In Teractive Dramaturgies

(Ed.) (Ed.) Hagebölling (Ed.) .media.publishing is an application-oriented Heide Hagebölling Heide Hagebölling x series that specializes in the presentation and in the presentation specializes series that as digital and of multimedia as well publication media. print Interactive Dramaturgies 1 New Approaches in Multimedia Content and Design Interactive media allow and at the same time require new forms of dramaturgy. Key Topics Heide Hagebölling develops a new understanding of dramaturgy – so called “Interactive · Interactive Dramaturgies Dramaturgies Interactive Dramaturgy”or “Expanded Dramaturgy”. · Cultural Learning Beyond the traditional concept, Interactive Dramaturgies is focussing on aesthetic, narrative, structural, and communicative elements that develop in interactive situations and multimedia · Museum & Media enviroments. · MediaTecture & Hybrid Spaces A collection of original contributions by internationally renowned multimedia authors, · Gaming & Interaction designers, and artists outline design concepts and strategies.Outstanding case studies and Interactive Film & Television media projects are analyzed, covering a broad range of both applications and genres: culture, · art, and education; museums and exhibitions; film,TV,games, and entertainment; augmented · Web-based Literature & Stories Interactive reality and hybrid environments.Interactive Dramaturgies go beyond the well established · Men-Machine Interaction term of interactive storytelling.They carefully define and create the rules of altered roles and · Interactive Content Design required competences of both authors and users in a new communicational setting.The publication provides designers, authors, artists, theoreticians, media critics, and students interested in interactive media with new approaches and views in multimedia content and design. Dramaturgies “Indispensable to anyone wishing to understand the multi-dimensional complexities and chal- lenges of interactive media at it’s cutting edge, Heide Hagebölling’s book is a brilliant collection of New Approaches in writings from many inspired and inspiring sources.The context of dramaturgy, in which these texts are set, fruitfully elicits propositions and reflections over a wide range of significant issues: Multimedia Content and Design from innovative narrative structures, interactive games, and new approaches to film,TV and theatre, to radical learning strategies, museum design and navigation, creativity in data space, and the central issues of content building.” Prof.Roy Ascott, University of Plymouth; University of California, L.A. ISSN 1612-1449 “This book fills a real need in documenting the rapidly changing landscape of interactive media ISBN 3-540-44206-5 and performance in a broad range of genres and emerging applications. It will be of interest to creators, producers and presenters of new kinds of online and offline interactive artworks.” Dr.Roger Malina, Chairman of the Board Leonardo Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications 9 783540 442066 › springeronline.com 13 127 11. Action, Adventure, Desire Interaction with PC Games Action, AdvenClaus Pias t This paper seeks to understand, classify, and give rather the scene in which the computer and user come historical context to the dramaturgy of different together. Interaction is characterized not only by the kinds of computer games according to the differ- users’ programming of their computers to perform cer- Part V ing interactive possibilities they provide. This results tain actions, but also vice versa, that computers make in three basic types of games: action games, ad- their users into actors of reproducible operational se- venture games, and strategy games. This conclusion quences. Thus Brenda Laurel explicitly and with good 11 is reached and accounted for on the basis of the reason bases her dramaturgy of user interfaces upon science of labor (time-and-motion studies), theatri- a strictly Aristotelian conception of theatre. For Aris- cal and narrative theory, and cybernetics. Time is totle, it is ultimately the circumstance “that there is critical in the interaction in the present in action action rather than reporting” [11.3]. Action is aimed games: they require attentiveness in the production not at “conversation” with the computer, but at “ma- of a temporally optimized series of choices taken nipulation” of complicated, invisible interrelationships from a repertoire of norm-governed actions. Deci- by means of simple, symbolic operations [11.4]. Action sions are critical in the navigation of that which is here simply denotes the handling of databases, the ma- at hand in adventure games: they require optimal nipulation of sets of data. Writing a text like this one judgments in the traversing of the decision-making would at best fall under the Aristotelian category of nodes of a flowchart. Configuration is critical in reporting, which is completely incommensurable with the organization of the possible in strategy games: a computer. To use the appropriate buttons to save it, they require patience in the optimal regulation of format it, or print it represents actions fitting for a com- interdependent values. puter. Interaction does not take place in the windows of word processing, but rather in all that surrounds it. Interactivity and Action This alone may explain the fact that dramaturgic concepts could first arise, and why they could, only in and Ever since Brenda Laurel (who – not coincidentally – along with the epoch of graphic user interfaces. For in was on the staff of the game producer Atari), it has be- the language of computer commands, a totally differ- come common to speak of “computers as theatre” [11.1]. ent kind of mode of writing and action rules, which Programs, such as Macromedia’s Director, which al- could be more easily described in terms of linguis- ready displays the dramaturgic profession in its title, tic pragmatism and, more specifically, in terms of the claim to do away with precisely those theatrical labors speech act theory. To write “KILL” under UNIX would that they pour into their software: actors are clicked mean – to paraphrase Friedrich Kittler’s old example onto a stage, and the productions created this way can – not just to write four letters, but actually to termi- be rehearsed backwards and forwards along a tem- nate something by means of writing. Thus, it cannot poral axis with variable speeds. In such rehearsals, be just a coincidence that in dramaturgically inspired which rush by without requiring any powers of the talk about graphic user interfaces reference is repeat- imagination on the part of their actors, a power of edly made to computer games [11.5]. Computer games definition over “actors” is witnessed that Diderot re- appear as that species of program in which the action- served for the “greatest of writers,” who leave their based side of interactivity is most purely embodied. At characters only the “smallest possible leeway” [11.2]. the same time, however, computer games raise most Of greater significance, however, than what occurs on emphatically the question of what interactivity actu- the screen is what happens in front of it. Laurel’s re- ally is, who or what actually rules the scene, and who flections do not concern the “tube” (the monitor), but or what the subject of such actions is. 128 Part V 11. Action, Adventure, Desire Interactivity could be understood as that interplay a radically new kind of game, since they open up such of man and machine that first became possible by a test field of interplay between man and machine – means of a theoretical space (within which it subse- a cybernetic test field in which the user tests the ma- quently occurs) in which both man and machine could chine and, at the same time, the machine always tests be conceived of together. This is what cybernetics as the user. the “metatechnology” of man and machine claimed As uncertain as the status of word processing (in to achieve, based on the concepts of information and the literal sense) was, it proves just as difficult to de- feedback [11.6]. In the digital computer – the cognitive termine what were the first graphic games [11.9]. It image of cybernetics turned hardware – this interplay could be the demo programs that demonstrated the ca- requires reciprocal presentations. The invisible data pabilities of the computer, it could be the diagnostic have to be staged visually and acoustically for user programs that made demands on all of the functions eyes and ears, and, conversely, the analogue signals of of the computer, or it could be the computer hacks the life-world of the player have to be staged as dis- who “misused” university and military equipment. For Part V crete data for query routines. Thus, at the point of this reason, there have been computer games since one interactivity, the computer appears to man as some- could call them that, in short, since the historical mo- thing human, and man appears to the computer as ment at which they were baptized in product form and 11 something machine-like, or, more specifically – as in “computer game” was stamped on their packaging. The the jargon of innumerable computer pioneers – as an Atari founder Nolan Bushnell – contrary to all hackers’ attached device. Only through such mimicry was it pos- ethics of free source codes – turned his tennis game sible to couple such heterogeneous elements as man PONG into the first computer game that could only and digital computer into a kind of “organic construc- be played, but no longer rewritten. And since it was tion”. Thus what occurs in this form as interactivity is meant for use in bars, waiting rooms, and departure – put rather dramatically – no longer something purely halls, it was also the first game that could be played human. without an opponent, in single-player mode. Above all The user, and more specifically, the (game) player else, though, it had a beginning and an end. It had to would be described in this construction in terms of his have a beginning, in order to allow for the insertion of position in the system.

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