July 06, 2004
Crawford on Immersion
"I am surprised at the two comments dismissing menu-driven interfaces as destructive to immersion. While I agree that menu-driven interfaces do interrupt the real-time experience, I question whether real-time experience is a significant consideration. I suspect that some people are expecting interactive storytelling to mimic cinema, which is real-time in nature. But cinema is the only storytelling medium that maintains real-time behavior. Theater has lengthy intermissions, and audiences don't lose the thread of the story. Television has commercials every ten minutes, and while people complain, the success of the medium clearly demonstrates the insignificance of real-time continuity to the success of storytelling. And of course literature is the most discontinuous medium of all - people can interrupt the reading of a book at any time, pop in a bookmark, and come back to the story hours, days, or weeks later.
Cinema was crippled in its early years by expectations that it mimic theater. It took revolutionaries such as D.W.Griffith to break loose from those silly expectations and establish the unique character of that medium. The same will happen with interactive storytelling".
Grand Text Auto » TIDSE 2004 (Part 1)
Posted by sfisher at July 6, 2004 08:41 PMComments
Postponing the real-time experience is not a problem as Theater intermissions, TV commercials, and Bookmarks show. Disrupting the real-time experience by forcing the participant/patron/audience to switch modes and think about some frustrating interface that typically highlights the nature of the medium itself (thus putting a bullet right through that old suspension of disbelief) is the problem. The minute I lose myself in an experience on a PC, Bill makes sure I don't forget who really is in control.
Posted by: Mark at July 7, 2004 12:48 AM
Manovich believes that mutual interruptability is one of the definitive qualities of an interactive medium. Any sense of agency that is provided comes to us through interface, be it typographic or graphic, textual information or spatial.
I was looking at some of the trailers that EA has released for their upcoming game "Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth", the interface is not laminated atop the world in the traditional control panel fashion, but is embedded into the systems space, it's elements, and agents. Given all I could do is watch the demo, the play seemed to be the same as any RTS game; the interface was simply embedded which provided for a more cinematic appearance during camera movements through the game space.
I will be interested to see better integration of interface in the future, but nonetheless interface will always be our gateway to any interactive system.
Posted by: SEDinehart at July 7, 2004 10:25 AM
Mark, your differentiation of "postponing" the real-time experience and "disrupting" it is based on two apparently unrelated factors: switching modes and frustrating experience. To the former, I would suggest that mental mode-switching is an artifact of the novelty of the interactive experience. Just as movie audiences had to learn that a facial closeup did not represent decapitation, so too interactive players quickly learn that agency is part of the experience -- and much the most enjoyable part of the experience!
The matter of the frustrating interface is also a transitory problem, I suspect. Yes, anything from Microsoft is guaranteed to set your teeth on edge. But there are good interface designers out there; I think we can safely assume that interfaces will improve over time, especially once we get adequate speech recognition operational.
Posted by: Chris Crawford at July 7, 2004 01:24 PM
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