Question: I just wanted to ask ... I didn't quite get "Dogmatic." I found it
entertaining, but I wanted to climb inside of it or something, There was
something, I'm not quite sure what you're objective was with it.
Answer: The research objective in that case was to make an interactive story
which offered apparent freedom to the viewer, who acts in first person, but
which was controlled by a story engine. The story was constructed using
principles of narrative guidance. The experience incorporated various image,
sound, scene and act dynamics to insure that the story adjusted itself to the
behavior of the viewer. There were elements -- the character of the dog, the
music, the cuts -- which were rendered dynamically during the experience. As
the viewer, you sense that the dog is an autonomous character, that he is
responding to you. This piece was created in 1994-5, so what you're seeing is
already in the literature; however, it conveys a moment when we have created a
subtlety which goes beyond a hard-wired experience. What is the nature of
storytelling when your characters and your editor are dynamic programs?
Question: I was just wondering if you could ... what are your views of
Michael's opening comments that interactive media may not necessarily need a
story in the same way that a game of pool doesn't.
Answer: Right. A lot of people talk about that. I think we constantly make
stories all the time in our minds. I would say even a game of pool is a
story. The story is associated with how we work within rules and arrive at a
goal. A game of pool is not a story in the traditional Aristotelian sense,
which "Dogmatic" is. The story I make up when I am in a pool hall has to do
with the people as people and players and their interactions as well as the way
in which my knowledge of geometry and calculus create expectations; in short, I
have a goal in mind, and there is an obstacle to that goal. My sense is that
almost everything we do -- having a conversation, dreaming, playing a sport --
are handled by the human mind as story, even though they are not traditional
Aristotelian, conflict-resolution scenarios. Sports does, of course, present a
conflict-resolution scenario. And then, there is always the "psychological
game" aspects, which the participants enact around the table. Michael and I
can perhaps argue that one out later.
Question: With "Dogmatic," I'm interested with the future development, what
was happening with the physical environment. So, for example, I don't like
mice, I'm really getting fed up with the mouse. So could you have a steering
wheel, to direct the dog, like drive around. And, could other people sit there
with another steering wheel or engine. So the dog is moving with you with a
steering wheel and then someone else is... say, three or four other people
interacting, moving the other characters within that space.
Answer: So what you're asking, is it extensible to multiple players? We are
really working on the coding scenario and what the story engine has to do. So
I think the story engine will be extensible, but let me actually give you
another example of an interactive piece that I think is really marvelous, which
is done by the same person in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
In that particular scenario people can go down an aisle -- there are processing
stations. -- and get their face photographed. They can process their face in
various different ways and the faces go into the network. The aisle leads you
to a room in which a single audience member can sit and peer into a world using
a Fake-Space boom. Two people participate on either side by changing the time
of day and the ambient sound of the passage through the virtual world.
Occasionally, the people's faces that have been captured and are in the network
fly into the virtual reality space and go "blop" onto a building or onto the
landscape. I think that there are many ways of extending the sort of idea, the
question is how much flexibility do you have to have in the experience itself,
how much flexibility do you have for shortening or for lengthening it. That's
what we were looking at. It's a fairly complex set of programs that runs
that.
Question: I have three questions about a person you were talking about named
Piaget. Who is Piaget, what has he written, and how do you spell Piaget.
Answer: The last one's easy -- "P-i-a-g-e-t." His first name is Jean, and I
apologize for not establishing the context. Jean Piaget was a psychologist in
Switzerland working from the 1920s onward into the 1950s and 1960s. Basically,
he studied how children learn and he proposed the first taxonomy of child
development. When does a child come to understand the abstract concept of
volume, for example? Or that volumes of different shapes represent can
represent the same amount of material. He made up a famous set of pouring
experiments where you have water in a tall container and in a short squat
container and the child talks tells the researcher whether or not the volumes
are the same. Piaget also observed children at play and described their
game-playing activities. Seymour Papert, who founded the Learning and
Epistemology group in our Lab, worked with Piaget in Switzerland in the
1960's.
Question: I want to ask you about something you said fairly quickly, about "we
discovered that there was an electrical charge that went through the body, and
we could turn pages." You seemed to be talking about that in terms of that
physical environment with the whale and I wondered if you'd worked with that in
terms of avoiding the mouse in the computer environment and using touch.
Answer: What it provides us with is a way of talking to a sensor. In our
theatrical space, for example, we used several different kinds of sensors to
detect the Explorer; we used sensors on the floor or sensors on the walls or an
IR beam that you crossed. This allows you to actually ... the system would
know whether I was approaching the person on this side of that first row or
whether I was approaching Cathy over at the other side of that first row. So,
if you had two sensors here, they could measure my proximity and the direction
of my motion within the limits of the sensing field. It is a small discovery
which can have very profound implications for how we will interact with
computers in the future.
Question: I'm Ted Clark from the Australian Teachers of Media. I was very
interested in the thing that you were calling "Thinkies" and how they would
work. You said that they were transportable across to other educational areas.
How do "Thinkies" actually work?
Answer: "Thinkies" are stories which situate the audience in a "head space."
When you buy into in a "Thinkie," you accept the fact that you will be
manipulated by the author in a particular way. You also know that when you
walk into a movie... it is an issue of expectation. When you walk into a
movie, if you've read the reviews, or talked with friends, you have some prior
knowledge about how you are going to be manipulated. In this case, we do it
more... you have more conscious activity within that manipulation. In a
"Thinkie," we could probably get you to understand what it is like to have some
kind of brain damage, for instance. To do this, we have to create an
environment where you live in that character's world. This might be very
important if you are going to work with people who have different kinds of
disabilities. You know, there's a lot or work right now with hyperactive
children. I think one of the big problems, and it's sort of talked about a
little bit but it's not really talked about, is that most adults don't
understand hyperactivity from an inward perspective. Equally, we could take
the rain forest as a subjective discovery and make you try to think like a
botanist. How does a botanist go into the rain forest, what is their thinking
process? Not just what they think about what they collect, but what is their
awareness of the environment. Now, the rain forest is interesting because
there is a lot of sensual knowledge that you gain in visiting a rain forest.
You are probably very aware of humidity; right now with a computer, we can't
totally make you aware of that, but we can give you some ways of measuring
that. I think that we're working toward are participatory environments that
have much more soul because they have more sensory capacity. The "Thinkie" is
built around a problem domain... what problem is the botanist really trying to
solve? What are they really looking at, and how could you think a little bit
more like they are thinking? So, that's what we're trying to do.
Question: David Jobling, I teach Interactivity at the New South Wales
Writer's Centre. Since you mentioned Piaget, I thought it might be worth
bringing up transactional analysis dynamic as well as Wolfenberg normalization
techniques in occupational therapy, because I think that there's a lot of
things that are derived from Piaget's early work, as well as of a newer
dynamics in communication that have been mapped out very clearly in those
theories. Do you know them?
Answer: Yes, I agree. That's a little bit ... you can go ahead if you want to
say a couple of words about them, but I think certainly Piaget has had an
enormous impact; he's a very important thinker to this whole area. One of the
things that I think Michael also talked about is getting to know who some of
these thinkers are. That allows us to generate new ideas...
Questioner: Indeed, indeed, which is why I thought I should throw a couple of
other names into the stew like Wolfenberg (?) and transactional analysis.
Question: My name's Peter. You mentioned the speed of feedback loops. The
Logo project seemed to have a very long feedback loop of some five days. Have
you done much research into how this effects interactivity, like, the length of
the actual feedback loop.
Answer: Actually, the loop is not five days, the speed of the loop is however
fast your asynchronous mail flies across the network, because we might have
somebody in Australia playing with somebody in Boston playing with somebody in
San Francisco or somebody in South America. Your effect on the system in
"Lurker" is, I would say, minimal. Your effect on the main story line is
minimal. Your effect on other players in the system is maximal. So, you can
actually really help another player solve some of the puzzles that are
difficult for them if you're interested in getting into that kind of exchange
dynamic with them. It's not perfect. The feedback loop actually occurs every
time we ship e-mail to you, and every time you ship an e-mail back in; the
potential exists for exchange. I think there are a lot of problems with
"Lurker," by the way, I don't want to make light of that, but they're probably
too difficult to get into here and maybe that would be a good offline
conversation.
