and culture that should be questioned.
It might be white men writing for white men, basically,
of a certain age.
And if we think, especially back in time,
playing video games, having grown up
playing all these games on all these consoles
implies a very strong privilege when
it comes to finance, your family's finances,
for instance.
Consoles used to be, I mean, they
used to cost the same as they cost today.
Games used to cost the same as they cost today,
but that was a lot more money in the '80s and '90s
than it is now.
So someone who had access to all of the existing home consoles
was probably a rich kid.
So those were the ones who became reviewers and decided
what a good game is.
So there's something about looking to those good examples
that could also need some questioning, and we might need
to break with those traditions and look
at other potential values in interactive artifacts
as the ones that we are creating,
those that are maybe more inclusive,
or taking other skillsets to heart,
rather than just excellent hand-eye coordination,
or whatever it is that makes a good gamer.
AUDIENCE: Before we leave this, just one more angle
I want to bring up, which is, even if you were expressly
looking for people who state that they
have a long history with games and can bring up this catalog,
which history, right?
Because in games, or even digital games,
and extend it out to non-digital games,
to board games or tabletop and sports,
then it's like each country, each region
has its own history, and people consider
different things canonical.
So a lot of American white men writing for white boys
pretty much have a fairly lacking experience
of Eastern Bloc games, even games
that were released in Asia, for instance.
Only a few Japanese games are sort of re-released in America.
And they think that's all of Japan, right?
And it's like, no, that's not--
that's part of Japan, and not even all of Asia.
So that would be an example.
That will be another problem, is that you
assume that a long history implies
a comprehensive history.
But no one really has a comprehensive specific history
with the entire world's history of games.
PROFESSOR: And that criticism has
been put towards design studies, as well.
I mean, we are reading three white men
of a somewhat certain age here today.
So they are, to some extent, myopic, as well,
when it comes to cultural values in these artifacts.
And I was thinking maybe we can get back on track
by inviting whoever put perspectives on there.
AUDIENCE: It was me.
They were talking in this article about the four
perspectives of, was it the designer,
the user, where they, like the--
AUDIENCE: Artifact and society?
Artifact and society?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
It was sort of what I was talking about before.
It's like someone who is very well-played
is going to have a different interaction with the artifact,
compared to someone who does not play a lot of games.
You have to consider a lot of different perspectives,
and it's very easy to get stuck.
And the idea is, you get stuck in one.
A creator can't see their own problems,
a lot of the time, which is why you need criticism.
And the criticiser doesn't have the perspective
that the creator does.
PROFESSOR: So that's, I mean, one
of the reason we have criticism is
to try to improve whatever field we are critiquing.
So it's supposed to be a help for the designers
to see things that they can't see themselves, as well.
And what I would do, if this was a longer class,
I would have you write up critiques of each other's work.
But we're just, we have so much work to do,
so we don't quite have time for it.
So I don't want to sort of burden you with that.
But it is a very interesting exercise, because you instantly
see that people see things in the thing you've been making
that you didn't see yourself, and you
thought you saw all of it, because you're
so engaged with it.
This is also something that breaks with tradition
of old-school literary theory, which
used to be very heavily focused on artifacts.
So you wanted to just look at the text
and see what the meaning of the text really is.
It comes from religious studies of trying
to figure out what the Bible is telling us to do,
or something like that.
But that was what the academic study of literature
used to be, as well, what is the author's
intentions with this text, and try to sort
of just reverse engineer.
Nowadays, we read, and we can talk about all kinds
of artifacts as texts.
It seems a little weird to do that, call a game
a text, for instance.
But if you think of the Latin origin of the word, which
textera basically means more like a texture,
like something that's woven together,
then it's easier to think, talk and think
about things as texts other than written words on a page.
So when we interpret texts, now, through interaction criticism,
for instance, we very much take into account
the context it is used in.
Because we think that there isn't just
one meaning of a cultural artifact.
It actually changes meaning depending
on who is interacting with it, and under which circumstances.
And that is something that has changed literature studies, as
well, the idea of it being someone encountering
the text, which you can hear in the name of reader response
theory for instance, which is, it's
not just about what Shakespeare meant when he wrote the text.
It's about how a reader now can respond to a text like Hamlet
that is of interest.
So this is very much based on that tradition of,
we are doing a reading not just of the artifact itself,
but the context of use and the identity of the user,
and so forth.
OK, so what you have left, let's talk about a little bit
about balance.
AUDIENCE: So I put that up there,
and it was mostly about, he was talking
about how, with the criticisms, there's somewhat
trying to strike this balance between historical context,
cultural significance, and technical descriptions,
and how do you, so how do you balance the different elements
that you should be looking at?
Because these are all different lenses
that a different person might evaluate through differently,
especially based on what field they're
in that is not interaction design, or interaction
criticism for design.
But scientific design is very much of the, how this was done,
or [INAUDIBLE],, how was this done, empirical facts.
And so there's a lot about different ways
to focus those designs, to focus the criticism based
on the different aspects that you can
be trying to evaluate through.
PROFESSOR: And that is what, I think, for Bardzell,
that is one of the things that creates
the need for interaction criticism.
Because that's somewhat alien to someone who is doing criticism
of movies or literature.
To them, it's perfectly fine to look at it as just
something that is being evaluated for its aesthetics,
end of story.
Well, when we evaluate a game, let's say
you're driving a car in the game,
and the steering works very poorly.
It's just, there's a usability issue there
that's very similar to when we evaluate cars.
So if the steering is bad, that's
going to affect the quality of this kind of artwork thing,
but it's a very sort of usability-centered thing.
So games and interactive artifacts
live in this weird space where these things come together,
and all of them matter.
So some of it is just matter-of-factly,
this steering wheel is bad, while some of it is like,
the scenery of the car ride in this game
evokes emotions, a lot of that.
So to me, it's what makes interaction design cool,
because it has all of these very different qualities to it,
and they can be foregrounded or sort of
be more part of the periphery.
But they all have to work in concert for an interaction
design for the unity, or organic unity of it, as Bardzell says,
to click.
OK, so I guess we just have framework.
So let's do that one as well, so you don't feel left out.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
I put framework, because this article
is a lot about developing a way to criticize
interactive material.
And I think it mentions how it's about developing skills that
enable people to think about interaction.
And so that's why I thought framework was a good word.
PROFESSOR: Right.
I mean, that's what he's doing here.
So it's a somewhat ambitious project
to sort of establish, starting the establishment
of a framework that goes outside of the tradition of HCI, which
is much more usability-focused, on and without losing
those qualities, still capturing the things that sort of fall
through the net of what that type of criticism
or that type of evaluation captures in an experience.
OK, are we ready for paper number
two, looking at the actual application
of interaction criticism?
AUDIENCE: I've got a question.
PROFESSOR: Yes.
AUDIENCE: What's the difference--
so there are-- correct me if I'm wrong-- there are car critics,
right?
PROFESSOR: Yes.
AUDIENCE: There are people who review cars professionally.
PROFESSOR: Yes.
AUDIENCE: What's the difference, would that
be considered a form of interaction criticism
of design?
PROFESSOR: Right.
So I think that, to Bardzell, it doesn't.
AUDIENCE: It's not.
PROFESSOR: No.
Because the focus is so much on the usability aspects.
AUDIENCE: Not on, like, the interior.
PROFESSOR: Right.
I mean, we do sometimes see that kind of approach,
where someone is sort of trying to focus more
on the experience of a car, or something like that.
And that's when it starts coming closer to that line.
So he talks about, not in this paper
but in another sort of parallel paper,
he talks about interior design and things like that,
that there's definitely touch points.
And when we start talking about stuff like the sound design,
what sound a car door makes when it closes,
that's very carefully designed nowadays.
And that is part of the aesthetic experience
of the car.
AUDIENCE: So just going back to balance, there could be a--
one-dimensional, might be two, three dimensions,
but there's aesthetics on one side,
and usability, technical details on the other.
And car critics fall much closer to the technical usability
side.
Interior design falls much more towards the aesthetic side.
PROFESSOR: Right.
But interior design, so maybe it's not a line.
Because interior design, interior design critique
is still very far from traditional literary theory.
So maybe it's some kind of weird polygon.
I don't think it's even a triangle.
But yeah, it's a field where he sort of tries
to visualize some of the--
AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah, the seven values.
PROFESSOR: Right, but maybe not necessarily all of them.
I don't think he tries to be comprehensive of what
that space looks like.
But I feel like the paper is still written
as a critique of HCI study.
So that's the one he wants to focus on,
like you guys are missing things when you decide what gets
accepted to Chi, or something.
AUDIENCE: But that's the context of why
he's publishing it, right, is interacting with computers,
in part, is the magazine, or is the journal.
And I'm curious about that other people
that you're describing, because you're
talking about interior design.
I'm thinking there's got to be architectural criticism that's
a fairly well-established field, and the only difference
that I see between what he's arguing in architectural design
is the use of computers in his what he's describing.
We're talking about concrete, and steel, and wood,
and other kinds of materials, but everything else,
architecture is just as interactive as anything
built by interaction.
PROFESSOR: Right.
The outside of academia professional core
of architectural critics is very small.
So I don't think it reaches--
so [INAUDIBLE] said it's only the games that really
have an established core of professional critics outside
of academia.
And I think it means he's thinking
that the architectural critics are [INAUDIBLE]..
AUDIENCE: I mean, that's perfectly fine to argue that it
should be a larger thing.
PROFESSOR: Right.
And I also think that, when we look towards architecture,
we're also seeing this transition where
they try to focus more on experience
and different perspectives, rather than saying
that the quality of the architecture is in the artifact
itself.
It used to be, if you look at architecture education,
the good examples was very much about,
like, this is good because this and this
and this, rather than talking about,
it's good from this perspective, because this and that.
So there is that movement within architectural criticism,
as well, to go, maybe--
I usually have architecture students in the other classes,
and they always giggle when I mention Gary.
Because within architecture, he's seen as kind of a fad,
and we have a big wonky example of that here on campus.
So that sort of focus on the beautiful shapes
and all of that, it's a little old school now in architecture,
and now it's more about, how livable is this,
or how well can you work in that weird bubble.
And it turns out not very well.
AUDIENCE: Just as literary criticism and, no doubt,
interactive design criticism is going
to go through these waves of different styles of criticism,
and they don't invalidate the old ones.
They just add to how we look at the same thing.
PROFESSOR: Right, but they might invalidate decisions
to hire certain architects to do certain flagship
buildings on campus, or something like that.
I don't think that choice would be made--
AUDIENCE: Based on criticism?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, well based on, oh, yeah,
that was maybe cool because the methods were new,
and they're not so new anymore.
So yeah, it's a little bit of that hype thing has done away
from, oh, we can actually have computers design curves
that we couldn't calculate before
if they would be load-bearing.
AUDIENCE: Certainly, at MIT, because we have an architecture
department and architecture faculty,
criticism must influence the choice of architects.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think for one thing, the MIT campus has
a lot more examples of high-profile architectural
buildings than almost any other campus,
because we have such a prominent architecture department,
and through a series of styles that don't necessarily
always fit together.
AUDIENCE: They don't.
A scrapbook.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, it's very much a scrapbook.
Anyway, that's a little bit of a tangent.
So any other thoughts on the Bardzell paper,
before we leave?
We're good?
OK, now let's do keywords for a second.
OK, so I'm tempted to--
we had perspectives in the last paper, and now we have lenses.
So maybe we can start with lenses,
and they can describe what the difference between a lens
and a perspective is.
AUDIENCE: So I specifically said lenses, because perspectives
can mean personal perspectives.
You might have a very different perspective of a game
than I do, because of our personal backgrounds,
and likes, and whatnot.
But the lenses are more, you're viewing this
through a performance-based lens,
you're viewing this through an interaction-based lens,
you're viewing this through the context of a particular thing.
So perspectives can be that, but it can also
be through your self, or through how we use it,
or how certain people might feel.
There's why I specifically said lenses.
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
And I think, yeah, that's spot-on, what they mean,
as well.
It's more like, I, as a person, choose
to put on this lens, a little bit
like you might switch the lens for your camera
for a particular purpose.
OK, so did you have more to say about your word?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
So one of the big things, as he's
talking about in this paper, is how through different lenses,
the same thing can be viewed in very different lights, or very
different ways, or come out very differently in the criticism.
So he has the three different criticism points of Maeve,
and is saying at the end about how,
just because of these lenses, the criticism of either
the interaction, the performance, or the users
comes through differently.
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
I think we should be able to jump to almost any of the words
from there.
Let's maybe do interface first.
AUDIENCE: OK, so one of my favorite sentences
in this article is that form and content, interface
and information are inseparable.
And interface describes how you interact
with the information that's being presented to you,
and can greatly influence how you interpret the information
that is presented to you.
They use, as an example, I think it
was like a Java applet, the word synonym finder,
this visual synonym finder.
I actually have a memory of using this way back
in the day, the early internet days,
of having it in this bubble on the screen.
PROFESSOR: Early world wide web base.
Internet is, you weren't around.
AUDIENCE: No, that's true.
That's what I meant.
Back in the days when dial-up was a thing.
So I remembered that experience, and so that was a--
the way that they frame it is that experience of seeing words
and connection to other words, and how
they relate to each other, and being able to make these hops,
these may small hops, but end up very far away from the word
that you started.
It makes language more fluid, instead of like,
when you read a dictionary, which has basically the same
information-- it contains words and what they mean--
but it's presented in this very logical, strict manner.
And similarly, with this Maeve project,
you can think of it as, oh, you just
have a collection of files on different--
I think it's architectural, this architectural project--
and you could click through the files, or something,
have it on your computer screen.
But now they've turned it into, basically, the users
of the system are performers.
What they choose to view gets presented on a larger screen,
and they also get to see how they're, like the cards
that they choose, relate to things that other users are
choosing.
And this adds like a social element,
a performative element, and greatly changes
the way users can see how each of these different cards
are, like they can actually see more direct comparisons
and [INAUDIBLE].
So yeah, I [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: No, no.
Yeah, that's a pretty powerful idea.
I think that it's not just a quantitative difference
between different interfaces.
Another example would be the physical typewriter
versus a word processor.
It's not just that the word processor makes it easier
or faster to produce text.
We actually write different things.
We think differently because of this word processor
working in a certain way than we used to think
when we had typewriters.
It's somehow changed the world, and not just,
again, quantitatively, but qualitatively.
People understand texts and themselves
differently because of this change of interface.
And this is just an extension of that,
where we can understand another data set completely
differently, depending on how it is, not just presented to us,
but how we are allowed to interact with it.
We will get back a little bit to the idea
of being able to interact with ideas next week,
when we're going to start thinking about how
to disseminate the knowledge that we're
generating in this class.
But I leave that there, for now.
I'm just going to keep going here.
Distinction?
AUDIENCE: That was me.
The article was talking a lot about how, increasingly, we're
splitting form and function, and the ideas, the information
you want to convey to the user and the way
that you do that are considered differently,
and that that's not a good thing.
It's like the idea of using the lenses and the interface,
the stuff we've been talking about, to mix the two,
because it's often more successful.
You want to get the--
I'm just going to use play a game-- you want
to get plot information across to the player,
because it's a story, but you also
want them to have fun while doing it
and interact with the story.
So they were talking about the idea
of performative experiences.
PROFESSOR: That goes very much along the same lines of what
we were talking about, with the interfaces, I think.
Let's keep on going, the information.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
The reason I put that down was also
because of the way the paper said
that interface and information are inseparable.
PROFESSOR: I see you've all caught on to the same idea.
I guess that is the big takeaway from this paper.
And it's all, I think, the same sort of criticism of, maybe,
specifically in software engineering, for reasons
of dealing with complexity, we divided different aspects
of these artifacts into different roles,
and different teams.
And it turns out it's kind of a suboptimization,
because it all has to work in concert,
or it's not going to be successful.
And sort of trying to find a way back
to ideas of the designer and the one actually manufacturing
something being the same person, where
they have full control over all aspects of it, to how can
we have complex development with a lot of people involved,
and still not lose touch of the organic unity of the thing, how
it all relates to each other.
Did performance have anything else
to add that hasn't come up already?
I feel like we're beating this to the ground.
AUDIENCE: More information?
PROFESSOR: Yes.
Yes, if there was something that you felt hasn't been--
AUDIENCE: Well, I guess we didn't
talk about the communication aspect that was in the paper,
about how the user is in the loop of application,
but also now, with like social media,
you're also communicating things to other people.
PROFESSOR: Right.
Yeah.
And performance, did you have something to add?
AUDIENCE: I don't know if I have much more to add.
But I just thought it was really interesting, because I,
or at least when I'm designing, I think of my users
like in a vacuum, kind of.
Or if it's a multiplayer experience,
then I think of them working together,
but I had never thought of someone being performing,
as a user.
And so I just thought that was interesting,
an interesting takeaway for me and my design endeavors.
PROFESSOR: Right.
I don't think it's just pointing towards the importance of user
testing, but also trying to challenge your own assumptions,
as you're having people test your artifact.
Again, the things we create are our babies,
and we tend to sort of cradle them a little hard sometimes,
and we don't want-- we want people to get how
we intended them to be used.
And then we might be less open to seeing where
the users or the participants actually
subvert our intentions, but still
make interesting use of the artifacts,
and that is something that we could actually
benefit from, from allowing and allowing ourselves to see.
And I think just one example was when
I was talking to game designers here in Boston about designing
co-op games, and I was making a case that they often
make a less interesting experience for player 2
than for player 1, I had a guy come up to me afterwards
saying, I've made co-op games for 10 years
and never thought of myself as anything other than player 1.
So if you're making those kinds of experiences,
at least try out the different roles
that you are designing for, and not
make assumptions that, well, the expert
or the highly-skilled person is always
going to be in this role, and that fits me,
so I'm always going to try out that role.
Because when you try out the role of player 2,
you might find that it's much less either fun or interesting
than you intended for it to be, just as one brief example.
AUDIENCE: I also found it really interesting
how they connected performance to social media platforms.
Because that is an interactive experience that isn't a game,
but some people think it's a game.
How many likes do you have?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, it can be gamed, for sure.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, or like World of Warcraft,
where you create this alternate persona, or you put on this,
you perform.
You perform the role of knight elf priest, or whatever,
or you perform the role of a popular figure on Twitter
who talks about puppies, and that sort of thing.
And I hadn't thought of it as performance before,
but it really comes down to that.
And depending on how much community
aspect you have inside of whatever you're developing,
it seems like there's more of a performance aspect.
PROFESSOR: Yeah.
There's a lot of opportunity for designing your own role
or identity online than you have in offline performance.
I mean, we're still performing a certain role
when we're at work versus at home, and so on.
But you have a lot more variables to tweak, I think,
online.
And it's just something that's inherently in you.
It's not something that we have any experience
from before this century.
We just didn't have massively multi experienced
virtual environments, and now we do.
So we're struggling a little bit with how to design for them
and make sense of them, but no one else
is going to do it for us.
So you are the ones to solve these issues.
Congratulations.