RE: [-empyre-] old discussion, new discussion

[Nick Montfort <nickm@linc.cis.upenn.edu>]

Brett, thanks very much for the abstract and your comments, both of which
are helpful to me as I think about art and science. I just wanted to pull
out one minor point to particularly agree with and expand upon --

> The abstract touches on the HCI level (interfacial is the term I used
> here), vs. processing and data access levels (which deserve more
> attention, imho).

Indeed, the interface is very important, and we should certainly deal with
where and how people and computers come together. But, as you point out,
the interface is not the only interesting thing about an interactive
computer system. The comptuer also does computation, even in new media
systems, and that aspect seems often neglected. It's pretty hard to
understand even a popular and not terribly complex phenomenon like SimCity
without looking under the interface and considering the rules of the
system and algorithms that make the simulated city go.

-Nick Montfort
 http://nickm.com  nickm@nickm.com
 My new book, Twisty Little Passages: http://nickm.com/twisty