Schemas, Stories, and Interfaces

Jane Douglas

Management Communication

Schemas• Building blocks of perception

• Schemas enable us to perceive the world

• Scripts to act on the world

Schemas• Establish users within world

• Establish expectations

• Enable interpretation/comprehension

• Enable action

Schemas• Also cue interaction

• The more conventional or familiar the schema, the less cueing necessary

• Max Payne vs Black & White

Other Uses for Schemas• Design of innovations to guarantee

rapid uptake and widespread adoption

• Mapping stories onto FSMs

• Aesthetic computing

Common schemas• Restaurant schema

• Classroom schema

• Work schema

Schemas provide fine details that inform our

expectations

• Romantic comedy schema

• Suspense schema

• Mystery schema

• Macintosh desktop schema

• PalmPilot schema

• TiVo schema

Schemas also provide blueprints for action

• If schemas enable us to perceive the world, scripts provide the means for us to act upon it.

• Schemas may cue scripts.

• Affordances may cue schemas or scripts.

Innovation and schemas• The secret to successful innovation lies

not in inventing new schemas but in cueing familiar scripts that can eventually hew to multiple schemas.

• Examples: Prodigy versus AOL

• Apple Newton versus US Robotics PalmPilot

Innovation and schemas• As genres mature, the schemas/scripts

can become more flexible.

• Sixth Sense and the horror schema

• Contrast even GTA III with GTA: Vice City.

Schemas and console games

• Shooters Strategy

• Hunt-quest

• Mystery

Schemas and immersion• When we’re squarely situated within a

familiar schema, even if we’re interacting intensively with a game (think twitch play), we are fully immersed within its world.

Schemas and engagement• When, however, a text is cueing

multiple schemas or requires us to invoke schemas from outside the game/text world to interact with or understand them, we tend to be engaged.

Immersion…Engagement…Flow

• Not a continuum so much as an X-Y axis, with what psychologists dub a “flow” state lying in the zone where the axes intersect.

• In a flow state, you’re both immersed and engaged.

Schemas and Scripts• Conventional schemas = familiar scripts

• Less breaking frame for scripts

• More immersion, less engagement

Design Implications• The more the tools for play are

embedded naturally within both the frame of the game/genre schema and the narrative, the more immersive the game.

Core narrative schemasSteady state

Breach/change

Redress/action

Steady state

Core narrative schemasCore narrative schemasSteady state

Breach/change

Redress/action

Breach/change

Steady state

Breach/change

Redress/action

Breach/change

For Example…Mystery• Another ordinary day in the village. = Steady state= Steady state• One of the residents is discovered

dead. = Change/Rupture= Change/RuptureDetectives set about discovering the

identity of the killer= Action/Redress= Action/Redress

For Example…Mystery, cont.

Killer panics and begins covering tracks= Change/Rupture= Change/RuptureDetectives follow trail of bodies/evidence= Action/Redress= Action/RedressKiller crumbles under pressure or confesses= Action/redress= Action/redressOrder is restored= Steady state= Steady state

FSMs• Steady State = Coke machine

• Change = money in

• Action = make selection

• Change = drink dispensed

• Action = change returned

• Steady State