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Constraint is Design: Katherine Isbister and Nicole Lazzaro on Intimate Relations
KI: Our lab just got a grant for a motion capture system to study interpersonal gestural dynamics and I’m really hoping we can feed that back into these sort of designs. I’ve got a lot of NSF grants going towards that kind of research. Once motion capture gets to an affordable level we’re hoping we can have these dynamics boiled down to a computable level and literally create gestural interfaces. NI: And I think Katherine, there’s more you could say about the psychology of touch. KI: Well it depends on what the touch is, holding hands can mean different things in different cultures, that’s a really sensitive issue. We saw that in our workshop, we told everyone that a $100 bill was hidden on someone and people were afraid to touch each other because of the boundary we typically have between other people. It turned out it was in my back pocket. I think everyone has that hesitation, but if you can get people to do something a little risky they automatically bond and their intimacy level goes up. GS: And really any kind of multiplayer game is about that. KI: Yeah, what’s so amazing about rhythm games is that getting in synchrony with people is typically what we’re trying to do socially, and multiplayer rhythm games really allow you to do that. You step into this space and get in synch and instantly you’re more intimate with that person because you’ve gotten your whole physical self in synch with them. You’ll see that people who are close have the same gestures, it’s just something that happens naturally.
GS: Nicole classifies fun into four types. There’s “Hard Fun,” like in a first-person shooter, where you frag all the monsters and have three health left, there’s “Easy Fun,” like Katamari [Damacy] where you’ve got that time limit but its pretty relaxed, there’s “Serious Fun,” which is like a rhythm game or a simulation, and then there’s “People Fun.” The examples you gave, Nicole, pointed at multiplayer games and guilds and so on, but I’m interested in interactive drama, making the mechanics be the characters and their social dynamics. I’d like to hear what you think about that, in terms of implementation.
It’s a hard problem but not an unsolvable one, I don’t think that there are “cyborgs” and “real people” and we’re clearly labeling them in our brains. They’re the same to the extend that we make that character. GS: So you don’t need human-level AI to do human-level interaction? KI: I’m much more for that Hollywood approach; the back of the set doesn’t look so great, it doesn’t matter, its about controlling the unfolding of the experience. I think that is the hard part of designing interactive experiences, it’s a question of “how do I make the reactivity of these characters feel authentic within the bounds of the experience I’m creating.” That’s a new part of the art form. It’s kind of a trial and error, tricky thing, you can’t see what you have until you prototype it. And you have to make the interface pretty enough that people perceive those characters as believable and are able to tell that what they’re doing is effective.
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Features
KI: The guy I got my PhD under has a book called The Media Equation (right). He makes the argument, based on a series of studies, that you can’t help but treat technology that acts social as if it were real people. I really believe that to be true. When you start creating these characters in a dramatic world, you’re using the same social senses to interact with them as you would a person – that’s the place we have to begin from.|
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