Written while reading Shadowplay (TEI ‘24), and still unresolved:
It has interactivity but no gamefulness, because to my mind gamefulness requires a feedback mechanism.
The distinction I am working with
- Interactivity — I act, the system responds. Shadowplay has this.
- Playfulness — the interaction is open and exploratory, with no fixed goal. Shadowplay has this too.
- Gamefulness — there are rules, a goal, and a feedback loop: I did A, I got B, and that changes what I do next. This is the one I want to build.
What confirmed it
A Fair Game? (TEI ‘24) is the positive case. Two players compete; a passport determines your speed; the first to the top wins; the feedback is the physical exhaustion of hauling on a rope. Remove any one of the three — rule, goal, feedback — and the installation can no longer communicate unfairness.
Lüneburg’s GAPPP work adds a condition I had not considered: engagement requires the action–reaction link to be perceivable. In Phosphor, only one of my three mapping principles is self-evident on its own. Architecture → reverb, an audience can hear. Gaze → harmony and vegetation → tempo have to leak somehow, or they are not readable as rules at all.
The unresolved part
A Fair Game? is two-player. Gamefulness there is carried partly by competition between bodies. If my installation is single-player, where does gamefulness come from?
This is the question that makes the multi-person vs. single-player fork a real design problem and not just a positioning choice.