Interactivity means having the ability to intervene in a meaningful way with the representation itself' – Andy Cameron

Interaction should not be confused with Interpretation. In technology, interactivity is the exchange between a human being and a computer program. Games are often thought of as promoting an immense extent of interactivity. A game is a play, a creative activity, which is defined by a set of rules and boundaries. Every game has a structure. Games are not only the object, but also the process, because they must be played for the experience to actually occur.

Ludology is the study of gaming. Gonzalo Frasca, game designer and academic researcher, has found that games have winners and losers, whereas plays don’t. The cognitive psychologists J. F. Skinner and Jean Piaget focused on Child Development in the mid 20th Century. Numerous experiments made with pigeons and rats showed that animals as well as human beings learn trough reward and punishment, success and failure.

MUD games (multi-user dimension games) are multiplayer experiences and open for content coming from outside.

Choice is a key component in design, but also in interactive games or stories, meaning interaction offers the audience choice. In gaming, designers create an environment, where users have a variety of choice.

There are two forms of time reference in language. Tense relates to situations taking place in the past, present or future, whereas aspect draws a distinction between the perfective and the imperfective.

A perfective aspect indicates a situation viewed from the outside as completed. In opposite to the perfective aspect, the imperfective relates to a situation viewed from the inside as ongoing. Those are the two fundamental modes of spectatorship.

Every good story should contain an actor and a narrator and the content is supposed to be a series of connected events caused or experienced by the characters. Traditional narratives are believed to be perfective, because no matter what you do, they are already completed and written. Their ending is not going to change, no matter what.

Digital stories allow you to tell your own version of a tale by giving you a random framework as a guideline. Although the happenings are flexible, digital stories still have a structure. Thus, they can be seen as a mixture of perfective and imperfective aspects and changeable and not changeable things.

Games, narratives and digital stories all have something in common: They all represent a value. While stories are rather serious, have a high culture value as they are addressed to adults, games are rather frivolous, have a low cultural value as they are mostly directed to kids.
















Narrative is a universal and dominant cultural form, which is as old as language itself. Narratives define the characteristics of humanity and its culture and are omnipresent in our daily lives. Over the past few years, however, society focused on digital media, because the audience desires interactivity. As Andy Cameron asserts in his essay 'Dissimulations' interactivity refers to the “possibility of an audience actively participating in the control of an artwork or representation. Thus, interactivity can be figured kind of a democratic revolution, as it is a form of freedom and liberation of the receiver from passivity of reading.

In contrast to interactivity, narratives are fundamentally linear and non-interactive. Hence, the question arises whether a narrative has the potential to transform into an interactive medium.

As reported by Borges, the reader sometime takes over the authorship from the author, when interactivity is in play, as he decides between the forking paths, that must already be written in advance. The more pathways a story contains, the higher is its interactive complexity. As soon as the spectator interferes to change the story, a shift from perfective to imperfective takes place.

To narrow down the number of forking paths, interactive stories often set a framework, but still sketch a web of possibilities to its users. A narrative representation has more closure, is more legitimized, fix and complete. The main difference between narrative representations and interactive ones is that time is presented differently. While narratives often refer to the past, interactive stories are rather presented in the present.

Andy Cameron is convinced that narrative representation has a more deep and lasting significance to its receivers than games, which are often unworthy of remembrance.

The main idea of Andy Cameron’s essay 'Dissimulations' is that in interactive representation it is difficult to talk of authorship as the reader is deeply involved.

In addition, interactivity can be seen as liberation from the repressive authority of traditional narrative forms, as mentioned above, but this doesn’t mean that narrative is at an end. Interactivity is just an explosion of narrative and throws the reader inside of the story to become a player. Interactivity can be considered an illusion, a simulation as it tries to conceal the absence of freedom and choice.

Andy Cameron is a British interaction artist, who made major contributions to interaction design projects with art institutions and commercial clients and even won several interaction design awards. Moreover, he created the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and co-founded an Interactive Design studio in 1999 in London. In addition, Cameron writes about the aesthetics and politics of interactive and networked media in essays.