Dan, On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:37 AM, Dan Saffer <d...@odannyboy.com> wrote: > Everything from chess to football to poker. But there is a lot of > interactivity.
The things that differentiate chess from (say) a pile of random pieces of wood on a table is _precisely_ its information structures. Chess has a clear taxonomy (the different pieces, the colors, the layout of the board) and rules that define how those taxonomies interact. What makes chess in any way interesting is how the relationships between the items in that taxonomy vary throughout the game. I could go as far as saying that chess is primarily about information structures in a state of flux with each other. The interactive elements of chess, on the other hand, are not core to its "chessyness". This is illustrated by the fact that chess can be played with wooden pieces on a board, by correspondence on paper, by email, blindfolded, using a console terminal, by two computers playing each other using binary numbers, etc. (The same is true to football and poker, to a lesser degree.) I'm not saying chess is _only_ information architecture; I don't particularly enjoy the game without its "tangible" UI (try playing http://www.craftychess.com/ using a terminal). But to say there is no IA there belies an incredibly closed-ended view of IA. > If you take a digital game like Simon > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)> and interactive displays like > Rosen's wooden mirror <http://www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html> > there is no information architecture involved at all because there is no > content to find or navigate through. I agree with your stance re: Rosen's wooden mirror, but that's hardly a game, is it? Simon, on the other hand, does have clear (if very simple) information structures. As with chess, they are what makes Simon different from a plastic cylinder with randomly blinking lights: there are only four colors (and not 19,202, for example), there are only four sounds, and there is a one-to-one relationship between these colors, sounds, and the buttons that the user interacts with. The rules of the game are also information: the fact that the sounds/lights are emitted in a random sequential order, and that said order is revealed incrementally one at a time. Someone designed these information structures for Simon. These are architectural decisions, and they deal with information being conveyed to the player. Information. Architecture. However, Simon -- unlike chess -- _is_ highly dependent on its interaction design. I would not be amused at all by Simon if I was playing it on paper, or on my computer screen. The "behavioral" aspects of the game are what make it successful. My point: all these things have IxD and IA. I don't know of anything that doesn't to a degree or another. Even if we agree that IA is about organizing data/information, that is still a pretty big and pervasive area of concern! Cheers, ~ Jorge ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
