The unfulfilled potential of the interactive medium
Introduction
Today, computing dominates daily life. Since becoming widely accessible in the 1970s, it has revolutionized how we communicate, shop, manufacture, store information, write documents, and make films. Yet for all its impact, much of personal computing merely automates tasks we were already doing.
This begs a fundamental question: what can be done with this medium that could not be done with any other in history?
One might answer: video games. Unlike utility software, games do not calculate taxes or schedule calendar appointments. Yet the way mainstream, “AAA” games are designed today makes them a far more constrained medium than its enthusiasts realize. This also applies to “AA” and to a lesser extent, indie games.
My own entry into programming was driven not by utility apps, but by a desire to convey complex ideas. Like many, I was initially seduced by visual fidelity before recognizing the medium’s true nature. Over time, two realizations challenged my perspective: first, the industry’s over-reliance on simplistic or violent themes; second, an interest in economic systems that revealed the limits of static text. To truly understand a systemic problem – and its solutions – one must experience its feedback loops directly.
Because terms like “video game” and “gaming” carry immense cultural baggage, I will use the interactive medium to describe the full scope of interactive software. This distinction allows us to evaluate the medium beyond the conventions of commercial gaming.
The core argument of this essay is to define what the interactive medium is uniquely equipped to express, where its current trajectory falls short, and what direction it must take to realize its native potential.
To understand where we are, we must look at how new media evolve – a pattern the interactive medium is currently repeating.
The pattern of new mediums
In their infancy, technologies are deployed simply to automate existing tasks, increase utility, or archive reality. They inherit the forms of older media long before they discover a native language of their own.
- Writing began not with poetry or philosophy, but with administrative accounting. Early cuneiform tablets and bone oracles recorded tax receipts, sheep counts, and land boundaries – acting as memory aids for bureaucrats. Centuries passed before written language captured foundational epics like Gilgamesh or the religions & philosophies from the axial age, and it took millenia before the novel emerged as a distinct form with Don Quixote.
- Film also followed the exact same path. In the 1890s, cameras were purely functional devices used to record motion for scientific and archival records – capturing trains entering stations or workers leaving factories. As it moved toward narrative, cinema initially just mimicked the stage, placing a static camera in front of live theater. Film only became its own distinct medium when directors stopped reproducing plays and invented a language native to the camera: editing, close-ups, and montage.
Computing followed the exact same trajectory. It began as massive, batch-processing mainframes restricted to governments, militaries, and corporations. These machines were non-interactive: operators loaded punch cards and waited hours or days for printed outputs. By the 1980s, cheap microcomputers and the 1984 Macintosh GUI brought computing into the home for personal utility.
Parallel to utility computing came gaming, which by the late 1980s fixated on graphical fidelity. Titles like Ninja Gaiden popularized in-engine cutscenes, marking the point where video games began spending billions to mimic cinema – just as early film had tried to replicate live theater.
To achieve this cinematic ideal, the industry entered an endless graphics arms race. Driven by competitive market pressure, studios poured vast resources into visual fidelity and doubled down on spatial simulation at the expense of systemic depth. Consequently, hardware capabilities and rendering power advanced far faster than design concepts. Strip away the cosmetic opulence, and most core design ideas in modern AAA titles could comfortably run on 1990s or 2000s hardware. Underneath the high-polygon models, games rely on the exact same building blocks as their earlier incarnations (and text adventures to boot): moving characters through level geometry, accumulating physical objects, tracking of quest states, displaying dialogue trees, puzzle solving, stepping into triggers that play a cutscene.
Spatial physics are visually immediate, inherently responsive, and effortless to market in a 30-second trailer. Abstract systems – like social reasoning, policy trade-offs, and relationship states, are notoriously hard to sell at a glance. Consequently, the industry perfected physical impact while abandoning human and structural complexity.
This spatial bias is even hardcoded into our physical hardware. Modern game controllers have been engineered almost entirely around 3D spatial navigation. The analog stick exists specifically to optimize fluid spatial movement and camera positioning, while face buttons and triggers are mapped to physical actions – jumping, swinging, aiming, and accelerating – for immediate ergonomic comfort. The interface in the player’s hands reinforces a language of physical traversal and spatial impact long before a single line of game code is executed.
What does the interactive medium require?
Unlike passive media, which rely on linear consumption, the interactive medium demands systemic thinking built around verbs. Rather than exerting total control over pacing, the author abstracts their argument into code, mathematics and feedback loops.
The rules and logic itself must be absolute, with as minimal exceptions and edge-cases as possible. Consider an air traffic control system or a railway network: its safety and predictability rely on universal protocols that apply identically across every craft in the sky or train on the tracks. When an interactive experience relies on hand-crafted exceptions to force specific outcomes, it breaks this universal logic – reverting from a coherent simulation back into passive media patched over with ad-hoc scripts. This is not a call for unguided sandbox emergence, where autonomous actors produce random noise without authorial intent. Rather, a universal, rule-bound framework tightly constrains player agency, ensuring that every input carries clear, systemic opportunity costs.
The audience can absorb the author’s message through their own agency, using the means the author has given them. Instead of reading a 100-page report on wealth inequality or climate change, players discover for themselves how their decisions ripple across a system. The argument is viscerally experienced rather than merely imagined.
To achieve this, interactive design must follow what Chris Crawford identifies as the core loop of interactivity:
- Listen: Accurately process player inputs (mouse, keyboard, or choices).
- Think: Evaluate those inputs against an underlying matrix of rules and systemic state variables.
- Speak: Provide clear visual or systemic feedback that exposes the updated state back to the player.
That being said, the interactive medium need not entirely reflect complex reality in a purely cold simulation. If contingent situations are needed to reinforce the author’s message, they can be implemented through smaller systems such as storylets or incidents – self-contained narrative situations that sit in a pool and trigger only when specific conditions are met.
Unlike a traditional branching script, where choice A leads to scene B – a storylet is tied directly to system metrics. It carries explicit preconditions required for it to appear and choices that modify variables behind the scenes. Instead of forcing the author to handcraft every plot branch, storylets allow for context-specific situations without violating the underlying systems. The incident does not override the system’s rules; it is summoned by them.
Designing verbs
As of now, spatial verbs dominate the interactive landscape. However, physical mechanics cover far less of human experience than modern game design assumes. Spatial verbs hit a hard ceiling when expressing abstract ideas; building physical structures with blocks cannot model the long-term impact of policy trade-offs.
Even when developers attempt to address abstract concepts, over-relying on spatial metaphors often obscures the message. In Molleindustria’s A Leaky World, players draw lines to connect nodes while avoiding leaks. Intended as a metaphor for managing information networks, the spatial mechanic causes player focus to drift into geometric puzzle-solving. Just as immediate violence collapses a complex thematic conflict into ‘kill that target,’ spatial dexterity collapses systemic reflection into physical reaction.
This spatial fixation introduces a critical temporal constraint: it locks design into real-time physical execution. When engines process time in milliseconds to calculate gravity, hitboxes, and collisions, player interaction is tethered to reaction- and timing-based verbs: swinging a weapon, steering a vehicle, dodging projectiles, or jumping gaps.
In contrast, literature and film handle time abstractly, elapsing months or decades in a single cut or sentence transition. Meaningful structural changes, economic, institutional, or sociopolitical – do not unfold in milliseconds; they operate over years and decades. While turn-based strategy games and simulations (SimCity, Civilization) allow players to pause, reflect, or forgo real-time entirely, mainstream gaming’s obsession with physical execution keeps the medium bound to the immediate present.
To express human and structural complexity, the interactive medium requires a broader, non-spatial vocabulary. Verbs act as the vocabulary of interactive design: a system built around jump, shoot, attack, and heal expresses physical violence, whereas a system built around allocate, promise, thank, and negotiate expresses intricate social dynamics.
When a player executes an action, the system evaluates their input against the author’s underlying rules before outputting an appropriate response. These verbs fall into two primary categories:
- Repeatable Verbs: Foundational, system-wide tools used continuously that scale in utility over time.
- Situation-Dependent Verbs: Contextual actions that emerge only during specific incidents or state conditions.
The set of active repeatable verbs should remain strictly limited. On the design side, an overabundance of core verbs becomes impossible to balance; on the player’s side, it creates decision fatigue. A concise, tightly bounded set of repeatable verbs forces the player to weigh real trade-offs and opportunity costs with every input.
Designing an interactive experience is ultimately about deciding what the player is permitted to do to the system. The verbs available to them determine which aspects of the author’s argument they can directly manipulate, defining what the system is capable of expressing.
Furthermore, complex systemic verbs map far more naturally to universal interfaces like keyboards, touchscreens, and mice. For anyone outside the gaming subculture, mastering a complex, multi-button gamepad creates an immediate cognitive and physical barrier.
Democratisation bottleneck
Distribution is one of the most important parts of the interactive medium. Requiring 100 gigabyte downloads and expensive hardware severely limits reach. True democratisation requires intuitive, browser-accessible experiences that run seamlessly on low-power laptops or mobile devices.
Systemic depth does not depend on high specs. Tiles like Crusader Kings III demonstrate how rich systemic simulation can be, yet its overwhelming interface can create a steep barrier to entry. Papers, Please, titles by Chris Crawford (Balance of the Planet and Balance of Power) and Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria (The McDonald’s videogame) prove that complex sociopolitical commentary can be conveyed through lightweight, accessible mechanics.
This is not a new idea; in the 1980s, Infocom demonstrated lightweight distribution through their custom Z-Machine engine. By decoupling game logic from underlying hardware, their interactive titles were easily ported across virtually every personal computer of that era. Lightweight engines remain the key to making systemic interactivity a universal medium.
The maturity of the interactive medium
Where an essay merely describes a structure, an interactive work gives it life – just as a painting illustrates what words can only outline. An essay can state that a policy creates trade-offs or that an institution produces perverse incentives. An interactive work places the reader inside those conditions, subjecting them to limited resources and competing objectives so they discover the consequences firsthand.
In this mature state, the author no longer merely argues a premise; they construct the underlying conditions that generate it. The argument is neither delivered through linear exposition nor disguised behind cinematic spectacle, but encoded into the rules of the system itself.
By replacing spatial reaction with systemic reflection, the interactive medium moves from a tool of passive automation to an unprecedented apparatus for human thought – a way to build, test, and viscerally understand the complex worlds we inhabit.
That’s all from me!
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