I would like to elaborate on Joyce’s initial post about “Clumsy Creatures”. In this post, Joyce said the following: “Robots and other artificial creatures are often created with a purpose and rarely have their ‘minds’ occupied by something other than that purpose. This does not give them any space to wander their minds and be clumsy”. I agree partially with this statement, because indeed initially robots will just execute that which they are programmed to do, but, when a robot or programme exists out of many different components, those very components might lead to unexpected behaviour. I am thinking of how some games might have a bug that the team hasn’t encountered and therefore not fixed. This is a staple of videogames and there are many videos on the internet displaying very clumsy and funny errors in the system. These will usually be patched and fixed by the developers, because these errors can be immersion breaking or worse make the game wholly unplayable.
It is also peculiar to see that when it is just some singular instances of these bugs being reported by players, then it is most of the time perceived as harmless and even funny. However, when a game releases and has too many of these bugs, the player base will usually fault the company and the developers for having not paid enough attention to release a polished product. Joyce commented on some studies that illustrated that robots were actually perceived as more likeable if they exhibited clumsy behaviour, but there seems to be a limit here. After all many robots and programmes are designed to fulfil a certain function and if the clumsiness is in the way of the functionality then users instead of being amused might become frustrated and not use the product anymore.
It might be interesting to have an artificial creature that would test the limits of clumsiness in respect to functionality. To what extent does the clumsiness add to the likeability of a product and when does it become frustrating to the point of not wanting to deal with it anymore? Can these features even coexist in the same creature without being a gimmick or should a robot either fulfil its function to perfection unless its function is to be clumsy.