From the complex city-planning game SimCity to the virtual therapist Eliza: how computational processes open possibilities for understanding and creating digital media.What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.
Wardrip-Fruin looks at “expressive processing” by examining specific works of digital media ranging from the simulated therapist Eliza to the complex city-planning game SimCity. Digital media, he contends, offer particularly intelligible examples of things we need to understand about software in general; if we understand, for instance, the capabilities and histories of artificial intelligence techniques in the context of a computer game, we can use that understanding to judge the use of similar techniques in such higher-stakes social contexts as surveillance.
- ISBN10 0262517531
- ISBN13 9780262517539
- Publish Date 10 February 2012 (first published 1 September 2009)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 4 October 2022
- Publish Country US
- Publisher MIT Press Ltd
- Imprint MIT Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 504
- Language English
- URL http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262517539