On the term "Interactive": A Rant

[Walt Freitag]

To discuss how the interactivity behaves in the different relationships within the game, is a highly meaningful discussion. What sort of demands does the verbal and written interaction place on it's human source? What possibilities for influencing the gameplay is inherent in each of these forms of interactivity? What pitfalls are there? How can we map the various forms of interactivity at play in a single game?

I, for one, is especially interested in the way gamesmiths make their presence felt in the actual game.

I agree that that would be an interesting topic to discuss. However, I think one of us should start a new thread for it.

This thread has had too many topics already. I didn't expect the initial post to get much response. I just wanted to air my point of view on the different uses of "interactive" and explain to Xero why the "gamer" usage is almost diametrically opposite to the "literary criticism" usage. This segued into a resumption of discussion of Xero's VoINT vs. VoIND concept, which I went along with because I thought (and still think) the concept may have some merit if separated from the objections to Xero's specific terminology.

Continuation of that discussion, though, would seem to depend on Doctor Xero answering the question I've now repeated on this thread as well as the parent thread: Is world-building by GM improvisation VoIND or VoINT?

M. J. and Tomas seem to me to be arguing somewhat askance to one another, because M. J. is still addressing a particular facet of Xero's concept while Tomas has declared the VoIND - VoINT distinction to be of no concern to him.

Given the hodgepodge of topics that this thread has turned into (largely my fault), any further discussion of any of these topics -- the meaning of interactivity, the question of what is the text (which already has a separate thread going), Doctor Xero's VoIND-VoINT distinction, or the idea expressed in Tomas's quote above of published material as an agent of the designers/authors/gamesmiths that makes their presence felt at runtime -- would be better served by threads of their own.

- Whalt