The paradigms of interaction in an interactive new media work consist of the possible choices for a user at any particular time. There are two categories of paradigms in Puppet Motel. For example, in the Hall of Time, described in Puppet Motel: A Description, it is possible to categorize the effects of cursor actions in the interactive objects present. On the one hand, cursor actions like click on an icon on the wall will cause a room change. On the other hand, click on the rotating cube will cause the rate of the icons changing to speed up or slow down. In the first case, the paradigm is the set of rooms that one can get to from the Hall of Time. In the second case, the paradigm is the set of room manipulation possibilities. I will first discuss the set of rooms paradigm.

The set of rooms accessible from the Hall of Time is, for the most part, made known to the user through the display of icons on the wall. The exception is the attic which can only be visited by pressing the ESC key on the keyboard. There are 22 icons that are displayed at a rate determined by interacting with the rotating cube. Icons are, however, always displayed individually. The relationship between the appearance of the icon, and the room it leads to, is not really solidified until one visits the room. The Cutting Room is represented by a razor blade; the Planetarium is represented by an airplane; the Music Room is represented by a violin. By design, the Hall of Time makes its set of rooms paradigm explicit but only after one has spent quite a bit of time with the work. Puppet Motel works hard to never make the whole paradigm explicit.

Even where all choices are available at once in a room, the paradigm is not explicit. In the Plug Room any one of the plugs on a dark wall of plugs can be clicked on to go to different room. In this case, however, each plug looks very similar. There is nothing in the appearance of a plug to indicate what room it will lead to. Despite the fact that one can get to five other rooms from the Plug Room, it is very difficult to know to what room a click will lead. Even after having been to the Plug Room several times, it is difficult to remember where each plug leads.

Just as often, it is difficult to find interactive objects that leave the user's current room. In the Aquarium, the set of rooms paradigm is hard to determine. The size of the set of rooms accessible here is quite small (two rooms): the Hall of Time and the Attic. Getting to the Attic is straightforward; assuming one has read the documentation. Finding the object that links to the Hall of Time is a bit of a challenge, as it is described in Puppet Motel: A Description.

I imagine that the set of rooms paradigm for each room in Puppet Motel has only been made explicit by the designers of the work and partially in this thesis. The Rooms Structure object introduced in 4.2 - Rooms Structure allows one to explore Puppet Motel in a limited and focussed way that does make the set of rooms paradigm for each room explicit. As well, one can get a sense of the size of the set of rooms paradigm for each room. Conversely, the number of rooms that lead to a given room, gives a measure of that room's accessibility.