Argax Project

The Object

The object of drama is "characters-in-action". This action¹ has characters as its material cause; in turn, the action determines what sort of characters are needed to produce it. As held by Aristotle, a character's motivation, or thought², is essential to understanding that character. However, as discussed earlier, it is not the only material from which characters are formed. They have a number of other physical attributes, and often thought can only be inferred by the audience from these outward appearances. While essential to character, thought does not cleanly fit within the exclusive formal/material cause hierarchy.

The notion of setting is missing from Aristotle. Yet, a story's action is partly constructed in terms of where things happen and what objects are used. This is particularly true in an interactive drama, in which the user assumes the role of a character and, through this character, interacts in a virtual story world. Although some of this interaction means affecting other characters, the user often spends time manipulating objects and his character's current location. We might refer to the characters and setting together as the story-world.

A reconstructed neo-Aristotelian poetics for interactive drama.

The user's actions at the story-world level serve as partial material for furthering the action, while the narrative context of the action so far provides some constraints on the user. This is just as Mateas describes agency, though in this reformulated model, the world's objects are placed within the same narrative context as characters. Like characters, modeled story objects often have an internal state that must be inferred by the user from the objects' outward appearances (as conveyed through the medium). Though we are usually most concerned with the affordances for interaction offered by the story-world, it is helpful to remember that the medium itself must also successfully afford the interaction controls needed to affect those virtual objects.

This concludes my restructuring of the current poetics of Laurel and Mateas. Although I have changed some of the relationships and labels, I have tried to maintain their basic concepts--particularly the formal and material causes, the description of "patterns" and "languages" at work in a medium, and the mechanism of user agency. Most importantly, I have reinstated the Aristotelian distinction between medium and object.

Notes

1. I will use the term action, rather than Aristotle's plot, to refer the events of the story world. This is to avoid confusion with the term plot as used by narratologists, which refers instead to the discourse or telling of the events, rather than the events themselves. Action here is essentially narratology's concept of story.
2. In this reformulation of the poetics, I mean thought more as Smiley did--including any mood, emotion, idea, or internal state of a character--rather than only as Aristotle's meaning of rational intention.

Argax Project : Dissertation : A Rough Draft Node http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax

Last Edited: 08 Apr 2011 ©2006 by Z. Tomaszewski.