The Art of Interactive Design offered me deep insights into the world of interactivity. Before reading this text, I had never stopped to think about the definition of interactivity or the steps necessary to consider something interactive, even though it is a core idea of computing. Nonetheless, I have found that the text managed to put into words almost all of my beliefs on the topic, and even the aspects that I do not agree with ended up intriguing me. For instance, the author argues that movies are not interactive because they fail to utilize two principles of interactivity: thinking and listening. He goes even further by saying that we should “appreciate them for what they are good at instead of press-ganging them into something they’re terrible at”. I found this passage to be interesting because nowadays we do have interactive movies, one example is “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”, which gives the option for the viewer to change the story depending on their choices. To me, it is amusing to come across an example of an outdated perspective and compare it with the forms of media that we have nowadays. Moreover, even though interactive movies did not exist back when the book was written, I still found his previously mentioned statement to be quite harsh. For someone who argues so much in favor of innovation, I did not expect him to reject the possibility of interactive movies in the future so easily. Sure, interactive movies are not that popular, but they are still appreciated for how entertaining and creative they are.
On a different note, I completely agree with his definition of interactivity, and I found his idea of a degree to be extremely useful. As he argued, the definition of interactivity is quite subjective. The lights of a refrigerator that turn on and off when a door is opened and closed are not interactive with adults, but they could be with children. In that case, how would we define whether refrigerators are interactive or not? With the interactivity scale, we can argue that they are indeed interactive, although lowly, because they barely interact with the user. Following that notion and the three principles of interactivity given by him (listening, thinking, speaking), I would like to give my own damn definition of interactivity. To me, one definition of interactivity could be: “A form of medium that connects two or more agents through active listening, thinking, and speaking”. The same idea, but written more clearly to me. Still, I deeply admire and respect the author’s arguments on such a modern concept.