May 17, 2000: taylor has some very smart things to say about the ways animation and comic and video game storytelling techniques are coming together online. One of the keys here is that so much of the engrossing-ness of comics comes from their very incompleteness. By forcing (allowing?) the reader to complete them--whether filling in the action between panels or imaginatively "fleshing out" cartoony drawings--comics become to some extent the reader's creation. Comics are not just low-frame-rate animation, nor are they a debased form of books.. There is something specific and undeniably powerful in comics' use of visual communication, something different than either text-only or video communication (I haven't seen it, but I wonder how the gutter is used in Time Code).

This reminds me (tangentially) of how almost no Windows users name their hard drives while absolutely all Mac users do, and what this suggests about the relationships people are forging with their computers. As taylor implies, we need to be thinking about how closure works in human-computer interaction. What makes one interface design more identifiable-with than another? What goes on in the fuzzy borderland between tools and agents and locations?