Magic Crayons and Artificial Media
I’ve been rather enamored by Chaim Gingold’s thesis “Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces & Words“. For starters, reading about the “magic of miniature worlds” instantly made me think of the wonderful modern-fairytale-in-a-snow-globe work of one Thomas Doyal.
Among other things, Gingold talks about several modes of authorship and participation in the video games. He goes on to explain how each group creates miniature worlds of decreasing numbers of potentials, but of potentials of higher value. Particularly in the programmer author spectrum, each is creating what Gingold terms a “magic crayon” which other participants can use to construct more restricted but more valuable crayons; programmers using a language like C can create an exceptional amount of potential constructs, very few of which have any value at all. An “author” (a level designer for example) using a set of tools created by a programmer has limitations on what they can create, but these creations can be more compelling, particularly for authors further down the chain.
Analogous to this, but reversed, is software that provides immediate access to interesting but limited elements, but also allows access to the structure of those elements, and the structure of those elements and so forth. Gingold uses Hypercard (which I’ve never had the opportunity to use) and Director (which had superseded Hypercard by the time I was introduced to interactive design) as an examples.
So far as games go, Will Wright examples are repeatedly used. From Sim Ant to Sim City, each game built out of a magic crayon for drawing towns or ant colonies. (As a personal example, Battletech, which I write about over at flechs.net, has always been loved for its customization rules wherein the stats of game units can be modified are completely recreated using a more complex sub-structure of the base game.)
Sections of Gringold’s thesis would have been a great source for my paper “Games as Artificial Media” where I explore some of these same themes. In the paper I argue that game designers make artifacts whose function is to be used in the creation of other, very specific, artifacts. Furthermore I look at how interpretation is or can be analogous to utilizing the “artificial medium” (“magic crayon” in Gingold terms) provided by an artist.
In the end it’s comforting to think that tool creation doesn’t have to be utilitarian and limited to defining existing tasks and building upon pre-formed mental-models; that creating tools can have, as an end goal, the potential to let a user to explore new models and accomplish tasks they might never have otherwise had access to or envisioned.
One concern with trying to sort out a fundamentals of interactive design is the potential of tripping into or retreading the cognitive ergonomics arena of HCI and IxD. As such I’m aiming to look for more of an aesthetics of cognition. Something that designers can utilize for communication, not just task based utility. 