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:

• A sufficiently deeply-implemented simulator, to act as the “board” of the board game.
• NPCs must be able to evaluate the board for value.  (This would be tied in to the NPCs goals.)
• 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:

http://tinyurl.com/yev2ha9

Earl Grey Review

Okay, I really do not like tutorials.  I don’t like them because they’re on rails, because they’re usually tedious, and because they’re generally either presentations of things I know or I don’t care about, yet.

This game starts out with an unskippable tutorial.  But, the tutorial is part of the story.  And it’s entertainingly written.  I still didn’t like it, though.

Earl Grey is a fractured interactive fiction of manners.  It starts off like it’s going to be an IF of manners, but takes a hairpin-turn and becomes a spoof.  And it’s pretty impressive that it can successfully spoof an IF of manners, that it can convey that to me, when I’ve never played one.

Still, I didn’t like it.

Problems with Face

Cultures are generally complex, and I’m not interested in rating them, in saying one is superior to the other.  But I am interested in that kind of cultural troubleshooting which is so popular in the West, and which is done by both progressives and conservatives.

And in my reading of biographies written by U.N. social workers, I’m noticing a pattern.

Something inexplicible happens, very often, when young women and girls enter into prostitution.  A little over a third of the time, I seem to notice this pattern.

The girl — I’ll stick with that term because they’re very rarely of age — is tricked or forced into sex-work.  She’s promised work as a seamstress in another village for good money, and then shipped to a brothel; or she’s abducted; or she chooses to prostitute herself because she needs money, often to pay for medical treatment for a sick parent.

Sometimes her madam, who might be an aunt or other relative, pays her monthly as a means of keeping her dependant; and then sometimes refuses to pay her at the end of the month, or doesn’t pay the agreed wage.

Sometimes, she’s just molested or raped, and it has nothing to do with money.

After that, what we’ll call the initial contact, she very often may escape the (usually exploitative) situation and return home.  Then, inexplicably, she starts looking for work as a prostitute.

Mill’s Methods (toward insight)

John Stuart Mill is known for his creation of the ethical system of utilitarianism.  The basic idea of utilitarianism is that an action is good (it has utility) to the extent it makes people happy.  There follows a complicated bit of hand-waving whereby happiness is (conceptually) measured and actions are ranked by the predicted amount of happiness they will produce in sum across the population.

What J. S. Mill is not known as well for are his rules for inductive reasoning.  And that’s a shame, because induction is a remarkably important part of the reasoning process, and it’s usually not taught at all, or taught badly.

Pulp IF? – Applying the F-H system to text game plots

In the last blog post, I reviewed the Foster-Harris formula for creating (let’s face it) pulp plots.  I argued that the F-H system is the minimal system for creating an emotionally salient plot.  Therefore, presumably, a F-H plot in a text game is the minimal design we’d need to get an emotionally salient piece of interactive fiction.

And I’m not saying that there is no emotionally salient IF out there, but the word on the street is that IF generally falls short of qualifying as “literature,” in contrast to pulp fiction (which is bad literature, but literature nonetheless).

So, what do we need to do to bring IF “up” to the standards of bad literature, according to the F-H system?