Pac Man turns 25 this month. Hard to believe. On my Atari 2600, I definitely had Pac-Man Fever.

As the CNN tribute rightly points out,

“This was the first time a player took on a persona in the game. Instead of controlling inanimate objects like tanks, paddles and missile bases, players now controlled a ‘living’ creature,” says Leonard Herman, author of “Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames.” “It was something that people could identify, like a hero.”

It was the first time most of us had ever adopted a digital persona, primitive as it was. But perhaps its primitiveness was part of its power, allowing for easier identification (see the great Understanding Comics). In the years following, game heroes took on more distinct forms, imbibed with more and more personality: Link, Mario, Gordon Freeman, et al. Part of the fun of playing these games–and really, part of the fun (and I suppose danger) of the digital world itself–is this taking on and playing different roles. I can be one persona on my blog, another on Everquest, a third on IM. In a broader sense, I suppose we play different roles nearly everywhere we go online (and maybe even in all life). I’m a shopper on Amazon, a stock trader on Ameritrade, a searcher on Google. (I think there’s a lot to explore in this sort of role-directed design.)

But what Pac Man and his ilk can teach us is that we’ll follow and identify with these digital beings, these pixel versions of the self, in all sorts of unfamiliar, alien settings that really don’t even make much sense (You mean I eat that big dot and then I can eat those ghosts?). Imagine applying the game-like principles of pac-man to something that does make sense, like stock trading.

Twenty-five years of the little yellow pie-chart guy and we still haven’t come to terms with what games are all about and how we can use their parts in things that aren’t games per se. We’re still like pac-man, running frantically around a maze, pursued by phantoms.

Want to be an interaction designer? Spend some quality time playing video games and watching TV.

I just finished reading Steven Johnson‘s latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You. It’s a great, provocative read and makes me feel much better about the hours I’ve wasted spent productively on Lost, Survivor and Medal of Honor. The book posits a number of concepts that are interesting to think about as a designer.

Johnson’s basic premise is that over the last twenty years, popular culture has gotten more complex and is making people smarter. He calls this the Sleeper Curve, after the Woody Allen “sci-fi” movie Sleeper where scientists from 2029 are astounded that people in the 1970s didn’t know the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. The type of intelligence that pop culture is training us in is the same sort of intelligence I use every day as a designer: pattern recognition, decision-making, and the ability to assess and respond appropriately to emotional signals. Television, video games, and the internet have all conspired to make us smarter in specific ways.

Johnson gives names to two types of activities that interaction designers not only engage in, but also observe all the time with users: probing and telescoping. Probing involves the discovery of the rules of the system through exploration, through playing with it. You discover not just rules, but the physics of the system: the patterns and tendencies. Probing can take the form of testing the limits of a system, pushing it until its artificiality (the seams) show. Telescoping is about the nesting of objectives inside each other like a collapsed telescope. It’s about focusing on immediate tasks while keeping in mind the ultimate goals, something both designers and users often need to do.

“Telescoping is about order, not chaos; it’s about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It’s about perceiving relationships and determining priorities.”

Johnson argues that the heightened probing and telescoping that we’re seeing is a result of complex forms (e.g. video games, the internet, etc.) that “encourage participatory thinking and analysis” and that “challenge the mind to make sense of the environment.” Johnson has a lot of interesting things to say about form, and about learning new digital forms. “Learning the intricacies of a new interface can be a genuine pleasure,” he writes. “I’ve often found certain applications more fun to explore the first time than to use.”

It’s an interesting, quick read, right up there with his other books, Interface Culture (a must for interaction designers), Emergence, and Mind Wide Open. I recommend it.

I usually don’t like books, movies, or TV shows about Hollywood: they seem too self-serving. The one exception to this is the reality show Project Greenlight, where industry neophytes get to make a movie. One thing that’s great about it is that it shows like nothing else I’ve ever seen the effect of business decision on the creative process. Only have three million dollars? Ok, well, the monsters are going to look terrible and we need to rewrite half the movie. CEO doesn’t like the movie? It only opens in three theaters. The effect of these types of business decisions upon what gets made is something that is seldom shown.

This season of Project Greenlight was particularly interesting because of the director they chose: John Gulager. Gulager was a very untraditional choice: introverted, older, and uncommunicative. And yet very talented. What was so interesting was watching him grow into the role of director, having to actually tell people his vision of the movie they were making. The producers and crew assumed he had a vision, but had no idea what that was, and so there was chaos until he learned how to talk to people like a director.

In a collaborative field like filmmaking or interaction design, all the vision and all the talent in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t communicate it to the team you are working with. And not just communicate it, communicate it like a designer, with a design attitude. You need the right ethos (the authority of a designer) to meet the expectations of the audience (that you know what you are doing). You are crafting an argument, after all: an argument of what the product should be.

Like many of the intangibles of our field, I’m not sure this can be taught, only learned.