Post on 30-Dec-2015
description
Schemas, Stories, and Interfaces
Jane Douglas
Management Communication
Schemas• Building blocks of perception
• Schemas enable us to perceive the world
• Scripts to act on the world
Schemas• Establish users within world
• Establish expectations
• Enable interpretation/comprehension
• Enable action
Schemas• Also cue interaction
• The more conventional or familiar the schema, the less cueing necessary
• Max Payne vs Black & White
Other Uses for Schemas• Design of innovations to guarantee
rapid uptake and widespread adoption
• Mapping stories onto FSMs
• Aesthetic computing
Common schemas• Restaurant schema
• Classroom schema
• Work schema
Schemas provide fine details that inform our
expectations
• Romantic comedy schema
• Suspense schema
• Mystery schema
• Macintosh desktop schema
• PalmPilot schema
• TiVo schema
Schemas also provide blueprints for action
• If schemas enable us to perceive the world, scripts provide the means for us to act upon it.
• Schemas may cue scripts.
• Affordances may cue schemas or scripts.
Innovation and schemas• The secret to successful innovation lies
not in inventing new schemas but in cueing familiar scripts that can eventually hew to multiple schemas.
• Examples: Prodigy versus AOL
• Apple Newton versus US Robotics PalmPilot
Innovation and schemas• As genres mature, the schemas/scripts
can become more flexible.
• Sixth Sense and the horror schema
• Contrast even GTA III with GTA: Vice City.
Schemas and console games
• Shooters Strategy
• Hunt-quest
• Mystery
Schemas and immersion• When we’re squarely situated within a
familiar schema, even if we’re interacting intensively with a game (think twitch play), we are fully immersed within its world.
Schemas and engagement• When, however, a text is cueing
multiple schemas or requires us to invoke schemas from outside the game/text world to interact with or understand them, we tend to be engaged.
Immersion…Engagement…Flow
• Not a continuum so much as an X-Y axis, with what psychologists dub a “flow” state lying in the zone where the axes intersect.
• In a flow state, you’re both immersed and engaged.
Schemas and Scripts• Conventional schemas = familiar scripts
• Less breaking frame for scripts
• More immersion, less engagement
Design Implications• The more the tools for play are
embedded naturally within both the frame of the game/genre schema and the narrative, the more immersive the game.
Core narrative schemasSteady state
Breach/change
Redress/action
Steady state
Core narrative schemasCore narrative schemasSteady state
Breach/change
Redress/action
Breach/change
Steady state
Breach/change
Redress/action
Breach/change
For Example…Mystery• Another ordinary day in the village. = Steady state= Steady state• One of the residents is discovered
dead. = Change/Rupture= Change/RuptureDetectives set about discovering the
identity of the killer= Action/Redress= Action/Redress
For Example…Mystery, cont.
Killer panics and begins covering tracks= Change/Rupture= Change/RuptureDetectives follow trail of bodies/evidence= Action/Redress= Action/RedressKiller crumbles under pressure or confesses= Action/redress= Action/redressOrder is restored= Steady state= Steady state
FSMs• Steady State = Coke machine
• Change = money in
• Action = make selection
• Change = drink dispensed
• Action = change returned
• Steady State