User-friendliness goes as something of an assumption in the design of objects (both digital and physical). We want to design objects that are intuitive, simple, and pleasant to use. When talking about this sort of design, there is often a belief that the best design goes unnoticed by the user - a seamless experience that does nothing to disrupt their reality. When approached naively, this embrace of the invisible does a disservice to the user; it skips over an open ground of negotiation and forces the user into a particular mode of use. We'd like to take a moment to look at this idea in a bit greater depth, and explain the strategies we are exploring towards alternative philosophies of user experience.
The 1999 book Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne presents a mode of "critical design" that challenges several aspects of the dominant paradigm of industrial design. While Dunne is primarily focused on electronic objects and physical art objects, the ideas that he engages with are equally relevant to software design. Discussing alternatives to the standard model of user friendliness, Dunne says, "by poeticizing the distance between people and electronic objects, sensitive skepticism might be encouraged, rather than unthinking assimilation of the values and conceptual models embedded in electronic objects" (Hertzian Tales, 21). It might seem strange to invite skepticism from a player that we eventually want to feel a close relationship to the artificial intelligence system of You and the Garden, but we want the player to come to this relationship on their own terms, not delivered there by an unquestionable mode of interaction or an overly 'helpful' AI. |
This idea of user-unfriendliness is even more important in AI development than it is in the design of electronic objects, as the overly helpful AI runs the risk of operating as a Service Object - one of the three problematic archetypes in representations of artificial intelligence discussed in a previous post. If the thing that you are interacting with is to maintain a sufficient level of autonomy for equal interaction, it needs to distance itself from the other party (the terms 'user' and 'player' both feel wrong here). Dunne discusses user-friendliness in terms of the "pet" (user-friendly) and the "alien" (poetically user-unfriendly); we want to be sure that our AI can be approached as the latter and not the former.
In order to address this goal, we spend a lot of time examining how You and the Garden's AI treats goals and player modeling within the game. With regards to the former, we look at systems that define goals in the AI's terms and not the players. There is always something that the game wants to accomplish within the garden, and this thing is distanced from the goals that we assume for the player within the garden. For player modeling, we look to define measures that are useful to the AI and empower it to accomplish its goals, rather than simply improving the player's performance or even the interactions between player and AI.
We think that there is a beauty and pleasure in the process of alien interaction. The differences between the two parties require trust, exploration, and negotiation to overcome - all things that cannot be assumed, but instead must be built over time. As a dialogue, You and the Garden cannot rush the player into an intimate relationship with the AI, but must instead present the ground to be covered.