I’ve chosen two subjects this week because they’re both consuming my mind right now.
On top of my social experiences, which are also consuming my mind… Mayhaps there are 3 subjects?
Anyway, the first concept, low-intermediacy is greatly important. It’s something I’ve always strived for, I just never had a word for it. If you don’t know what “intermediacy” is, it is basically the bridge between the conveyor and the consumer — in a way, the “thickness” of the medium. How much bandwidth does the medium take up in the user’s experience? A book would be low-intermediacy while a AAA video game would typically be high-intermediacy.
I typically hate high-intermediacy content. So much of what I care about in media is the communication of ideas. It is the same reason, when scrolling on Amazon Prime, the majority of modern content could not hold my attention, and yet The Great Dictator, at least for its first 15 minutes, kept me completely enthralled. When intermediacy is low, you can’t get away with an uninteresting message.
…Or a sinister message. Consumers could engage with a work and be fed toxins without their conscious understanding.
Now, that’s of course at its worst, and this does happen, but what I see more often is high-intermediacy with nothingness at its core. Pure candy. And many, many, many, are consuming it and are becoming sick and withering away.
Low-intermediacy does not allow this, at least not as easily. In low-intermediacy, the message is forefront. Or, at least visible. Low-intermediacy enforces that the consumer be actively involved message’s imagery. At its best, low-intermediacy works because it encourages the consumer to also be actively involved in the message’s impact on their lives.
I say “low-intermediacy” is the goal rather than “no-intermediacy”, not because I don’t believe that no-intermediacy is impossible to achieve (brain chips are coming, lol), but because I don’t believe it is the highest ideal. “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”. However, it must be a single spoonful. The entire work cannot be sugar, and the sugar should not fully hide the “medicine” so that you don’t even realize what medicine you are taking.
Ok. That covers low-intermediacy. Let’s switch now over to toylike design.
Toylike design, along with reading text, is my favorite type of interaction in interactive media. That is, it is the most interesting for me to interact with. If you are not familiar with toylike design, think of checkers (a game) vs. a slinky (a toy). Checkers is a tool for competition, in which we end in one of two states — win or lose.* A slinky, however, has more ambiguous functionality. Sure, you could turn it into a competition (who can make it slink down the greatest number of stairs), but innately it has no purpose. Instead, it is a tool for the user to discover their own purpose. A tool for self-discovery and projections that are not innately within the object. This is what makes it a toy.
Minecraft is a good example of interactive media with toylike design. Now, its brilliance really comes from its interplay between its “game” (survive) and its “toy” (building blocks). Minecraft wouldn’t have the punch without both. Yes, “creative mode” in the piece exists, but without the main “survival” structure, it is with some degree of certainty it would not have become a household name.
In a modern visual novel it is, in fact, possible to integrate both toylike and gamelike design. The only difference that a modern visual novel has from a video game in this respect is that it is the path of least resistance to use toylike design over gamelike design. Sections of expression do not break MVN Rule #2. If you want to use gamelike design, the end states will instead be used as branching tools. If you want it to be meaningful, an end state is not allowed to you, so to make it impactful can easily become an unwieldy amount of work.
*In many games, there is also a third state: a “draw”. Which, allegedly, is possible in checkers… But who knows.