I’m categorizing games, for people who just want a quickly consultable list. I’ll make this list sticky for the duration of the Comp. It updates somewhat behind what I’ve played. (more…)
Notes from Cambodia
Last night, I had a date with two very nice young women. Westerners. It was nice to find people who share my values. It didn’t go anywhere; I was shy about inviting myself back to their place, and I think they were, too. (more…)
Rover’s Day Out: a review of IF Comp reviews
Well, it seems in my review, I wasn’t entirely fair to this game. That was not deliberate: I wasn’t playing the whole thing.
The game is happening on two levels, and apparently you’re informed of the second level stuff through the status bar. Which, I was just about to write, doesn’t appear on my screen: but I see just now that it does. At the top of the window, up with all the old text that I’ve already read.
*I* don’t know… maybe I should replay this in the interest of fairness. But I just typed in a few commands to work out the Mystery of the Vanishing Status Bar, and Oooohhhhh, Gooooddd the morning routine! (more…)
Why not modals? – Toward Ron Newcomb
Ron Newcomb advocates using modals in his recent blog post. And I agree, we should use modals in IF. And I thing we would use them if we could easily.
So I think we should ask, what would be needed for us to use modals?
Ron uses the analogy of strategy games like chess to motivate his arguement. Just as players in chess have plans and intentions, so NPC intentions could be queried in-game by the use of modal sentences.
My reply to Ron is that, I think that’s great, but it’s really not about modals.
In order for this kind of thing to even be an option, you *first* need to have a strategy game with well-defined rules. That means the game must have a logical space which the NPCs can make moves in. They must be able to sort for contingencies, in much the same way a chess program sorts for contingencies.
Really, that’s the challenge: making that happen in a way that’s still story-like. We will return to the “story-like” question in a moment.
As I currently see it, the programming end would require:
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A sufficiently deeply-implemented simulator, to act as the “board” of the board game.
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NPCs must be able to evaluate the board for value. (This would be tied in to the NPCs goals.)
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NPCs must have a menu of options which will change the board status.
–Now, I’ve said in the past that it would be fascinating to implement a minimal dungeon with a few locked doors and thorough attention to NPC verbs, that allows the NPCs to “play” the game ahead, in simulation, a few moves. In other words, in this simple proof-0f-concept game, the NPCs would use the game engine itself to look into the future.
In other words, they would be omniscient and, for a move or two, prescient.
A year or so ago, Emily Short burst my bubble by pointing out that, to *really* get this to work, with every NPC having its own understanding of the game-board, you’d have to model the entire game once per NPC. And, you’d have to model each NPC once for every other NPC…
However, I don’t see that as the real problem in creating deeper NPCs. The real problem is simpler:
In general, we don’t understand human emotionality well enough to create NPCs that react to the simulator in emotionally salient ways. So creating believable NPCs isn’t something we know how to tackle; and believable NPCs is a prerequisite to narrative.
But, we can probably fake it. The Sims [TM] is a game that does not offer believable NPCs, but they are, apparently, “believable.” — People get sucked in. In general, it seems a little bit of emotional salience goes a long way. The lesson of the Sims ought to be that we don’t need to get a perfect portrayal of the human animal to make a good game.
(The reason the Sims is not a text game is that the graphics go a long way to sell the “humanity” of the NPCs: another, less welcomed, lesson.)
I’m currently working on developing (in TADS 3) some interactive creatures. Currently, I’m only to the point where they can find paths through an arbitrary map — provided the map has no one-way connectors. Soon they’ll be able to wander on an invisible tether, respond to hunger, and chase and flee each other.
I’m thinking this could be useful in two ways: one, to create a social backdrop against which the gameplay could happen; and two, to make the map more easily dynamic. On this second point, for example, perhaps you couldn’t rummage through Lord Winston’s closet when the servant is around, but if you use a sausage to lure the hounds into the house, she’s too preoccupied to worry about you.
This is currently doable, of course, but having a set of general tools I think would make designing these dynamic, social puzzles easier. You would no longer program a series of flags and state changes, but a set of behaviors.
Creating NPCs that strategically pursue emotionally salient goals is a long way off, but creating instinctively driven NPCs, that can learn where the food is, behave territorially, and dynamically make friends and enemies seems a first step.
Take the Foster-Harris Survey!
Although I haven’t written anything on Foster-Harris in a while, I see that I’m still getting traffic on his writing system. If you’re interested in his emotion-based formula for building stories, you can take the survey here.
If you’d like to let others know of this survey, you’ll find the tinyurled link most convenient — it won’t break under cut+paste:
Resonance: review of Comp reviews, and some thoughts
Some discussion of the reviews of _Resonance_, followed by some thoughts on what they tell us about how people play IF.
There will be SPOILERS further on down in this review.
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Generally, I’ve been summarizing and quoting other reviewers here. But for Resonance, I’m not going to do that as much. I’m just going to quote a few reviews:
You can say with some justification that maga_dogg just didn’t get that Resonance was quite often meant to be funny. (Indeed, often the humor is hard to lock onto.) But, he has a real point here:
Chatting up Deirdre. Oh, right, noir. Some genres are colliding at odd angles here, I think; this is standard behaviour for Shabby Yet Smooth Detective Down On His Luck, but sits really oddly on Wife-Avenging Fugitive. Kind of weirdly sad, you know? He’s scared, he’s in shock, he’s in mourning, his whole world should be a mess of sick fear, the last thing on his mind should be chasing tail – but the only way he can think of to deal with Deirdre is tail-chasing mode.
–He’s right; that’s a real problem. But, for some reason (perhaps because I forwent the haircut?) I didn’t get that conversation. (more…)
Snow Quest: a second look
Spoilers abound. I will pad with text from the game, after which there will be
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You can hardly remember how long ago it was you first set out on your quest; it feels like months. Nor can you recall how long it’s been since you last saw another human being; that feels like weeks. Your memories have become so jumbled you find it hard to recall any particular incident at all, but you reckon it’s been nearly two days since the last of your food ran out, and at least three since you lost most of your equipment in a snow-slide, and now you are cold, hungry, and all but totally exhausted. It’s only some grim mixture of habit, determination, and stubborn refusal just to lie down and die that keeps you plodding on mile after mile after mile. But now at last the mountain range is in sight, and there you know your quest will end. (more…)
Snow Quest – a review of Comp reviews
The reviews of _Snow Quest_ were a puzzling mixture of the two cases we’ve considered earlier, _Duel That Spanned_ and _Beta Tester_. Here we had *both* a broad consensus on what the game was about and what it was like to play the game; but, we had a diverse range of thoughts on what the game meant.
This is what the reviewers agreed on: (more…)
The Russians on Adrift
This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen. Peering through Google Translate, I see one of the Russians has written:
Adrift, a pancake. So he rolled to the dogs, I will not play in this squalor. And the installer, and the player, and these fucking game, so they all burn in hell.
And these fools that write on it. Let killed.
–As a recovering Adrift author myself, I can relate. (Let’s hope God doesn’t speak Russian.)
The Duel that Spanned the Ages: a review of IF Comp 09 reviews
This is a review of the reviews of _The Duel That Spanned The Ages_, largely found with Yhlee’s index of reviews. Feel free to post a link to other reviews in the comments, especially if the review contradicts the conclusions I come to.
This is meta-criticism; the goal is to understand better how people play and read IF.
I’m not going to have time to get through all the reviews — the end of the Comp is coming up quick — so I’m looking to review games with different patterns of response. And we can quickly see that _The Duel that Spanned_ is a very different case than _Beta-Tester._ (more…)
More Cambodia
As I sit here at my Wi-Fi hotspot, just having logged in, there’s two Khmer sitting behind me. Two ladies in late middle-age. One of them is cradling the other, who has her head on her friend’s shoulder, and is crying disconsolately.
I haven’t seen anyone cry like that for a long time. Sometimes it turns into keening, sometimes sobbing. And she’s talking to her friend the whole time, explaining something in Khmer. And then catching her breath suddenly. Like a child. (more…)
