Three play effects –
Eliza, Tale-Spin, and SimCity
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
 
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Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media creator and scholar whose current work focuses on digital fiction and play, fields he explores as an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, as well as in his posts at the group blog Grand Text Auto. He edits and writes books on digital media, games, and storytelling – his newest just published by MIT Press (Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media). In his receiver contribution Wardrip-Fruin looks at three different models of what we experience through play – based on the relationship between the internal processes of a digital work and the opportunities for interaction it presents.
 
 
 
 
Eliza

In the mid-1960s Joseph Weizenbaum created a stunning piece of software. Years before HAL 9000's screen debut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, this software, Eliza, made it possible to have a conversation with a computer.

Eliza ran on a computer less powerful than the one in my mobile phone, though at the time it was one of the most advanced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rather than being hooked up to a monitor and a mouse – or HAL's microphone, speaker, and camera – Eliza was experienced through something like a typewriter, allowing the computer to type to the user and the user to type back. Yet, in the midst of all this now-primitive technology, Eliza was able to produce remarkable results. People could type anything they wanted to Eliza, and the software would respond in different ways depending on the currently active script. Here is an example using Eliza's most famous script, "Doctor", which caused the software to parody the conversational patterns of non-directive therapists during an initial visit:
   
  You are like my father in some ways.
  WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
  You are not very aggressive but I think you
don't want me to notice that.
  WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
  You don't argue with me.
  WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU
  You are afraid of me.
  DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
  My father is afraid of everybody.
  WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF
YOUR FATHER.
  Bullies.
  DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT
THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
   
While Eliza/Doctor (speaking in all capitals) may seem quite smart above, each script for Eliza is actually just a set of linguistic tricks. One of the simplest tricks, seen repeatedly in this excerpt, is to take a word or phrase from the user's last statement and turn it back in the form of a question.

But when we interact with a piece of software we don't necessarily get a clear picture of how it actually operates internally. And many users of Eliza/Doctor initially developed very mistaken ideas about its internals. They assumed that, since the surface appearance of an interaction with the program could resemble something like a coherent dialogue, internally the software must be very complex. Some at first thought it must be something close to the fictional HAL: a computer program intelligent enough to understand and produce arbitrary human language. This happened so often, and was so striking, that computer science circles developed a specific term for this kind of misunderstanding: "the Eliza effect".


Play and the Eliza effect

This essay is a brief look at the Eliza effect, and at two previously-unnamed effects that can arise in the relationship between the surface appearance of a digital system and its internal operations. More specifically, this essay looks where others haven't when exploring versions of this relationship: the area of play.

Weizenbaum may have originally thought of his system as a plaything – he certainly characterized the Doctor script as a parody – but his attention was soon drawn to another aspect of users' interactions with Eliza. He came to focus on the conceptual mismatch that gives the Eliza effect its name, and specifically on how it could "induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people". He wrote a book dedicated to demonstrating that the internals of computers aren't magical and that we do ourselves a disservice when we assume that human beings are so mechanical that we could, or should, have our intelligence matched by computational machines (Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976).
 
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