Interactivity

Interactivity is the potential for, or phenomenon of, interaction; interactivity can be a property of an artifact, a perception, or an experience. The term interactivity is not well understood, and interaction is often conflated with any action causing an outcome. Nevertheless, interactivity continues to be essential in video game studies. The gold standard of interactivity is often expressed by the metaphor of the conversation of reciprocal human-to-human interaction, although human-to-computer interactivity is not conversational. Interactive art and interactive fiction have insights for understanding interactivity in video games. Two aspects of interactivity are most important for video game studies: (1) interactivity may be the element of video games that best distinguishes them from other media and cultural forms (visual art, cinema, literature, database), and (2) the quality of interactivity in a game may be a way of identifying genres of video games. For the player, video game scholar, and video game designer, perceived interactivity is more important than fulfilling any technical definitions of interactivity.