Rules.  A set of preset algorithms that determine a computer’s response to interactor-input.  At least that’s how it is defined in Janet Murray’s piece “From Additive to Expressive Form.”  It is through these rules and the “defining ability [of the computer] to execute” those rules that programmers were able to manifest life in an inanimate object: Eliza.  These rules turned out to be so functional that their execution though Eliza was able to convince cognizant individuals that a machine really “understands what is said to her” and “whatever is happening around her.” Her.  As if the program wasn’t life-like enough, programmers decided to assign a gender-specific pronoun to it.  I guess this helps my thought-process while reading the piece and then in connecting Murray’s purpose: these programmers were able to combine classic technology with aspirations of its potential, the procedural algorithms with the variety of input, to create situation-based responses.

This whole schema to me feels like a Stepford moment, not in the sense that we’re turning our spouses into robots, but that we’re humanizing the machines.  We don’t call them algorithms, but don’t humans also use rules, programming us through life experiences, to decipher input and determine the best response?   Both humans and programs such as Eliza and Zork test their capacity and the extent to which a response is warranted.  The way Murray arranges the argument, it seems like the range the programmers set for computer-based technology starts with these algorithms and ends with something as close to human mimicry as possible.

Another point of Murray’s that resonated is her reference to digital environments as encyclopedic and how they are sometimes used to “develop multithreaded stories composed of many intersecting plots.”  Having not read this article first, I was unaware of the concept when I went through Andy Campbell’s “Dim O’Gauble,” a story told through a digital forum.  The story is presented in pieces and seems simple enough to progress through (the viewer just clicks on the yellow arrow to get to the next linear slide).  The intricacies play in, though, when a certain slides allow you to click on highlighted words that take you to a tangent event, like an encyclopedia that refers you to another entry for clarification.  After so much clicking and backtracking, in the words of Murray, “it leaves readers/interactors wondering which of the several endpoints is the end and how they can know if they have seen everything there is to see.”  But these multiple pathways were created purposefully by the author to mimic the non-linear tangle of human emotion.  Once again, the programmer has humanized the machine.