Towards a Working Definition of Interactivity

A general theme of my dissertation focuses on literary concepts of interactivity. Literary is probably too specific a term, as my interests range from pop-up books, to novels, to electronic texts, to computer games. And while my central training is textually based, I am also distinctly concerned with the image – and thus image-text interrelationships. For a while, despite a general enthusiasm for ‘multimedia,’ some literary criticism (or, criticism from traditionally literature-based institutions – especially that centered on ‘hypertext’) approached media less like ‘multi’ and more like ‘text.’ This resulted is less than adequate attention being paid to the image-as-image.

This is, I think, one reason for the continuing narratologist-ludologist debate, whereby the latter rightly want to insure that each media object is approached on its own terms. And, likewise, why considering issue of materiality strikes me as an important methodological approach (again, drawing on a long history, which I have discussed before). One of the few drawbacks in Espen Aarseth’s otherwise wonderful book Cybertext is a less than adequate accounting of the image in a set of predominately textual examples of adventure games and electronic texts. This is, incidentally, why I think he makes the comment that Myst, to him, is dull. Predominately empty of text, Myst relies on images and video while it simultaneously reaffirms the materiality of the page itself. What Aarseth sees as textually (and interactively?) dull, I see as media rich (especially considering its historical contemporaries). [aside: I will give the exact reference later, as I seem to be unable to find the book in the large pile on my desk]

In Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, Paul Dourish introduces his book with a history of interaction in programming. He tracks a shift from “a step-by-step model of procedural execution … [to] a new conceptualization of computational phenomena that places the emphasis not on procedures but on interaction” (4, italics his). He further writes:

While I have often made the comment that the concept of “interactive” has taken such a broad meaning in our culture that it has ceased to mean much at all (often, people say they want an ‘interactive’ something, which is to say, “something that is not boring, and that sells my product”). I’m fascinated in our desire for the interactive, in historical and contemporary attempts to broaden the sweep and the depth of the page and screen. There are, of course, several methodological approaches that have historically taken a broader view of, say, books than just text on a page – the field of textual studies is ripe with such work. As I push towards my “working definition” of interactivity, I will continue to draw on such examples and methodologies, where assembled media components – text, the physical properties of page or screen, images, programming languages, software packages, and so on – not only function as recognizable entities, but also as interconnected (and thus inseparable) aspects of a working media ecology.