A popular and very useful textbook in Interaction Design defines the field with this diagram: 
As I explain in the Introduction and especially in Chapter 2, Inventing the Medium is not meant to substitute for the body of knowledge mapped above but to complement and recontextualize it, by drawing on disciplinary methods and craft practices that are absent from the HCI/Interaction Design map of the design process.
Here is how I would express it, using the same diagram: Continue reading
The premise of Inventing the Medium is that computation has created a new medium of representation. How do we know when we have discovered a new medium? One answer might be that we know it by the combination of terror and delight that we experience as pioneering practitioners explore the new affordances for human expression.
For cinema there is mythic moment associated with the birth of film, the Lumière Brothers 1895 showing of a film about the everyday occurance of the arrival of a train.
Posted in What is a Medium?
Earlier this semester one of my students showed a Sony Playstation promotional video called Michael in which characters from multiple videogames gather in a bar. A Globe and Mail column describes the scene like this:
“Michael” is a two-minute live-action film featuring characters from more than a dozen games that have appeared on PlayStation platforms. It begins with a pair of Second World War soldiers from Call of Duty parachuting through the night into a forest. The duo make their way through the shadows to a dimly lit pub, where they find PlayStation-exclusive heroes including God of War’s Kratos, Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, and LittleBigPlanet’s Sack Boy mingling with personalities from popular multiplatform franchises including Portal, Assassin’s Creed, and Metal Gear Solid. Continue reading
Posted in Ch 13 Game Model, Interactive Narrative
A recent NPR Interview with my colleague the game designer and theorist Ian Bogost endearingly focused on his frustration at having accidentally made an enjoyable game.
The Facebook game Cow Clicker was meant to parody Zynga's Farmville and expose its inanity and cynical commercialism. Instead it became a hit.
Cow Clicker was meant to parody the wildly successful Facebook game Farmville, exposing its unchallenging and pointless gameplay and its cynical commercialism. But to Bogost’s dismay his intentionally boring game unexpectedly attracted 50,000 users. Stunned out of his customary ironic detachment, Bogost found himself unable to resist the direct “pleasure” of having people play his game. He began to pay attention to what they liked and to fulfill their requests, though he was bothered by their unironic pleasure in the gameplay. In order to reinforce his satiric intent, Bogost tried to subvert the game by charging ridiculous amounts of money for obviously worthless virtual items. To his dismay, people paid and continued to enjoy the game. Eventually he resorted to outright destruction, starting a counter that ended with a satisfyingly absurd “rapture” that left no cows standing, just a little clickable shadow in the pasture: a “cowpocalypse”!
Posted in Ch 13 Game Model
Tagged A Slow Year, Cow Clicker, Farmville, Ian Bogost, Zynga
Janet H. Murray 