ReelChaos Blog

This news article got me wondering if there is such a thing as emotionally engaging software (besides video games).

The article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21102202/

My conversation with my girlfriend:

Me: I love his quote "… If we can design things that are somewhat emotionally engaging, it doesn't have to be as reliable"

Her: True, like R2D2

This is funny to me because she got me an R2D2 for my birthday; it's now sitting in my office. The problem is that sometimes he's not so "Voice-Activated" he doesn't process all the commands well, yet in the manual they describe this as "misbehaving." So if a piece of hardware can pull this "emotionally engaging" thing off, I have to ask could a piece of software? I mean I know people get really engaged by some games like Second Life, Warcraft, etc, but how about other pieces of software. Could you stand it if your next word processor is not as reliable if it is emotionally engaging? (since Microsoft already tried that) What software could stand to be more Emotionally Engaging?