Activity and Agency in Historical “Playable Media”

Abstract

This article examines examples of English movable books produced for and created by children from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries as interactive media. I analyze the interactive design of flap books, slat books, and mechanical books in comparison to contemporary pop-up books. By adapting ideas associated with digital media and applying them back I time, I analyze the design of the movable books in light of their child reader-viewer-players or interactors. By comparing early understandings of interactivity, notably of John Locke, with those of contemporary theorists, I demonstrate how a hierarchical perception of activity and agency occurred. Ultimately, I suggest how we may be able to rethink our valuation of the terms.

Keywords:

• activity
• agency
• child
• interactor
• movable books
• flap books
• manuscript
• Locke
• Murray
• Wardrip-Fruin

Notes

^1. Since they are hybrid objects, movable books are difficult to classify and therefore difficult for the researcher to find. They may be acquired by a museum, a rare books library, a print or ephemera collection. This last label carries pejorative connotations as transient or unimportant objects, although movable books are an ancient form predating the invention of printing, and a vital part of the children's book market today due to improvements in paper technology (McGrath, 2002).

^2. Murray (1997) notes that the main application of the concept of interactivity outside of computer-user engagement is in reader-response or reception theory. Iser (1974) derived the term “implied reader” to refer to a set of roles suggested by the text to a reader to assume, similar to an actor in a drama. The basic indeterminacy in the texts “implies” a reader who participates in synthesizing and making meaning throughout the process of reading.

^3. The common example used to explain affordance is that of the handle of a teapot suggesting it needs to be grasped by a hand (Wardrip-Fruin et al., 2009, p. 3).

^4. Wardrip-Fruin (2009) proposes that part of the insight of The Sims games creator Will Wright in designing complex building simulation games, first constructing a city and then designing characters in their neighborhoods, is that the design of the game is visible on the surface, so that playing the game teaches players how the simulation works (pp. 310, 316). While this is part of the appeal of complex games, he notes this is also part of the attraction of simple games such as Pong. By contrast “The Tale-Spin” and a third effect “The Eliza effect” concern computer games whose intererface does not allow the interactor to understand the basics of the design: the first being much complex than it appears, and the second being less complex. Regarding “Tale-Spin” he notes how it encases “fascinating processes” “in an opaque interface” (p. 146).

^5. The Bodleian library copy is available online at http://theconveyor.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/cain1_web1.jpg

^6. Locke proposed adapting existing adult play objects for literacy purposes. One prototype he advocated was adapted a common gaming device to a literacy toy by pasting the letters of the alphabet on the different sides of an ivory-ball (section150, pp. 209–210). He also suggested prototypes of literacy games and toys still played with today, like Scrabble.

^7. In Practical Education (1798/1974) Maria and Richard Edgeworth similarly criticize furnished dollhouses for curtailing active engagement, “an unfurnished baby-house might be a good toy, as it would employ little carpenters and seamstresses to fit it up; but a completely furnished baby-house proves as tiresome to a child as a finished seat is to a young nobleman. After peeping, for in general only a peep can be had into each apartment, the young lady lays her doll upon the state bed, if the doll is not twice as large as the bed, and falls asleep in the midst of her felicity” (vol. 1, p. 6).