Schemas, Stories, and
Interfaces
Jane Douglas
Management Communication
Schemas
• Building blocks of perception
• Schemas enable us to perceive the
world
• Scripts to act on the world
Schemas
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Establish users within world
Establish expectations
Enable interpretation/comprehension
Enable action
Schemas
• Also cue interaction
• The more conventional or familiar the
schema, the less cueing necessary
• Max Payne vs Black & White
Other Uses for Schemas
• Design of innovations to guarantee
rapid uptake and widespread adoption
• Mapping stories onto FSMs
• Aesthetic computing
Common schemas
• Restaurant schema
• Classroom schema
• Work schema
Schemas provide fine
details that inform our
expectations
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Romantic comedy schema
Suspense schema
Mystery schema
Macintosh desktop schema
PalmPilot schema
TiVo schema
Schemas also provide
blueprints for action
• If schemas enable us to perceive the
world, scripts provide the means for us
to act upon it.
• Schemas may cue scripts.
• Affordances may cue schemas or
scripts.
Innovation and schemas
• The secret to successful innovation lies
not in inventing new schemas but in
cueing familiar scripts that can
eventually hew to multiple schemas.
• Examples: Prodigy versus AOL
• Apple Newton versus US Robotics
PalmPilot
Innovation and schemas
• As genres mature, the schemas/scripts
can become more flexible.
• Sixth Sense and the horror schema
• Contrast even GTA III with GTA: Vice
City.
Schemas and console
games
• Shooters
• Hunt-quest
• Mystery
Strategy
Schemas and immersion
• When we’re squarely situated within a
familiar schema, even if we’re
interacting intensively with a game
(think twitch play), we are fully
immersed within its world.
Schemas and engagement
• When, however, a text is cueing multiple
schemas or requires us to invoke
schemas from outside the game/text
world to interact with or understand
them, we tend to be engaged.
Immersion…Engagement…
Flow
• Not a continuum so much as an X-Y
axis, with what psychologists dub a
“flow” state lying in the zone where the
axes intersect.
• In a flow state, you’re both immersed
and engaged.
Schemas and Scripts
• Conventional schemas = familiar scripts
• Less breaking frame for scripts
• More immersion, less engagement
Design Implications
• The more the tools for play are
embedded naturally within both the
frame of the game/genre schema and
the narrative, the more immersive the
game.
Core narrative schemas
Steady state
Breach/change
Redress/action
Steady state
Core narrative schemas
Steady state
Breach/change
Redress/action
Breach/change
For Example…Mystery
• Another ordinary day in the village.
= Steady state
• One of the residents is discovered
dead.
= Change/Rupture
Detectives set about discovering the
identity of the killer
= Action/Redress
For Example…Mystery,
cont.
Killer panics and begins covering tracks
= Change/Rupture
Detectives follow trail of bodies/evidence
= Action/Redress
Killer crumbles under pressure or confesses
= Action/redress
Order is restored
= Steady state
FSMs
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Steady State = Coke machine
Change = money in
Action = make selection
Change = drink dispensed
Action = change returned
Steady State