The first studies of the social sciences aimed at the videogames of the 80s and the methods to evaluate the usability engineering of the 90s have highlighted a set of positive and negative aspects in the human-computer interaction which go from the ergonomic aspects of the devices down to the motivations to draw the attention of the users in the interaction process. In this research we present the results reached with adult users in relation to the communicability and the usability in a classical videogame for PC. We also present the elements of interactive design which boost the poiesis in cultural heritage that the analyzed videogame contains.
TopIntroduction
The word “poiesis” stems from the Greek, which means “creation” or “production” (Nöth, 1995). One understands by poiesis any creative process. Iit is from this conception that, in the field of the arts, poiesis refers to the fascination provoed at the moment in which, through multiple associative phenomena contributed by perception, the different elements of a set interrelate and integrate to generate a new entity, called aesthetic, for instance. That is, a way of knowledge and also a playful way: expression doesn’t exclude the game. For instance, in the categories of interactive design, the layout is the first of those categories related to aesthetics. However, the rest of categories (layout, content, navigation, connection, panchronic, and structure) also play an important role in reaching the highest aesthetics to foster and keep the attention of the user at the moment of interacting with the videogame. The notion of aesthetics can be linked to the notion of beauty in the arts (Beardsley, 1982). According to Plato, the arts can materialize to different degrees the quality of beauty. The beauty of the concrete things may change or disappear, it may exist for some and for others not. Beautiful things take very much into account the due proportion among the parts, through a mathematic calculation (Beardsley, 1982). In this sense, and with the passing of the centuries it sends us back to the notions of the Divina Proporzione by Leonarod Da Vinci (Figure 1) and/or Sezione Aurea (Figure 2), at the moment of disposing the elements that make up an interface, that is, the topology of the scrollbar, the icons, the illustrations, the text, etc. Now the qualities of the measures (metron) and the proportion (symmetron), constitute beauty and excellence. In this sense, Escher’s works make up an excellent field of study, from the geometric point of view of the impossible figures (Schattschneider & Emmer, 2005; Escher, 1996). In the beauty and excellence interrelation, since it depends on measure, beauty is assigned a high post in the final list of the good things. In other words, these thoughts by the classical Greeks are interesting at the moment of evaluating the usability of an interactive system, generating a set of quality metrics, for instance (Figure 4).
Figure 1. The Divina Proporzione and the interface space
Figure 3. Escher: interactive system off-line
If the diagonals are drawn as in the figure where they cross we have a very important focal point for the youngest television viewers or computer users in the Western world. In the succession of quadrants the so-called logarithmic spiral is achieved. Now the artistic works made since Antiquity in Persia, Egypt, China, etc., had their basis in the observation of nature. It was Leonardo Da Vinci in the Renaissance who unravelled the keys in the flora and fauna, for instance. That is why that they are also in the logarithms spiral present in the shell of a snail, shell of the nautilus, entrepreneurial logos, etc. A good example of the multimedia interface is the Figure 4 (Attica Cybernetics, 1994) because it is present the divina proporzione.
Figure 4. This interface is a good example because it has the Divine Proporzione at the moment of disposing the elements that make up an interface.