todd

Erkki Huhtamo Lecture & more

Today's talk still just scratched the surface of some very interesting subjects. History has always been an important (and rather interesting) aspect for me, and I'm glad Erkki looked at a lot of work done before the seventies. While a lot has changed in the last few decades, a lot of it was either anticipated or done before. There's a lot that people don't know about their past...for centuries, locals living around the Parthenon could not tell you why it was originally built.

Somewhere between "It's all been done" and "It's a new era unlike any before" exists a view of the past more interesting than these two blanket statements combined. Innovation does not occur in a vaccuum, and reincarnated inventions (stereoscopic photos, say) were undoubtedly different in each of their lives. Why things were different, as well as how they were the same, invite study and often provide amusing answers.

Looking into the roots of modern interactivity, specifically games, has been a topic of research for me. Video games today still owe a lot of their characteristics to the old arcades that go back to the last turn of the century. The disorder of seeking constant stimulation that was described, coinciding with the rise of assembly-line occupations, also caught my interest. "Automatic Amusements" with all of its implications, perhaps sums up many of the themes in that section of the talk.

Finally, I've been thinking about the "levels of interactivity": Interruption, Selection, and Creative Conversation. I've been known to say that the reason why so many games are violent is that it's easier to make an artificial character attack you than to talk to you. Computers still can't handle language that easily, and when they do, it's usually through a fair amount of trickery. Trickery that begins to question how creative most human conversation is.

However, if we expand "conversation" to mean "an extended, complex mode of feedback", the issue may start to get easier. Extended, open ended simulations could arguably be conversations, giving outputs that result in very unforseen consequences.

I'm wondering if one could compose an environment-the computers method of communication, if you will-the user doesn't so much "talk" to the machine, but converses through their actions within the environment. This has been done to an extent in a few places, again usually with simulation in mind. The sim games use it as part of a game mechanic, and toylike educational software could also be said to have this dynamic.

At any rate, this "creative conversation" idea will be something to think about as I look more into self-building environments. Complex methods of interacting with a virtual space, beyond solving a contrived puzzle, slaughtering its inhabitants, or "winning", might be the decent precursor to conversing with a machine. In terms of conversation, actions, even virtual actions, can still speak louder than words.