Implications

In the previous three chapters, we have conducted a close reading of an array of digital media artifacts which belong to the basic-level categories including user interface, video game, and digital art. These three commonly separate groups of artifacts generally contrast with each other in terms of both the creator’s motivation and the consumer’s expectation, but the works included in the corpus resonate in the pursuit of liveliness. As the analyses in previous chapters have shown, the properties of these artifacts with respect to the four qualitative variables exemplify the principles of technological liveliness. They are able to immerse their users in a virtual environment with both primary and secondary liveliness; they entail coupling and/or sustaining patterns of engagement that match users’ bodily motion and perception, resulting in a sense of intimacy; they anchor sensation for immediate conceptual blends yielding embodied concepts of virtual space, followed by elaboration of metaphorical blends; they generate output on the fly and in real time, supporting users to explore diverse possibilities in outcomes. In short, they all rely on animated phenomena to give human users immersive, familiar, embodied, evocative, and divergent kinds of experience. This study is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of all digital media artifacts, and inevitably there are many other salient examples that demonstrate comparable values in those four variables.