Preface

In the early 1980s while I was still at Atari Research, I began talking with Alan Kay and Don Norman about a particular idée fixe: the notion that when people were using computers they were interacting in representational worlds, much more like plays in which they were characters than computers on which they ran programs. What a funny idea—at once both obvious and strange. The idea got its hooks into me. At first, I wanted to develop an approach to creating games that might imbue “the system” with enough intelligence about dramatic theory and structure to generate dramatically interesting “next actions.” That was what I was trying to think about in my PhD dissertation.

Through a painful process of learning what I could about artificial intelligence, I arrived at an expert system as the correct approach. It took me a couple of years (and the experience of working with Joe Bates’ Oz project at Carnegie Mellon) to disabuse myself of that notion. At issue, I decided, was not only programming method, but also a perspective about how interaction is framed, and it relied on a solid understanding of dramatic structure and theory in the process of interaction design.

I wrote Computers as Theatre in 1989–1990 to put my hypotheses to the tests of persuasion, articulation, and application to the then-contemporary landscape of interactive media. My examples were drawn primarily from single-player games, “productivity” software like word processors and spreadsheets, and the operating environment of the shiny new Macintosh computer. My sources were in many cases bright young scholars and designers who are elders in the field today.

Looking back at the original text, I’ve been embarrassed by how outdated many of my assumptions and examples seem today. But I was also surprised by those things that remain relevant—the notion of dramatic interaction and the interplay between structure and experience. Many of my original sources are still vibrant, amazing scholars and designers. Even some of the examples are still germane; there are still word processors (or “document creation programs”) and spreadsheets. There are still single-player games. And traces of the Desktop still bleed through many contemporary operating environments; even smartphones show vestiges of the ancient desktop metaphor.

But how much has changed! Then, I was a young PhD with a need to prove myself. Now, I can see retirement just around the corner. Then, I had two very young daughters. Now, I am a grandmother. Then, I was an entry-level producer and researcher; now, I’ve started three companies, spent the better part of a decade at Interval Research, and founded two graduate programs in design. Then, there were damned few women kicking butt in the field; now, there are young superstars like danah boyd,¹ Mary Flanagan, Amy Bruckman, Justine Cassell, Celia Pearce, Emma Westecott, and many, many more. Then, there was no World Wide Web, no Internet access for the common folk, no recognizable social networks, no “consumer-grade” mobile phones, no embedded sensors. Now, there are massively multiplayer online games, sophisticated collaborative work environments, subversive games, and distributed sensing. New science generates fundamentally new understandings about how brain, mind, and biology can inform our work. When I revise this book again . . . well—let me not get ahead of myself.

1. No, she doesn’t capitalize her name.

If you have read the first edition of this book, thank you. Be patient. The emphasis on dramatic fundamentals in the early chapters will look familiar. I promise we will take that understanding in some new directions. You will see some of the old examples, but now they are set alongside new ones and contextualized as part of a broader historical traverse. You will see lots of sidebars with lots of stories in them, old and new. And you will see some new ideas from the present that may change the future. Please enjoy.