What Is Interactivity?

Reading Summary

Chapter 8 of What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss by Greg Smith goes in depth about Interactivity which is what makes “new ” media actually “new”. There is passive media which is considered old media such as television where the viewer doesn’t have to do much apart from staying awake. Interactive media would be something like video games where games require for the player to be in control to keep the game progressing. The chapter then talks about strong and weak designed mediaspaces. A strong designed mediaspace would be a personalized world created for individuals to have a similar experience as others. A weakly designed mediaspace would be a world where the individual creates their own content such as social media. Interactivity in strong designed mediaspaces is focused on the interaction with objects not with people unlike weak desgined mediaspaces. Last of all, the chapter mentions how strong desgined mediaspaces such as video games allow the player to have a choice on what happens next.

Outside Example

This chapter made me think about a new video game I purchased last week called Doom Eternal. Doom Eternal is a first person shooter where you play as the Doom Slayer and try to liberate humanity from a demon invasion. As you play the campaign you learn the story of how demons invaded earth, who the doom slayer is (the charater you are playing as), and how you can save humanity. This game has been highly recommended as it is a fast paced game with an extreme amount of gore, great gameplay mechanics, and great graphics. At first I was undecisive whether to buy the game or to wait until it was on sale, but being in quarantine and getting bored playing the other games I have, I decided to buy it and would recommend it to anyone who is into first person shooters.

Reading Connection

Reading the chapter made me think of how I interact with video games. Since Doom Eternal was the last game I bought and the one I played the most this week, I focused on how I interacted with its campaign. Although some games allow the player to interact with the narration, Doom Eternal doesn’t allow for that, you simply follow the story line to progress through the campaign. There are a few easter eggs that can be found throughout the missions by deviating from the storyline a little which is a way of interacting with the world the player is in but it is nothing major unlike some open world games. But the main two ways a player can interact with this game is the way each player plans on defeating a hoard of demons by targeting certain demons that may be more powerful than others and by deciding which gun to use to defeat them. This is the major way of how this strong designed mediaspace makes the player interact with objects. As I played the game there were a lot of situations where the game forced me to make a choice of what gun I wanted to use and which demon I should attack first. These gameplay mechanics were new to me but overall I enjoyed the complexity of the game although it took some time to get used to.