While it may be obvious that anything “interactive” should involve two parties that engage with each other with inputs and outputs, I found the article’s discussion of the varying degrees of interactivity to be very interesting. The most accepted definition for interactivity also happens to be too broad, generous to a degree where one can define the act of using a refrigerator as an interactive activity despite there being no meaningful outcomes; a high-level interaction should go beyond programmed responses.
Video games are obvious examples for interactivity, but there is one game that I think truly exemplifies the author’s expectations for high-level interaction — Alien: Isolation. The author argues that for an interaction to be high-level, “both actors…must perform all three steps [of] listening, thinking, and speaking…well” (Crawford 7). The impeccable programming of Alien: Isolation makes it a game that “thinks” and reacts to player input in increasingly dynamic ways. In the game, the player has to run and hide from the xenomorph, which runs on artificial intelligence that learns from the player’s tactics and then adjusts its strategy so that the player cannot reuse the same tricks and gameplay remains unpredictable. This very well exemplifies the “iteractive process” of a high-level interaction in which both the player and the AI of the xenomorph have to learn and evolve together. While it is far beyond the scope of my current coding capabilities to create a highly intelligent program like the xenomorph of Alien: Isolation, I think the element of surprise and unpredictability is something I can think about when designing user interactions in my p5 sketches.
References:
https://intro.nyuadim.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/theArtOfInteractiveDesign.pdf