My favorite interaction that I remember fondly of is Tamagotchi. Below is a picture of it.

I remember as a kid playing with it a lot. The reason why it felt so special was because it felt like I had a real pet. The interaction that you had with the device is somewhat similar to interacting with a puppy. Moreover, as you take care of the little tamagotchi character, it evolved or even grew up.

Most of the toys that I was introduced to as a kid did not have such factor to it. It was fun to play with it for a while, but there were limited things you could do with them. However, this little device had several different options. You could help it exercise, eat, clean, and even find a friend with someone else’s tamagotchi. This was definitely my favorite interactive experience.

My favorite interaction in life is board games. The way they are made is so simple but there are rules that you have to follow. An example would be a game called “Munchkin”. The game is a tiny version of “Dungeons and Dragons”. The goal of the game is to reach lvl10 (or lvl20 in expansions).

The game is simple and complicated at the same time. You interact with it using a rolling dice and some coins and of course the cards.

There was this quite popular game that came out in 2009 for the playstation called EyePet that my sisters and I used to play a lot. Its a different game from what we usually play in first shooter games, and there is no specific linear story. You must set up the camera in the beginning, and start the game, then a reflection of where you are sitting gets displayed on the screen.

An egg pops up and where interaction with the virtual pet begins and you are able to caress the egg till it hatches and meet your new pet.

The game has a variety of options and different interactions the player (or players) and the pet can do. I don’t usually like these types of games, but for some reason the make up of the virtual pet was very well done, and it also includes facial expressions and reactions to things add to the realistic feeling it has when playing.

This was the first interactive film that I know of, designed to be streamed alone or in a small group of people; such an experience could not have the same effect watched in a theater in a big crowd as you wouldn’t feel complicit in the choices you made with the presence of other people. The film is reminiscent of a hypertext novel, in which your decisions fork various paths. There are evidently one trillion different ways your individual film experience can go.

There isn’t too much time in between making a decision that it becomes a typical movie, but it isn’t short enough that there is no room for storytelling through the medium of film. In other ways, the speed of interaction feels just right. There is also a progression to the interactions…with each subsequent decision being more high-stakes. The player is eased into the decisions, which coupled with having enough time for the arc of character development, creates more emotional investment into the outcome they receive. If they reach a dead end, the viewer can go back in time as the whole story is about multiple threads of time and whether one is more real than the other. However, the story becomes altered just as they do. Being able to go back to the last point before it all went wrong furthers emotional investment in the interaction as the viewer becomes struck with the desire to see many, if not all, possible endings–there are evidently five possible main endings for the film, so that is a good number that it is possible to see all five in about two hours, the average length of a feature film. Each decision that the viewer makes has only two possible immediate choices, making it relatively simple for the viewer comprehend what is required for them to interact. If the film was convoluted with the ability to make a decision from even three or four or eight choices, the viewer would probably get exasperated and stop watching or make a random decision reducing the emotional investment in the decisions made.

What I loved most was that the film was really about the appearance of interaction. Though the viewer was empowered to make decisions in the course of the film, they come to the conclusion that they only have the appearance of free will, a realization whose development parallels that of the protagonist. The protagonist similarly realizes that his decisions are being controlled by none other than the viewer. Perhaps, appearance of interaction is phrasing it wrong. Because it is certainly interaction given the media’s various reactions to the choice the viewer makes. Rather, it is that your interaction appears to have consequences but you soon realize the futility of making decisions. The film also raises the theme about whether it is only through insanity that one can realize their true creative potential. From the first decision of what cereal to eat versus one of the last decisions of whether to kill your father or not, Bandersnatch is an engaging interaction. It received much criticism from Black Mirror fans and others who declared that the endings weren’t personalized enough. That is probably well-warranted if you look at it from a critical lens as a film, but as a medium, it raised so many questions about how an interaction is designed to give you the appearance of free will…with other forms of media, the artist usually has an intended interaction for the viewer; there is a specificity to the interaction. It also makes the viewer wonder whether this will change the way that we watch on our screens and the dangers that may come from that in terms of what data is collected from us…when we interact with something, is our interaction a form of input? What could be gleaned by it? And by who?

This past winter break, I visited Marpi’s New Nature exhibition at ARTECHOUSE DC, an art gallery that focuses on immersive interactive art pieces.

The part of this particular exhibit that I really liked was a room full of screens, each screen containing a “creature” you could interact with by waving your hand over a motion sensor. The sensor would track your hand, which you could see displayed on the screen with a small hand symbol, the movement of which would get different reactions out of the creature. These also all implemented AI, so the creatures adapted how they reacted to the interactions. Essentially, the way it was explained, the reactions we were getting from the creatures were not the same as say, the reactions the very first exhibition visitors received from the creatures. This video I took during my visit shows just one of the many creatures you could interact with:

I really liked this interaction for many reasons. First, I think the music, lighting, and graphics all complemented each other nicely. The music was very calming yet futuristic in a way, and kind of inspired curiosity. Second, the interaction was very easy to understand. The user’s hand makes a digital hand appear on the screen, which gets an immediate reaction from the creature – it is all very intuitive. Third, it was fun to play with all the creatures in different ways. They were each designed differently – this one just happened to have many balls that would bounce in different ways. I also really liked the use of AI because it made the creatures more “real,” in a sense. They learned, just like real living things do. There was one creature, however, whose sensor didn’t seem to be working properly so the digital hand wouldn’t move the way you wanted it to. However, looking back on it, this could have been on purpose.

I thought chatbots were pretty old and outdated until I *met* Mitsuku last semester as part of another IM class. It was really interesting that this chatbot was in a human form. The homepage states that she’s a “four-time winner of the Loebner Prize turing test, so I gave her a try – or rather, a lot of tries because she actually turned out to be interesting!

Mitsuku’s answers may not always be fitting, but she has a lot of different answers on stock. I find it interesting that this chatbot almost gives an impression of a real person, which makes the conversation more exciting and interesting, regardless of whether the whole content makes sense or not. It’s interesting because you wouldn’t expect such complicated, sophisticated answers from the computer that just isn’t human.

I read a paper a while back that talks about how believable these chatbots have become. Some people have actually started treating these chatbots as their real counselors because of certain traits that they possess. For example, chatbots often repeat some phrases of the sentence that you write, which is what counselors and psychologists often do to turn the conversation’s focus back to the patient/speaker. The preset algorithm makes these chatbots particularly successful in giving the impression that they possess human qualities. I find this human-machine interaction very fascinating and see a lot of potential in developing this field.

Screenshots from my conversation with Mitsuku

DANGER:  SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

“People think there’s one reality, but there’s loads of em all snaking off like roots, and what we do on one path affects what happens on other paths. Time is a construct.”

Bandersnatch is a 2018 Netflix sci fi/ horror film that is a part of the fantastic Black Mirror series. Though it is a film it is also a choose your own adventure game. You, the viewer, make certain decisions for Stefan, the protagonist, starting with what kind of cereal he should have for breakfast.

Stefan is a young game developer from the 80s, creating a choose your own adventure based video game himself that he has titled ‘Bandersnatch’ after the book it was based on. Colin, another game developer and a hero of Stefan’s reveals to him that his own life is like a choose your own adventure game, his fate decided by the smallest of decisions.

What makes the interaction in Bandersnatch so brilliant is that it is entirely self aware. You, the viewer on Netflix is a part of the story as the one who is pulling the strings on the protagonist. As Stefan ruminates on Colin’s words, he becomes aware of you, the viewer’s presence and role in his fate as he realizes he no longer has control over his decisions. This is most convincing in the moment in which he actively resists the decision picked by the viewer. The moment of resistance to it draws attention to the own player’s agency, something that we tend to take for granted when playing games.

Bandersnatch’s drawing of the viewer’s agency as the player into the narrative is one of the most effective breaks of the fourth wall I have experienced.

“There’s a cosmic flowchart that dictates where you can and where you can’t go. I’ve given you the knowledge, I’ve set you free.”

The game One Night Ultimate Werewolf has its players bluffing and lying in order to win ( sort of like mafia).

At the beginning of the game each player is given a card. One or more players are werewolves and the rest are villagers. Each villager has an action that they perform during the ‘night’.

As soon as each player knows what they are, all players must close their eyes, only opening them to perform an action as instructed by the voice on the accompanying app during the ‘night’. Cards are stolen, swapped and spied on and when every action has been performed all the players ‘wake up’.

Now the real game begins. The players have 5 minutes to figure out who the werewolves among them are in order to vote on who to ‘kill’. The main interaction consists of discussion amongst the players as to who is trustworthy and whose story checks out. This stage can get pretty raucous and tense. But you never really know anyone’s true identity until after the voting and the cards are revealed.

Five whole minutes of the game are spent with the players talking it out. What I love about this game is how it has everyone in suspicion of each other which underlies the whole process of the interactions between them. Players band together, try to decide who to trust, bluff (double bluff and triple bluff), test other players to see if their story checks out, trick each other into revealing important information, look for inconsistencies in each other’s stories, double cross each other etc. Not everyone is who they claim to be and you decide who you can trust.

Here is an example of a game…

I really like the interaction between a cat-lover (human) and a cat because when such a person sees a cat, a giant smile instantaneously appears on the person’s face regardless of how the person has been feeling. The cat-lover goes up to the cat and begins patting the cat. Depending on how amiable the cat is, the cat either lets the person pat him/her or simply run away. I’ve seen my cat-lover friends talk to cats as if they are talking to a baby. They would talk nicely in a very high-pitched voice and place their face close to the cat. Although I do like cats, I am not a fan of petting wild cats, and so watching the cat-lovers interact in a way they do with the cats are amusing.