Rather than the amorphous and nondirected action-reaction couplings that spontaneously (and most often erroneously) emerged in Glowflow, Metaplay clarifies the correlation of (visitor) action and (system) reaction precisely by isolating it and embedding it within a tightly coupled, clearly delineated circuit. To achieve this isolation, the environment sacrifices the autonomy of response. As Cameron notes, because the technology to create a truly interactive computer-supported responsive environment was unavailable (at least to Krueger), he was forced “to simulate interactive technology, using people behind a screen [the artist, in the case of Metaplay] to provide the system responses. In this odd and oddly productive reversal of the classic Turing test, the “participants would think they were interacting with an interactive environment, but in fact they would be interacting with concealed human beings" (Cameron, 18).
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