The lights dim. There a rustling sound as ice cream wrappings are cast off and the audience wriggles into its seats. A few scattered conversations wind up as the stern warning appears on the big screen—NO TALKING. In reverent silence, the audience is listening. You’re at the movies.

Contrast the busy atmosphere in a room of interactives. Keyboards are clacking and mice are clicking. People move around freely, helping each other out through the screen menus, pointing out weird things that happen when you click here. You’re online.

As the new medium on the block, the art of interactives is evolving quickly. Naturally, the first subject matter was technology itself. The pioneering title Myst was an entirely people-less world of machines and devices. Now, the people have arrived and the machines have disappeared. Obsession with the latest software update has given way to the more timeless technology of storytelling.

Use of hand-drawn animations complements the local feel in this year’s interactives. In Pretty Aprons, Alyssa Rothwell continues to evolve her handcrafted Australian bush idiom. The cartoon characters in Mohammed Zaihan’s Beyond Connaught Bridge offer an intimate introduction to life in a Malaysian village. And with a distinctively Melbourne downbeat, Michael Buckley’s The Good Cook tells a story in raw bits and pieces.

Meanwhile, chatting on the Internet is eating into time that was traditionally couched in front of the television. Artists are beginning to find creative ways of directing this chat into meaningful kinds of exchange. Eric Zimmerman’s SiSSY FiGHT 2000 introduces a ‘Scissors, Paper, Stone’ logic that, while deceptively simple, offers an infinite number of resolutions in an multiplayer environment.

Chat is as much about miscommunication as it is about getting in touch with people. Try saying something intelligent in most chat rooms. Words don’t always come when you need them. Lucy Francis’ Aphasia and Martin Casey’s Born with a Broken Tongue explore the alienation of speechlessness. And in a more comic mode, The Sims characters carry on their lives purely with wordless intonation.

The 20^th century began with a new science of misspeaking. Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life revealed the hidden logic of malapropisms. Sigmund’s wonder talking cure is the subject of No Frontier’s beautiful Viennese CD-ROM The Archaeology of the Unconscious. Suzy Treister’s No Other Symptoms gives us a whimsical take on the inventor of penis envy.

So what is everyone talking, and not talking, about? The way most of the interactives have played out this year, the topic is surprisingly consistent—childhood. Is this a cultural regression? Or does returning to childhood put us in touch with the really important things that we wanted say. As Baudrillard said, ‘the child is the adult's destiny’.

It seems surprising that we might find this path back to childhood through digital media, given its complexity and coldness. Perhaps it is the intimacy and freedom of the small screen. Just chat amongst yourselves for awhile, OK?