Reading Response #6

to Artful Design • Chapter 6: “Game Design”

May-Ann “Gray” Wong

5 November 2023

Music 256A / CS476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Interaction, Active Participation, and Hyper-1st Person

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principle 6.7 and 6.8: “all games require interaction and active participation” and “all games are played in hyper-1st person” (317). All games are played in hyper first person, but what about apps? It feels like apps are played in hyper third person such that any sort of reference to the user as an actual living, breathing, physical creature is stripped; even a default profile picture is abstracted into a cartoon humanoid or sometimes not even a human at all or sometimes not even a face at all. Further, many references to real life physical interactions are often stripped away in interfaces, in comparison to skeuomorphic design of days past. Additionally, some graphics and visuals have become more abstracted into pure icons; semblances of shadows and highlights and anything that does suggest physicality is traded in for a sleeker, one-or-two-color version. Of course, this is not to say that either design school is wrong, but just that I wonder if this sort of a design does have some sort of relation to our lack of intimacy with technology nowadays or if it really is just a visual aesthetic trend of the time.

It’s also interesting to consider this lens when juxtaposed to games; I feel like improvements in technology have allowed for incredibly realistic and incredibly detailed art, and for games to feel “more real” in a way, which is the opposite direction of what I described above for things like apps or websites. It was touched upon in this chapter that games can sometimes make us feel more human, make us reflect on our humanity, and emphasize ways in which we are human, and this is all done within a digital realm, not too unlike that of a phone or laptop or other device. If this kind of real-life fidelity and reflection and interaction was brought back to non-gaming things of digital nature, I wonder how that would affect our usage, enjoyment, and relationship with technology?

Of course, games also have reasons for why they affect us so and why they are so good at it, compared to something non-personal like an app. But continuing this line of thinking, I wonder if this also speaks to the fact that a lot of apps now, in contrast to Principle 6.7, heavily encourage passive participation and minimal interaction. something like swiping is bare minimal effort, and especially paired with autoplay and endless scroll, it feels that technology is working to actively dissociate a person from its wants, labor, and physicality by encouraging an entirely digital self embedded within the internet and its various networks of social (or maybe even nonsocial) media. I definitely covered this in last week’s reading, but it really is a question that’s been bouncing around in my brain ever since engaging with this class, and I’m grateful that this strange sort of obsessive question has been taking up so much of my thoughts and dialogue.