I know, I know. I should have read this article by Greg Costikyan long time ago. Useful. Quote (to go in my interaction definition catalogue):
"Decision Making. I offer this tem in an effort to destroy the inane, and overhyped, word "interactive". The future we are told, will be interactive. You might as well say, "The future will be fnurglewitz." It would be about as enlightening.

Definitely, in a broad sense, all interaction is about making decisions, or choices. (what is the difference here, I wonder, btw decision and choice?). Here it seems, decision making is closely related to the wish for a certain effect ("If I go though this door, I might complete this level" - "if I move this piece, I will make space for that piece" etc). But still there are "forms of interaction" (for lack of better phrasing) like social interaction, where decision-making is not very important or concrete effects are not pertinent. Though it involves decision making ("what to say now?"), rather, social interaction is about creating an impression, maintaining dialogue until you either know what you need to know or have the excuse to get away from conversation (so you also make a decision on when to stop social interaction....sometimes. We all know people who are very good at forcing you to stay in conversation with them, though you would rather not. But social norms prevent you from actually following up on your decision to leave the scene.). That is, social interaction is a performative act, whose final effect or outcome does not solely rest on the conscious choices you make but on a whole conglomerate of other factors which effects the situation during which the social interaction takes place: the objectives of those you interact with, the non-verbal language you use, the institutional context, the concrete setting of the performance etc. So if you are in a game with multiple users, perhaps it is not all about decision making, but also about "interaction" after all. That is, if you reserve interaction to be used only in connection with the word social. So far Im heavily in need of a terminology which could replace "social interaction", but I havent found it yet so till then I will stick to using the word interaction in this connection. Hmmh, this line of thought might be very foggy, but Im still grappling with these issues, ideas. How does one define what goes on in a virtual world, when I think what "happens" is neither a game, nor a story??
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:12