Miss Dewey? I Don't

Microsoft has debuted its new search engine, Miss Dewey. It seems that MSN.com is losing out so badly to Google that they have decided to create this new gimmicky thing. Miss Dewey is a live-action actress who responds to whatever you type in the search box. The actress that plays Miss Dewey is certainly attractive, and her sometimes naughty reactions will attract her 15 minutes of fame (after all, I'm writing about her...), but the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.

Dewey's responses are a bunch of pre-filmed Flash video clips (the whole thing is wrapped in Flash, which is why it takes so long to load). After typing something in, much clunkiness ensues, as the parser analyzes your text and searches its database of clips for something relevant or at least supposedly humorous. Only after the chosen clip plays do your actual search results appear.

It feels so 1993, back in the day when video game makers were talking about "interactive movies." None of that stuff worked, in either a critical or popular sense. (By contrast, "interactive drama" is a field still alive and growing).

The root of the problem: you cannot interact with static media. Or, as my guru Chris Crawford puts it, "You can only interact with process, not data."

I'm using "interactivity" here as a formal term of art, not in the informal, colloquial sense. Just because some web page has a button that says "click here" does not mean that actual interactivity is taking place. Too often, something like Miss Dewey promises interactivity, but when it fails to deliver, we get bored and never come back.

It's all about expectations. When you click on your TV, you don't expect interactivity, so you don't experience this kind of frustration (you do of course experience all the other frustrations associated with the infernal Tube).

I hope to write more soon about the emerging medium of computer-based interactive drama, how this field differs from video games, and how interactive drama may provide authors a new way to explore the unchanging human condition in a form that has particular appeal to the postmodern person.