Playing Software by Miguel Sicart;

Author:Miguel Sicart;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Maria Lugones; Qanon; Amazon; Play; game studies; media studies; game design; play design; digital culture
Publisher: MIT Press

Personalities and Playthings

Make-believe is a specific playful strategy that makes playthings out of software agents, so the interactions with them become more pleasant, interesting, and fun. Personality design is a productive approach to facilitate this make-believe engagement.25 It is also an illustration of a deeper cultural and social displacement of competition as the main form of play in relation to software. In this penultimate section of the chapter, I return to voice assistants to illustrate the potential of this analytical perspective and what we can learn from play and personalities when designing interfaces with software.

In Anatomy of an AI System, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler mapped the deep geographies of an Alexa device. Seeing the flow of data and the distributed computational processes that make that system work, it seems unfathomable that just talking to that unobtrusive piece of technology is invoking a hidden network of systems, policies, and economics as vast and predatory as an empire. We users settle with asking Alexa to do something with and for us: talk to us about the weather, tell us what the time is, find and purchase something for us, entertain us. Alexa will be there, listening, monitoring us, and according to some patents filed by Amazon in the late 2010s, potentially even caring for us.26

Voice assistants are sold to us as restless secretaries, but also as the helpful, mother-like instantiations of a loving corporation; a surrogate for the parental figures some privileged brats left behind when they went to college; parents who would always listen and cater to their children’s needs while they focused on their future career and successes.27 In their absence, Alexa takes care of them, does the shopping, reminds them to dress appropriately for the weather, attends to all their needs and some of their desires. Alexa responds to the ideal of a mother/female role that many young Silicon Valley engineers seem to have in mind when designing technology and services: labor and commerce hides in commands and prompts, the results of the economic exchange hidden by glossy technologies so as to not think about the human and environmental abuse they often depend on. The warmth of Alexa and Siri, the way they seem to care about us, invokes a particular social relation based on a particular understanding of concern.

But that is just one social frame. Another social frame is that of Alexa, Siri, and the Google Assistant as impish characters who are always present, always helpful, and moderately playful in their way of acting. That is why these systems are designed with a sense of humor: so that our interactions with them are framed from a social perspective partially defined by play. Adding humor to the interaction possibilities of these assistants is an ineffiency. Instead of fulfilling their roles, these systems add humor to be just slightly inefficient, just too personal to be purely instrumental.

In our computationally mediated lives, Alexa and Siri are not the visible ends of a complex system of interconnected computational and economic resources: they are characters living in our world.

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