I like to think of interactivity in the way Chris Crawford defines it: as an exchange between two (or more) thinking elements. In that sense mere reaction to a trigger doesn’t suffice. But, more importantly to this discussion, the elements of the interaction do not need to include the player.

Of course it’s probably a good thing if you design an environment that is aware of the player’s actions. But I find it helpful to think of interactive worlds as self-sufficient entities first. To not build everything around the player.

I’m not saying a book or a movie is interactive, but if there’s something potentially interactive with which you don’t interact with at all there is still interaction going on. If someone visits my house and I don’t say hello to them or acknowledge their existence in any way, I’m still interacting with them and they’d interpret it as rude.

Also in games the type of interaction tends to be focused on the character’s avatar, but there are a few games in which you only adjust settings or conditions and then watch and see what happens. I think that can be just as interactive as a game where you physically move an avatar around and interact with the environment as a character within it.

We don’t need to go as far is AI to talk about a living artwork. Just a few animations and sounds that are triggered by random numbers can do the trick. In fact any set of numbers can be used to generate life in a computer application. Random numbers, or numbers coming from some other event (the weather, cars on the highway, seagulls in the sky), or numbers coming from user input. To the computer, it’s all the same.

But wherever the numbers come from, doing something with them, turning them into visual or audible stimuli, is quite a unique feature of this technology. I think it’s a good idea to design games as living organisms, as things that respond to all sorts of input, not just the user’s.

Another one that I can think of is that it can hide parts of itself ‘behind the scenes’. Theater has this to some extent with backstage, but that’s not quite the same thing; in most forms of art what the audience sees is the entirety of the work, whereas games often have to be played many times to see everything in it, and often it’s impossible for a player to see everything in a game. This isn’t true of novels, movies, or music — you go through and read/see/hear everything tangible about it in one viewing (there may be things you missed, but that was due more to not paying attention, not due to it not being presented to you). In games on the other hand there are parts where even if you’ve played a game a hundred times you come across something you’ve never seen before.

Level making/editing is similar to film editing in that it involves taking the entirety of what’s available (game mechanics, game entities, etc) and arranging them to create specific effects or scenarios. You’re also not really creating anything as much as you are manipulating already-existing elements (for tile-based games at any rate).

‘Editing’ in its general sense could describe the planning and refactoring of environment design, and how the player interacts within a game as a whole.

I do really like comparing the game medium to film though, especially when participating in ‘can games be high art’ discussions. In many ways it’s the new medium on the block, and new mediums and ideas always get a lot of flack.

Nineteenth century photography got it’s share of derision from the high art community of the time, as did Impressionism. And I think it would have been hard to convince a turn of the 20th century theater critic that the medium used in pornographic nickelodeons would become an established artistic format in a matter of decades.