TIGSource Forums

EDIT:

This thread has turned mostly into me talking about my game. I'll gladly welcome any ideas that have something to do with what I'm talking about. The focus is still generated stories.

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I've wanted to generate stories for a long time. It's kind of my calling in a way. I have a lot of ideas about how to do it. I mean, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea. Anyway... does anyone else think about this? I like the subject so I'll just talk about whatever.

Mmm. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the player can express themselves in a meaningful way. I can tell you that my current designs have no text. I mean I'm planning to have no text in the game. The characters will have a wide range of emotion, which they will be able to express clearly, through animation/sound and behaviour (of which I am most proud).

The player will be able to interact with other characters in meaningful ways. There will be no dialogue options (kind-of obvious). All the interaction will happen through the game's core mechanics. And... the freedom/flexibility of the player's and other characters' expressions will be comparable to that of a real language. It won't be as powerful, obviously, but the idea that you're learning to speak a new language won't be a secret. Everyone will see it that way, you just won't at the beginning. There will be a kind of a "holy shit..." moment part-way through when the player understands what's happening.

I've spent some time studying language construction. I also have some experience designing software that will translate one language into another, accounting for context and other subtle things, and tools that will help a person learn to speak a new language. So I'm kind of comfortable there too.

I spend a lot of time deconstructing stories that I like, looking for their technical constituents, their pieces. It's like creating an ingredient list from tasting a finished dish, but I'm doing it with movies and things like that.

I don't have a lot of experience with animation but I know enough about acting/directing, story telling, and stuff that I think I'll create expressive characters without hurting myself. The characters will animate procedurally to match the generation of their opinions/behaviours. I like procedural stuff....

I like AI a lot. It's probably my biggest strength.

I'm kind of just talking about myself....

Anything interesting about these kind of things I'll reply to. You know, just thinking.

Do it.

Nice to see some interesting thinking and clever approach in this sub-forum. I am little bit afraid thou that this would be new Sims, but then you said something about learning a new language. Game focusing on that would be quite interesting. Then again we are not actually talking about stories so much but player-NPC interaction mechanisms.

Nah, not like Sims. It's more like Final Fantasy, Zelda, Prince of Persia, some platformer. You know how every "make a choice" RPG is 1-dimensional, or a series of 1-offs? Or you have Skyrim which gives a lot more flexibility but doesn't have a structured story? I'm thinking about something that gives meaningful expression in your play, ala Mario (personal opinion), but has the range of something like... reality, the structured adventure of an epic like Mass Effect, but plays deeply and exploratively like Deus Ex mixed with Dark Souls, and of course touches your soul like Journey, name drop, name drop. Though it's not really like any of those things, it's its own thing... obviously.

You grow to interact more fluidly with the people around you as you progress. There's this Pokemon/Monster-Hunter vibe where you encounter, study and capture creatures, but unlike those games you have to form relationships with them. The creatures are more like a half-way point between humans and creatures; they're still creatures but more directly relatable the way a person is.

The growth of your relationships, with the creatures and other people, are necessary for progressing through the game. There will be clear barriers in-front of which you will need to communicate effectively enough with others, or understand others enough, or search for the right partners before being able to proceed. It's kind of like getting "the hookshot to cross the gap," but you're getting "the developed inter-personal skill-set to climb the mountain."

The game will start off a lot more like a really straight-forward action/adventure, but there are beings and plant-life everywhere going about their business in independent, though interrelated ways. The idea that you belong to this community, or the abstract idea of a community, comes to you slowly. You spend the game playing it like a normal game, but also building up these relationships, learning about the world, learning your own abilities, growing, making choices, and learning how to communicate.

The "communication" is more like a platform from which to deliver story and more complex mechanics. Partner characters make an excellent vehicle for giving comprehensive player feedback. Whatever "language" they speak will be tuned to the mechanics of the game, so interacting with them will be like speaking to buddies on a headset in a multiplayer death-match, except there's no bullshit, the story is pre-built (i.e. good, because effort went into it), and everything blends with what's happening on the screen.

A lot of the time the value in having a relationship is just to have the relationship. Like in real life, your friends in the game give you constant feedback on what's going on around them, including how they perceive you and your actions, filtered through their own personal world view and current state of mind. They're always teaching you how to play, driving you in new directions, stuff like that. They're like a game-long tutorial in a way. That way I can make the game as deep as I want, then expect players to learn it, because learning from an attentive person is much more interesting than tutorials, text, and figuring it out yourself. The tutorial is the game and vice-versa.

The diversity of the characters' behaviours are the building blocks for generating a story. The world "behaves" too, the character's act on the world, stuff like that. A lot of "inanimate" objects have subtle personalities, the way trees can "have personalities" if you look at them in the right way, though they express themselves really slowly. In the game the inanimates would be a little more timely.

There's a basic "structure" for the game's plot. Individual players would experience it differently, certainly, and there would be a lot of replay and extended story and stuff like that, but there would also be core elements that every player goes through. The world goes through general transitions, characters have goals, certain things will definitely happen. There will be an invisible "story director," like the "action director" in Left 4 Dead, except you know, not platonic, that ensures basic structure is held. The result is a story-line that fills in a probability space that I have a lot control over and can reason about. I'll build it as carefully as I would a movie, I just have - what would you call it - "functional primitives" (?) instead of dialogue, blocking, and camera angles.

You could say my goal is to make others feel the way I felt when I played FF7 when I was ... 11(?), except they have far more control over the way things develop. It will feel like you're being guided along, but you still get to express yourself, be yourself. It's literally you in an adventure. It's hard to state in simple terms.

Also I want it to be deep like Go. Go is like a conversation if you rock at it. Sports fans see a ton of stuff in their favourite sport. I'm also influenced by Poker, fighting games, shooters, hard-core action.... You know, why not.

Anyone who thinks about procedural stuff, come at me. I'm ready for you.

I don't think about procedural generation because it's merely a way to create content (the other way being by hand). It says very little about games.

I am, however, very interested in believable, open-ended and complex worlds with believable role for players to fill in. Any such world would necessarily result in playthroughs that would be interesting to retell, the so-called "emergent narrative".

I wonder what kinds of actions would players use to communicate with NPC's? And what are they going to be talking about? Like, is it going to be proper communication, or just a puzzle masquerading as communication?

Haha. Well, generating content is not a substitution for doing things manually. First you have to do enough stuff by hand so you can teach a computer to generate things just like it in greater variety. Turning to generating content as a way to avoid manual labor will only result in sub-par content. I'm not talking about a short-cut.

I think generation is the future of games. It's hard to say why easily. We certainly have some way to go before we're generating voice acting at movie quality level. We've still got a-ways to go before we're doing it consistently manually....

Yes, the emergent narrative. That's what I'm going for, the mythical holy grail.

Yeah, ok, the actions thing. That's hard to put into words at this point.... hmm.

Think of it this way. When an expert plays Starcraft, or Go, or Halo, or whatever, you can get a very good idea of what's going on in this player's head if you're an expert too. You can get a whole lot if you know the guy. The little ticks in his behaviour will communicate distinct personality traits and feelings. Even Mario communicates a lot. I love Mario. The key issues with these kinds of communications are thus:
  1. You need to know the game really well to get it.
  2. The player generally needs to know the game really well before he expresses himself through it in meaningful ways.
  3. You probably need to know the player personally to link behaviour to emotions in the most interesting ways.
  4. What you do glean from the player's play is not necessarily information that would allow you to "converse" with him in-game, through game-play, in the most relevant ways to what's going on in the game.
  5. Even if the above things aren't an issue, observing the mental state of the player actually takes a lot of careful observation on your part. I've watched a lot of pro Starcraft. I always need commentators or I don't know what's going on. The game was built to be played, not to communicate. Viewing the game as a collaborator/opponent is very different than viewing it as a spectator.

Now think about soccer. People fucking love soccer. I'm learning to love it. A lot of shit goes down on the field. What you see is just a bunch of dudes animating a mile away on a green background with a high-res texture. But people are attached to their teams like a religion. The humanity gets communicated.

Think about Guitar Hero. What if it actually taught you to play guitar, had an escalating free-form campaign - in which you expressed yourself increasingly - and had cooperative play that leveraged these facts? A lot is said between professional musicians in a jam. It's all emotional, sure. But in a game it can be a lot more. Guitar playing is a small sub-set of games.

People love Machinima. Red vs Blue is a small edition to an evocative engine.

It will be proper communication. It won't be a puzzle masquerading as communication. That's like Monkey Island, or bits of Earthbound - which does a surprisingly good job of making you believe otherwise.

In the game you will talk about the things that are most relevant to the game. In Fallout 3 for example, conversation is always about nothing. Gameplay is about choosing destinations, preparing for a journey, fighting, customizing, upgrading, buying, exploring, yada-yada. The conversation is about "the story." The game would have been a lot cooler if both the mechanics and communications we're focused on the same things. Really they're just two separate things that intersect in controlled ways, providing contrast and assist.

I'll bring in Team Ico to the explanation. In Ico you drag Yorda around, you call out to her, she comes to you, you hold her hand to make leaps, you help her up ledges. In Shadow of the Collosus you interact with the Colossi, you interact with the horse; both interactions are very subtle. In both games it's more like you're making decisions based on the mechanics, and then the world is reacting to you as if you're communicating with it, re-enforcing the meaning of your actions.  After playing for a while you start to think of your actions in more narrative-like terms. Your actual decisions are controlled by the rules. The story just guides your attention to where it should be. So when playing it's like you're making narrative decisions, and the world is responding with character, even though you're not really. It's a clever illusion. (I love those games btw).

Ok. So. Imagine if the characters had a wider range of emotion. Say Ico could interact with Yorda in 3 ways, instead of just one. Now say the meaning of each interaction is partially influenced by context. For simplicity, say 1 interaction is the call, as it is in the game; the second is an "attack," like an emotional berating, yelling at her for making a mistake, punishing her, being a dick; and the third is a conversational, like chatting, maybe consoling, mostly sharing your current feelings.

Ok. Now say each interaction existed on a scale, just 1-dimensional. The scale represents the intensity of that interaction. Let's say there are only 3 notches. So for example, there are 3 degrees of calling to her, each indicating how urgent or demanding you are being. Maybe you can't choose which intensity you use; it's entirely dependent on your "state". As you play the game the system is measuring what you're doing. It assesses if you're panicking, if you're ruminating on a puzzle, if you're goofing off, if you're in the zone (i.e. succeeding), if you're playing slickly, if you're playing smartly but executing sloppily, stuff like that. Ico's state of mind shifts around depending on how you've been playing, and based on what's going on in the scripted story.

Okay. So let's say you're stuck on a puzzle and frustrated. This is a hard thing to measure, but let's just assume that we do it well. Ico demonstrates his feelings subtly in the way he moves (procedural generation!). The biggest key to his state (of mind) is when he communicates with Yorda. Maybe you do the "conversational" interaction. This queries Yorda for help. She behaves in a way that indicates how she feels about her current situation. Maybe she's making nonsense noises - as she does - as she walks around with you, gesturing at things (procedural!). If she's in a good mood she'll be more helpful and springy, and she'll offer more insight (keeping character, obviously). Note, the insight would be very, very subtle. The puzzles in Ico are very delicate. They would have to re-designed to accommodate this stuff. If Ico is frustrated Yorda will be more helpful; Ico will show his frustration through his tone. However Yorda might slowly lose trust in him as a result (only slightly). Each interaction is a window into both characters' minds.

Now, as you play, Yorda is transitioning constantly. Since you're always interacting with her you're consistently building this idea of how her mental state is developing. Understanding her is like looking for ships on a radar screen. You get a blip every so often then extrapolate movement. From this you can determine how your behaviour affects her - also, you're constantly giving off your own cues in your animation/sound and mechanical execution (the things you can't control).

Yorda could then be leveraged by the devs (me) to smooth out the rough edges in the puzzle design. Yorda is already supposed to be your "key" to escape; she literally opens locked doors. That stuff is all scripted. With procedurallity (??) she'd literally become a necessary component of your journey. You would learn the link between your play, Ico's changing state of mind, and Yorda's reactions. Slowly the barrier between what you'd like to say and what you would say would disappear. Yorda too would be able to communicate increasingly complex things.

I don't know how well that communicates the idea.... I've had to work on this a lot already... I mean near full-time for years. There's a lot of stuff to it. Also note, Ico isn't really a good game to justify the work-load of the procedural stuff and the communication. A game has to be designed around those features from the beginning. That's what I'm doing, sort-of.

So yes, real proper communication.

I'll use one more analogy. I love fighting games, but I suck at them. It takes too long to learn everything. RPGs however I rule at. I don't grind, get treasure, and I'm careful about side-quests. I think some (lots of?) people are like that. Anyway, I love repeating a boss over and over, slowly tweaking my strategy until I own his ass by a slim margin. I get super pissed when the ceiling in the game's mechanics is low, meaning I can't go a huge distance just on my own ingenuity. Most people aren't like that. Most people are confused by stats, or they lack an understanding of basic fundamentals in-order to see the strategy in making good decisions. I didn't know grinding was a thing until I grew up. I mean, if you make poor decisions about how to level your characters, or where to put your resources, you can mess yourself up for way later on. Like you need to know your stuff. Anyway, I suck at fighting games.

The depth of a lot of games are out of reach without the proper mindset because there are too many things you have to learn to get peak engagement. I tend to love RPGs more than the average gamer because of how I think. It took years before I started to love shooters, because I have issues with staying focused on the necessary elements when navigating in 1st person. Timings and combos make fighting games elusive to me. Starcraft, I'm sometimes pretty good at, and other times terrible; it depends on my mental state. Either I focus enough to tend to the fundamentals or I don't. I don't have enough practice to make them automatic.

Ok, so here's the thing. The difference between a skilled, deep-playing, fighting game player and a novice is large. The barriers that one needs to overcome to cross that gap are often not spelled out by the game. This is true of Starcraft, high-level Diablo, pretty much everything. That's why casual is hot; games are hard. Anyway, if a game experience could guarantee that a player makes it to the deep-playing level, say by completing the campaign, then you'd have a game that teaches players to communicate in that game's "language". (Games never do this. Some sort-of do, but not without serious bumps. Completing the campaign usually means completing the story-line.) If that same game had you communicating with other characters in order to proceed, in a way that was mechanically and narrative-ly consistent, internally and with each other, then that game would teach you to communicate in general.

Imagine the Ico example, but by the end of the game you're inputting commands as complex as you would in Tekken - automatically without thinking, intuitively. The result is an expression that could be appreciated by an un-initiated viewer, and would be understood and reciprocated by in-game characters and other players.

The game is in a way a training ground for learning to express yourself. The expression and the gameplay are linked, so the expression and the mechanical meaning are mirrors of one another (like how an experimental jump in Mario looks experimental, even to someone who's never played Mario before).

Mmm. I guess there's a lot of pieces to it.

So the game tries to mind-read you so that other NPC's can see what you, as a player, not as an avatar, feel?

Mmm. It's more like how you feel filtered through the lens of the avatar. Assuming there's a single playable character, you (the player) would be expressing yourself through him. NPCs would react to some blend of your personality mixed with his.

Think about Mario. He's pretty Mario no matter what. If you've never played before, maybe your personality doesn't shine through that much. As you play, Mario becomes a closer reflection of your ideas, what you want. Obviously you hit some boundaries early. It's very hard to be un-Mario.

In Skyrim you slowly embody your ideal person. You don't really animate/look different - you have different armor; you play different.

Ok. So it's like a combination of the two. At the beginning you are role-playing this character. Maybe it feels like the beginning of FF7. The story is baked but you have this control over exploration and pacing. Over time you gain more control over how you develop and what you can do. I think at some point you become exactly you, or something very close to you within the context of the game. You're super distinct like a leveled up Skyrim char, but with the freedom of expression you feel in Minecraft, except of course your decisions are reflected through your person instead of your creations.

In simpler terms you transition from what feels like a linear role-playing experience to something more open ended and expressive. Your character is always bound by his personality, i.e. shaped by his past decisions, but is always growing so can eventually become whatever you want, as long as you stick with it. For example, you can never behave in a way that breaks with your character. It is impossible to create an inconsistency. If you want to be someone new you have to create the long history for that person the be the natural conclusion of your actions. So there's always this filter between what the player feels and the character expresses. You're never not role-playing.

It's kind of like waking up in someone else's mind and slowly gaining control over them. They slowly become you. Except of course you're in Never-Never Land.

And of course the game is built in a way so that you pursue activities that let you be a person that you want to be. Nobody wants to be straight themselves, not usually, unless they find an awesome version of themselves.

In a sense, yes, the NPCs "mind read" you.

You also have a great deal of choice. Like life, some things you can choose to express or not, and some things trump your choice.

Does that make sense?

Hahah, I know that talk. I love Jon Blow. Very, very wise designer.

He, uh, has lower hopes for the role of story in games. He sees the
potential of games in other areas. He gave a talk with the creator of
Miegakure at some event in the last few years. In that he described
things like orthogonality in design. The talk was called, "Truth in
Game Design" or something like that. Or maybe that was just the point
of it.

He contributed the most important phrase that he has given me in that
talk. It was something like, "games exist to deliver a truth." I used
to think, "games deliver an experience." I prefer his perspective.

He likes to talk about games as a vehicle for discovery, for both the
creator and the player. He says you should find something that is
true, represent that through rules in your game, then explore that
truth and see where it takes you. Game development is like a
conversation, not a plan-and-execution.

Some of that stuff isn't original... okay, whatever. No one is
original, but I liked it a lot. It did feel fresh, and I just like Jon
Blow.

Anyway, assuming you love Jon Blow too, I'll leverage that fact for a
counter-attack. There is nothing about a story that can't be
understood and deconstructed into its constituent parts. When a
screenwriter sits down and loses his(/her) mind for 6 months straight
over a script, he(/she) is going through some, definable, mental
process. He forms relationships between ideas in his head. Maybe he
goes out and gets some new experiences. At some point he expresses
them on paper, according to the restrictions of his contract (or his
initial impulse or plan or whatever), his understanding of good movie
form, and his understanding of the perceptions of others. Each
construction is a neurological event transcribed. One idea connects
with another, and another and so on. The writer screens these ideas
using some formula, then ends up with a script.

A story is a real thing. Ideas are kind-of non-tangibles; they are
very tough to define; they are context-sensitive. It's hard to explain
them to a computer. I mean the Microsoft Office paper clip avatar is a
testament to the inability of computers to understand what I want. Or
maybe that's just Microsoft.... But they do exist. You kind of have to
define an idea using other ideas, then those ideas with other ideas,
and around and around you go. But that's the way humans work, and
humans aren't that complicated... sort-of. We're 2% genetically
different than a chimpanzee? How complicated is a chimpanzee... oh
boy....

Games are systems. You create a system, explore it, then arrive at
experiences you could not have originally projected. Ok. Let's assume
that I can take any idea and transform it into its fundamental
components. That just takes some effort and experimentation. Then I
can project those parts into the game. If the rules from the
experience transfer, then the experience I had in mind is created.

The amount of work to bring an idea over (into the game) is
substantial. Creating an experience in a computer is an order of
magnitude more complex than creating it manually; that's game
development. But, once you do bring it over, the value begins to
multiply. Mr. Blow demands that all game development should revolve
around the uncovering of truth that extends from the properties of the
game you're developing. I agree with the intention of that
demand. Stories certainly contain some kind of truth. Ideas can be
measured. We have to generate stories. We don't even have a choice.

The idea of a non generatable story is just one of those things that
we say to ourselves because generating stories is so hard it puts us
face-to-face with the infancy of our collective understanding of
computers and design theory. Though that's definitely not a knock on
anything you said. We're just really bad at expressing our ideas, even
to each other, let alone to a computer.  Creating great stories
manually is a high-power job. Generating them is like a free ticket to
insanity. Who wants that?

I'm not claiming I'll generate things that will rival great books, and
replicate regularily, but I think I can top the average man-made video
game story. Throwing in the high degree of player input that comes
with any great game, I'll get an even better story. Then I'll steal
the credit for all the heavy lifting done by the players until I
overdose on cocaine and stupidity.

Story and plot are different, yes. You say player-generated plot is
the way to go. Ok, maybe this is me misunderstanding
terms.... Consider FF7. I love that game. Any FF game before 13 other
than 11, and maybe not 1 will do. I played FF7 at literally the
perfect time in my life, like a lot of kids, so just assume that it
was incredible. In FF7 I felt a strong degree of control over what was
happening. The plot was largely out of my hands. There were a couple
of points where I could swing events, like controlling who I dated at
the Golden Saucer, whether I got picked by the gangster boss to be his
sex service, when/if I got Yuffie etc. Those things mattered, a lot,
but they weren't the core of the experience. The key plot points were
out of my hands. All the major things happen in a pre-scripted order,
with cutscenes and awesome things. In Skyrim for example, I control
the plot massively, sort-of.... Well, at least I get to control the
order of things. That game doesn't really have a plot to me. It was
more like a dungeon crawl in an art gallery. In FF7 I felt I had more
control over the story than I did in Skyrim.

Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Skies of Arcadia, FF7, they're all the
same; the plot happened, I watched. In-between major events I did two
things: explore and/or prepare-for/engage-in battle. The exploration
was my opportunity to control the pace of the game. In FF7 I chose how
I navigated the environment. As I walked to the edge of one screen, or
the invisible boundary of an area, the camera angle shifted, to
another, often well chosen, shot of me. I was directing the pace of
the cinematic. Maybe I was in a hurry, or taking-in the scenery, or
scouring for treasure and enterable rooms. In town I could choose who
I talked to, how long I wandered around for. I could risk triggering
the next event by hitting the action button in high risk
areas. Sometimes I would just run back and forth between two
screens. Sometimes I alternated between the decision-making required
for shopping and wandering. Sometimes I was compelled to move forward
because that's what felt right. By the time the next major event had
happened I'd invested a good deal more in the character since the
last major event.

Cloud performed the same animations over and over. I looked at static
backgrounds. I read some text that didn't change, some of it
twice. Maybe I missed some. It felt like it was me playing. It wasn't
my friend playing, it was me. I remember there was a guy who loved
FF. He was the only one I knew who did. He was older than me. I
remember him sitting down at my PC and handling the controls for a
bit, obviously more naturalized to the environment - I had just
started my game recently - and I thought, "wow, he's Cloud too. I
didn't consider that." Of course it was obvious, I wasn't
brain-damaged, but it still felt novel watching him run around as my
character. It wasn't an invasion of my privacy. He wasn't controlling
my story. He was temporarily telling his own in a game world that
looked just like mine, that I was moving around in 30 seconds earlier.

What does this mean? I have no idea. The power for a player to tell a
story is very strong, and he/she doesn't need much to do it. FF7
offered very little control. Really you could decide where you looked,
how long you were there for, and when you moved the story along. That
was it, that and fighting, a relatively simple mechanic. There weren't
any complicated algorithms. The computer didn't understand anything
about me. The game was designed just so that I could exercise some
control but never break from what had already been decided would
happen.

Earthbound made me feel like I was controlling a story. It was a lot
like Half-Life 2 in that way (I haven't played the original).  Both
these games are good examples. In Earthbound I felt like I was
discovering the plot myself for most of the game. Half-Life 2 was a
little more obvious, but the flexibility in the approach to combat was
enough to make up for it. Also I was very young when I played
Earthbound. The Mother team just laid things out in such a way that
you were guided instead of fed. They populated the world with little
vignettes that massaged you into the correct mindset. It was like
undergoing suggestive hypnosis. You know it's happening when it is but
you don't care; you play your role.

There is a big gap between that experience and one that is totally
under the control of the player. One of the assumptions that the
Open-World RPG makes, typically, is that a player needs to be able to
do anything to feel like they're expressing themselves. But this isn't
true. A child who has parents that create no rules is often unhappy. A
child with too many rules is unhappy in a different way. The best home
has the right rules. Children need the structure that guide them to
the areas in life where they can express themselves and have a good
experience. The modern Western RPG is like the lax home, and the JRPG
is like the strict home. Every other game with a strong story
component pulls from one of these two poles. Minecraft has very little
structure, Dark Souls has a ton.

:). Yes it's a complicated problem. I don't think it will take genius,
just uh... persistence, something like that, maybe a little more.

So here comes the kicker. One of the most compelling experiences you
have in gaming is when the narrative, whether loosely structured like
in Minecraft, or heavenly spooned to you like in FF13, lines up with
your personal experience in the mechanics. In FF6 for example, or "3"
on my cartridge, the game felt so real partially because I had
control (in the same way I described having it in 7), but also because
the battles were so intense. I had never had to think and focus and
refine my strategies so consistently in a game before. I'd just sit
and sit and sit, and master. I'd grow, right in front of my own eyes,
with sweat slipping the controller in my plams, my eyes glued to the
screen, and my thumbs bouncing buttons like piano keys. I would
overcome what had seemed like an insurmountable challenge, through
ingenuity, persistence, talent, and growth. Through battles I related
to the characters in one critical way: struggle. I struggled when they
did. When the rest of the story played out I was so much more in-tune
with what was happening. When mechanics and plot combine, the
experience explodes. Players are story generating machines. They pour
creative content into their own imaginations and the machines in front
of them non-stop. There is a potential for story creation in games
that far exceed any other medium, because games are collaborative.

Aside, think about the power of mod communities. Woah, what if you
could harness and channel that into a single product?  Right now it's
a wild-west with mods, or a Mr. Rogers with user-gen content
distribution.

Counter-Strike was a community creation. Hell, indies are a community
creation.

Okay. Where most games go wrong, when mixing story and gameplay, is
not lining up the feelings produced by one with the feelings produced
by the other. They just don't do it. It's not like it can't be
done. It just doesn't happen. Let me name a few games off the top of
my head who do do this... hmm, Zelda, Metroid, Mario. Uh
oh. Coincidence?

You know, players give excellent feedback about how engaged they are
at any given moment. There's a lot a game can do to determine how its
generated patterns are impacting the player. There's a lot of
potential there.


I wonder what the best way to describe it is. What you've said isn't
inaccurate. The plot isn't something that generates out of
nothing. Minecraft is totally free-form. That's not what I'm thinking
about. The game I have in mind has a general structure. There are
transformations. Imagine you are a rock star putting on a concert. You
show up with a vague idea of what you are going to do, and you
improvise. You react to the crowd, you let it out from the hip. That's
where it's at. You still have songs, your songs have structure; you
just understand them well enough to bend them to your will only using
your intuition. There's no other way to be on stage, unless you're a
big giant loser.

The kinds of intuitive relationship you have with each piece of your
music can be coded into a game. The story will have structure and
flex. I'll shove in themes and ideas that I love, and the system will
find it's way from one point to the next, maintaining the
relationships that I built, and taking into account what the player
has to say. I wouldn't provide any more flexibility than what could be
handled by the AI.

Also, players will learn to compose music. ... oh shit.

The computer doesn't decide rules. I decide the rules. When you write
a script for a movie the first thing you do is spend a shit-load of
time coming up with ideas. I've read that 5-10% of the time in writing
a screenplay is actually writing the screenplay. Nearly all of the
time is pre-work, and the rest is revision. There's this mountain in
the writer's head that doesn't hit the page. The dialogue is just the
tip of the iceberg. Then the director, then the actors, then everyone
else interprets the finished thing. They take those iceberg tips and
build their own associations down into their own minds. At various
points things need to be brought together. The team communicates with
each other and the writer, looking for clarification on how everyone
perceives what he's written. They activiate all his unwritten
knowledge at one point or another. Ideas ripple out from his mind into
the rest of the team, until they're eventually hardened into a final
thing.

The writer has the ability to do rewrites. He can express his ideas to
suit different directors, or the various needs of a single one, and a
million other constraints that stream in. So much never makes it into
the movie. The writer in a way is a collaborative story teller. He
starts with a piece of a thing, a basic structure, then bends it to
blend it with input from the much more powerful voice that is the rest
of the team. What if his mind was in a computer? All the rules he
spent developing in his mind could be put into a machine. Then we'd
get the same result, except reproducible, digitally. Oh yeah....

Note. Writers have a hard time collaborating. You really have to
communicate with someone else to share script duties. The process is
too personal. Look at the diversity of film, the lack of
diversity. Script writing is hard. You don't see companies of writers
for a reason. They only work in teams for some tv shows, and those
come with a packaged structure. If you could illustrate your ideas in
a technical form, it would be possible for two minds to build a story,
or 3, or 4.... go, goo.

There will be a strong sense of authorial input. It will be possible
to generate predictable player behaviour and have the game play itself
if I wanted it to (say for testing). In other words, there will be a
definable median playthrough, from which every other play through will
vary from in some way. You can think of Doom as an analogy if you'd
like. In Doom, if you were to draw out a player progression graph, the
player's play space would expand and expand, climax, then contracts to
a single point, representing the next locked door, or necessary
entryway, then repeat. Imagine the same graph in n-dimensions with a
little more variety in progression. There are abstract "gates" in a
sense, that are defined in rough ways. Some things need to happen
before other things, and so on.

Mmm. Also, since everything is procedurally generated, the quality of
the graphics can be scaled dynamically and context-senstivitiely, if
that has any meaning to you, or anybody. Goodbye loading times.

This is turning into my diary.

Ohh, I'm watching that Jon Blow vid. I had forgotten, in this one he
fights for the potential of story-based games. He did a talk a year
ago - one of his most recent - where he seemed a lot less positive
about it, though a lot more confident in himself. It was also during
that talk that he gave the single best answer that I have ever heard
to how to make good educational games. The particular question was
framed as calculus I think.

Note, he talks a lot about mechanical experience and narrative
experience blending. He calls it story meaning and dynamical
meaning. Those are good terms too. His biggest knock is that it's too
difficult to predict the development of a creative product to stabily
develop a logical one beside it (i.e. software). A small change in the
mechanics can have sweeping interpretations by the player, totally
destroying the narrative meaning; and a small change in the story can
have enormous costs in re-developing all the code to match
it. Software implementations of creative ideas are exponentially less
malleable than ideas on a page...  but they're exponentially more
productive once they stabilize. Oh the ironies....

The solution is to develop the story-line and mechanics in tandem,
retaining flexibility in both. Plan: find the best summary of the
desired experience, implement the minimal narrative and mechanical
structure to deliver this experience, repeat. Grow the experience out.

When I say procedural, I mean everything: the sound effects, the
music, the story, the animations, the characters, everything. 'Tis
necessary... well, sort-of. The alternative is just a lot more
complicated to talk about.

God, I love Daft Punk.

You know, I've never played a Metal Gear game. My god. Who am I?

yeah we've become pretty good at giving the player illusion of agency. but how much cooler would it be to get rid of the smoke & mirrors and do this shit FOR REAL.

A lot.

I was thinking about doing a roguelike with procedurally generated stories at one point. There was a core principle I realised - stories are not simulations.

For example, when writing Lord of the Rings, Tolkien didn't roll a bunch of dice to decide if the good guys won their battles. He just wrote that they did. He didn't plot the position of every individual in middle earth then work out who the protagonists met on their journey, he just wrote that they bumped into whoever they needed for the plot to advance. All stories are written like this, full of contrivance and coincidence. A good story hides the contrivances, but it's still there.

I was going to go about generating a story the same way. Let's say you generate a town full of random people. Normally in a story the protagonist never meets anyone who doesn't further the plot. So I'd have the game remember which generic NPCs the player talks to and when it needs a character to fill in a story position it could pull from the pool of NPCs that character talked to (where appropriate of course).

Perhaps you discover that the bartender you talked to earlier is the leader of the local cultists when you burst into their hideout. Perhaps that weapon store owner you bought a knife from earlier is a lone vigilante who turns up to heroically save you after you almost get killed fighting monsters in the sewers (not because the game scripted you to lose, but because you attacked monsters that were above your level). It adds the sense of narrative that you expect from a story.

Stories are not simulations, yeah. Skyrim is kind of like a story simulator, except it only simulate 4 things. Good stories have to be written.

Reading what you wrote, I'm thinking about it this way. Imagine all of your characters as a resource. Maybe you wrote some interesting characters, and some interesting things that could happen between them - details about their relationships. You have a box of dialogue, feelings, behaviours and so on. The contents of the box are divided nicely into categories. You have exciting stuff on the left, Clara's stuff on the bottom, anything that comforts the player in the middle, and anything that goes well with the 3rd and 5th dungeons marked in red.

When the player is in a situation, you say, "what would I like this character/player to experience next" (this is from the perspective of the machine, or you the developer). Then you search through your box for a piece that fits, given what's already been used and what constraints are on the situation: who is where, what the character's current state is etc.

Some items in the box have generic labels. Some dialogue is like, "when Clara is pissed and frightened and underground," or, "any child under 3 when the hero has just been foolish." You just fit stuff into slots.

You want the player to have control, but you don't want to allow a mediocre story to play out.

Have you looked into façade theory and implementation papers?

Are you talking about the software design principle?

He's talking about this game: http://www.interactivestory.net

I checked it out. I think I've heard mention of it before but forgot about it. It's interesting.

I like the voice work. The game feels very smooth. It's artificially "low budget" - probably from being low budget - so the behaviours are meaningful. I feel a lot of emotion just from the characters' positioning, body language, and facial expressions.

There's a lot of work to make voice blend with procedurally generated content; voice, hand-drawn art, mo-cap animations too - anything man-made. Facade seems to make some assumptions about how the player will fulfill their role, then gently guides him back into place by only re-affirming constructive choices. That's how you train animals, children, unsuspecting people; that's how you do it.

The biggest issue with the game is its lack of guide rails. It is very easy for the player to get into a position where he doesn't know what options are acceptable, so he is left to choose between doing something that probably wastes time or doing something that progresses the situation.

It reminds me of those dog collars that shock the wearer when it steps outside of an invisible, underground, fence. Dogs put in that position tend to roam extremely small areas (far smaller than necessary) out of fear of repercussion for failure. The repercussion of exploring the game is doing something with uninteresting or non-existent results.

Actually, I'm kind of reminded of the freedom I felt playing adventure games - point-and-click - when I was a kid. Back then I felt like I could do anything. My choices were pulled from my vast databank of life experience, so my whole history was engaged. Those games became trivial when I started to see the tiny path you have to walk down; I still like them.

I suppose half the fun of Facade is figuring out what you can do and can't do. There isn't a ton of consequence for being wrong so the value of doing that is purely explorative; it isn't connnected to the game's primary experience. There are two games in Facade: one of playing through the story; the other of mapping out what's allowed, within the "realm" of that story. You need to be in the mood for both to get the value of out either, and one doesn't necessarily rev your engines for the other. A lot of "exploration first" games fit this description. Skyrim, for example, relies on a desire to explore and a desire to role-play, but doesn't use one to inject the other.

But Skyrim is successful, and rightfully so, so whatever.

A lot of story-like, proc-gen, game attempts focus too much on the tech. They often miss the more important point of what decisions the player is allowed to make in the first place, and how they are presented, and how they contribute to the game's vision. Facade doesn't make this mistake, so it's interesting. Too bad it's only half a game though. Mapping its experience even on to something that suits it naturally, like a riddling adventure game (Monkey Island), would increase its value immensely. However, the creative force that builds up the mechanics would have to be in-synch with the one that did everything else.

There's this lack of unity, in vision I guess, that usually prevents proc-gen, and malleable story lines, from being interesting games and real narratives. We're not really short on a new AI paradigm (well, maybe a little), or tech explosion, or whatever. We just don't have enough design experience for blending all of our ideas to feel natural. We're just budding designers. AI is like fruit from the highest tree.

Thanks for the link.

things you should read

http://www.edge-online.com/features/future-videogame-ai
http://emshort.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/the-act/#more-4857
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3761/beyond_aiml_chatbots_102.php?print=1Suzette
http://aigamedev.com/open/reviews/facade-ai/
http://www.interactivestory.net/papers/MateasSternDAC05.pdf

EmShort is the industry leading figure for video game dynamic  character and story design. Here is a bunch of categorized group of article she made and is not only insightful but practicable:

http://emshort.wordpress.com/category/characterization-in-games/
http://emshort.wordpress.com/category/conversation-modeling/

Other thing you should look for:
Behavior tree:
http://aigamedev.com/open/article/bt-overview/
http://aigamedev.com/open/article/behavior-trees-part1/
http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/02/24/introduction-to-behavior-trees/

Thank you very much. I will read all of it.

:). The behaviour trees. AI is my forte. But thank you anyway. I read all AI literature anyway, always. For perspective, and to be a jerk: I'm currently build a poker AI, which will play the game very well, and will be able construct training schedules for me to play as well as it, optimally. That's where I'm going to get my game funding from.

You talked about, in another post, predictive complexity, like me predicting an opponent's moves in a fighting game. Poker is all that; mechanics are really an excuse to predict. Everything else is about being one move head. That's the connection between the Poker AI and the game one (i.e. "conversational") - also, both are very "soft" logic i.e. intuitive.

I'll post my thoughts on the articles once I've consumed them.

(Still reading most of your input toast_trip & the thread)

I believe this has more has deeply to do with how the NPCs re-reacts not what the player does, thats the whole problem with "sandbox-alignment" games. Sometimes I think "if the NPC wasn't coded to ask the player for anything, would they really give a shit about what the player does?" Sometimes this is where MMOGs fall into this pitfall where it becomes apparent that the designer lazily created this conflict for them & then tacked on this long ass text for what reason when people skim thru it.

The problem is NPCs don't care about one another enough, the entire game is built around the problems of the player-char as if everyone was waiting for the player to reach them. Who were they before the player even got into contact with them? More importantly, who are the others NPCs to one another - you stated some awesome games; in FF7 Barret broke down when his crew died in vein for his anger here he felt guilt & loss, in Journey you are alone in this world that no one knows so when you encounter another player online, progress is strengthen by the mutual fear of the unknown yet the beauty of the world.

Guess what I'm trying to say is, systems need to span where NPCs are more than just dolls to one another, its that cool little thing in Skyrim where you see NPCs talk to one another but to take to another level could create a deeper purpose where the conflict has nothing to do with beating the game but seeing how NPCs deal with one another & the world itself.

One thing I loved in GTA 1 & 2 was you had to side with a gangster to unlock their half of the missions. This would piss of their rivals, they will attack you & you cannot even receive missions from the opposing sides until you start killing their rivals yet you needed to complete every side missions to move on to the next level. Imagining putting context under this where you expose the nature of their problems with one another, imagine spanning interactive systems like Karma where for killing another sides men would come back to bite you in the ass in later levels & then some. Procedurally generated stories have to start with the NPCs purpose, their re-reactions to the player reactions could be like a long ass game of ping pong. Along with Pacing + Timing, everything can hit just right.

No, NPCs would definitely not care. One of the worst feelings is when you exist in a world that has not life of its own. A world like that clings to you like saran-wrap. Not cool.

It creates melodrama. The goals given to you seem hollow, and patronizing. It makes many interactions boring. It pushes you out of the experience. It makes you not care about who is who, and what they do. You may as well not be a character at all.

Those are lifeless worlds.

Character construction is non-trivial. Movie makers fuck it up, authors fuck it up, and game-makers, for whatever reason, really fuck it up. I still don't know why that is. I think there's this divide between writers and the rest of dev, so the writers are more constrained than otherwise, get treated poorly as a result. Their work isn't prioritized.... On top of that, the writer can't control what the character does, so they're left creating story in this independent arc from everything else. Hence the text walls.

It's a result of everyone trying to do their job simultaneously, without a lot of cohesive direction.

The issue: mechanics get designed first, then characters are put in the world. By that point designers are struggling just to give the play experience they want, so NPCs become vehicles for enforcing "level design." By level design I mean the segmented construction of challenge segments. So in Skyrim it would be individual quests, "exploring" a particular area etc.

Writers shove everything else into the empty spaces. Obviously this doesn't work. NPC creation needs to happen in tandem with everything else. The obvious difficulty here is that the NPCs need to evolve with the mechanics. If you change core gameplay, all the NPCs might have to be reconsidered. This reality is daunting. But it's not a time-waster, as so many devs believe. It is actually an opportunity. Evolving NPCs, iterating on them, produces a much healthier design, and firmer integration between all the pieces of the game.

In Journey - maybe you know this - the devs started with the idea of player interaction. That was more important than the sand and the plot. They said, how can we make player-on-player gaming be more meaningful? So they developed the rest of the game around this idea. That's one of the critical reasons why it worked out so well.

I'll build up my AI while I prototype. So the NPCs will be learning to play as I do. They will have the same powers and options as the player, though obviously with different restrictions and goals. They'll also have their own personalities. That way I'll be able to prototype how all the characters interact from a very early stage.

One of the biggest mistakes less experienced AI designers make, is to design a system, then design the AI afterward. This is not a good idea. That is like writing a software package then implementing threading afterward. I mean figuring out how to implement threading afterward (then implementing it).

Do not do that! If you're a programmer you'll understand why.

I want my characters to feel so real that the player never sees the man behind the curtain. I'll raise my NPCs like babies, inside the growing environment that is my game.

Yes, generated stories start with robust characters. They are like the tools you use to build things, or the building blocks for a house. Faulting foundations will always crumble, no matter how genius your building is on top. But good foundations can take you somewhere.

Yes, everything can hit just right. You must control it like a conductor, but like a ninja. No one sees.

It's like you want more a social simulation than a storytelling generation engine

gimmy's posts are procedurally generated

Stories are built on characters.

Story telling engines are built on social simulations.

If I said to you, "let's focus on making our heroine more relatable," would you say to me, "no, let's make her journey more interesting first!"

Can't build the roof without the walls. etc.

Create an NPC that reacts believably and you are in a much better position to manipulate the story. So many dynamic story lines in modern games feel contrived because the devs try to manipulate weak constructs that weren't designed with dynamism in mind. etc.

moi has a good point.

edit:

Still going through those articles.

I liked that GDC vid with the Wooga guy talking about core gameplay loop. Best social/casual games talk I've seen.

I'd have to disagree on these first sentiments, create an interesting journey and then make the heroine react believably to the events that unfold during it, whether the player/reader relates or not is largely out of your hands. The goal creates the journey, the journey incites the reactions, the reactions define the character.

Or they try to manufacture "relatable" personalities only to make them seem contrived and flat.

It depends which character you are talking about.

Start with the player character, Skyrim's for example. This is a game where the events are chosen independently of what the character might want to do. Its approach is to flatten barriers between the player and his desires so that he(/she) can roam wherever he pleases. The issue with this is that none of the player's actions connect together in a meaningful way. Every decision exists in an independent silo and has little to no affect on how other events play out. ... I'm talking about in-game connections. The character's "story" exists in the player's mind.

The core engagement of Skyrim is to do whatever you want. Since there are so many things to do, and each thing is given a lot of character and detail, its flaws are a worthy trade-off. However, if it tried to be Final Fantasy and retain a comparable degree of player choice, the plot would feel contrived... or the player would feel forced along a path i.e. there would be very little freedom.

Characters have to be built out of details. Humans are built out of details. We experience one thing then the next. Our personalities are a reflection of all the things that have happened to us. Each event we experience produces a reaction in our minds that stitches itself into our selves. When we act, spectators see pieces of that fabric reveal itself in varying ways. The fact that everything within us is intricately connected, using some twist of reality as the thread, is what makes us relatable and interesting. Other people watching us see pieces of our experiences through our behaviour.

Flat characters are products of non-relatable details. They are built out of experiences that the writer didn't think hard enough about, didn't feel very strongly in the first place, or didn't translate to the page effectively. They are also, often, inconsistent. Each part of them doesn't seem to connect to the other parts in a way that seems believable to the audience. This is often because the writer didn't spend enough time understanding why each character makes the decisions that they do, how each decision connected to the owner's past, and how that past is a plausible reality in the manufactured universe.

Maybe it would've been better for me to say that characters and their journeys should be constructed in-tandem. If you construct the journey first, the characters have a higher probability of being weak because you'll need to invent reasons for them to continue through each leg, meaning you'll probably choose traits for them that you don't relate to, meaning they'll become less believable. If you construct the characters first, you don't have this problem - a character can go anywhere - but you may find him(/her) ill-suited to the journey you'd like to see him in. You may have picked that journey because you happen to find it interesting and want to tell that story.

Forgetting NPCs, if you want a player-controlled character to make meaningful decisions and be reacted to in meaningful ways, you have to restrict what options he has to a certain degree. If he can do anything, then it becomes much harder to build a believable world around him. Every game has invisible tracks. There is this hallway that the player walks down that may be very wide but still gently guides where he can go. Even Skyrim has one. If you want to make connections between the player-character and the world you need to restrict what decisions he has available and how he reacts to events, intricately. NPCs, in-order to be interesting, need defined personalities. That limits the range of interesting interactions they can have. Either you flatten the plot so that it has no structure (Skyrim) or you restrict the PC.

If you want to develop a story you have to develop all the pieces together. You have to iterate. You can write in a linear way, defining the world and characters as you go, but you'd still be deepening each element at each stage. If you developed 1 character's move set in Smash Bros completely, then another, then another, and so on, you would end with a very disjointed game. Doing that would be similar to designing chess by choosing how one piece moves at a time. The depth of chess emerges from the intricate relationship all the mechanics have. The relationship between depth and internal dependencies is just as true for interesting stories.

I'm not planning to develop all my character then construct scenarios. I'll be developing both at the same time. The mechanics, the structure of the narrative, the characters, the artwork, the sound and music, will evolve one step at a time. That's how most games should be made, and I think that's how most people do it here.

What I am saying is that good games are built on good fundamentals. Lemmings were made cute and interesting before the idea of a "level" arrived. Prince of Persia was fluid animation, a couple mechanics, and artistic influences before it become a game. I'm probably preaching to the choir. I think believable interactions with NPCs, that allow you to express yourself, that produce naturally emergent consequences, that suit the world, and that flow out of and back into the mechanics, are just as hard to build as any other mechanic. Most games that try for these things, and fall flat, do so because they shove the development of the character interactions in at the end.

Mario is fun without coins and mushrooms and moving platforms, or death and time limits. All of those things, plus secrets, power-ups, bosses, and funny-moving enemies, build around the solid foundation. You could say that Mario was a "platforming" engine before it became a game. Mario 64 was just Mario running around in a white room, to nail the feeling of motion, before it was anything else. Creating that first was a command from Miyamoto. I'm suggesting building the comparable white room for characters, in which NPCs are interesting all by themselves, and react to the player in compelling ways before anything else is added. I want the act of expressing oneself, seeing the consequences, then acting again to be engaging all by itself.

Naturally everything will continue to develop as pieces are joined.

If you need a journey to make a player's choices interesting then the player's choices probably aren't that interesting to begin with. That's where I was coming from with the walls+roof comment.

Though I think we're just talking about semantics. Game dev is game dev.



Yeah, that's even worse. Flat characters have no personality and are uninteresting. Manufactured characters are flat and insulting.

The problem is you're focusing on traits and mannerisms, not driving forces. Traits and mannerisms can help define a character's presence but it is the wants, needs, and virtues (or lack thereof) and what the character is willing to do to achieve or maintain them that make a character compelling. It is internal (and external) conflict, and something we can all relate to in one way or another.

This is actually where Skyrim really suffers, rarely does it ever give you any real reason to care about any of the characters or even your own outside of what is relevant to the gameplay mechanics. They focus so heavily on traits and mannerisms that they completely omit any kind of real internal conflict, and what is there is so contrived it just comes off as lifeless. Don't get me wrong, I love the game but definitely not so much its story.

Flat characters aren't the product of unrelatable details, they're the product of driving forces the player could care less about (and often it seems the NPC could care less about them as well). "Please good sir, find my lost magic sword! I'll just wait right here and do nothing proactive about my situation because it doesn't really matter to me, so take all the time you want. I'll probably just give you some useless potions for your troubles and then we'll never mention the ordeal ever again."

I mean really, if some guy randomly came up to you and said "Hey dude, I lost my sunglasses across town a while ago. I don't really want to go look for them so can you go find them? I got like 50 cents I can give you if you find them." How enthusiastic do you feel about that? This is essentially what we are given in games time and time again. Of course the characters are flat, they're wasting our time and their conflicts are anything but dramatic. The characters can have all the quirks in the world but if we don't care about their conflict or what they are doing in reaction to it then in the end the character is pretty much worthless.

The details complement the reactions to the conflicts created by the journey to reach the goal.



Edit: To give a good example, Monkey and Trip from Enslaved. That game really does an amazing job at pulling at the heart strings and showing the characters twist and turn under the pressure of the conflicts their journey throws at them. Ninja Theory did an amazing job at touching upon the humanity of the characters and you feel it all throughout the journey.

Semantics.

Traits are driving forces. The two are different sides of the same coin. We behave according to our goals. A goal is an abstract thing. It is the idea that we relate to that allows us to act towards what we want. A behaviour is a real thing that serves our goals. One is the other. You can take a character's goals and derive their behaviour. You can take their behaviour and derive their goals.

What you're talking about are characters with inconsistent mannerisms that either point to a goal that can't possibly exist, or one that isn't rooted in detail i.e. it is isn't interesting. Skyrim's NPCs have mannerism based on goals that have 0 detail. For example, "character who wants to be loved and is wary of strangers" could be a possible Skyrim NPC description. "Loved" is the goal and "wary of strangers" is a behaviour the implies a goal such as "strangers are normally implicitly condescending to him because he can't relate to them because he grew up under a rock (and is socially isolated), so he rejects them to protect his self image as someone who is worth talking to". Actually, that implied goal is probably flattery to Skyrim NPCs. (The goal is: to protect social self-image).

Anyway. Both goals can be summarized very quickly. To make the character interesting he would have to be injected with a lot of relatable details. A goal such as, "to be loved," is generic. "To be loved by a maternal figure who expects a lot, is rough around the edges, and forgives frequent blunders... because he is hyper-active, unstructured from a lack of belonging to a formal institution such as work or school - due to rejection for a slight oddity to blink too much - and in constant conflict with his passive mother," is a little more detailed. You can keep going and going. The more detailed you become the more naturally behaviours will emerge, and the more likely that they will appear consistent and trigger the player's imagination.

"Details" was a dangerous word. I meant critical details. The details you're implying are just poor ones. Good details and bad ones are totally different things.

Maybe I should describe the engine this way.
  1. Detail a character's goals and input it into the system.
  2. The system translates these goals into behaviour for the character.
  3. Interact with said character, as the player, to see if it is interesting.
  4. Repeat.


edit:
Enslaved is on my todo list. Monkey is played by "Golem" from LOTR.

"Wanting to be loved" is not a goal, it is loneliness. It is an internal conflict.

"Wanting to be loved by a maternal figure who expects a lot, is rough around the edges, and forgives frequent blunders... because he is hyper-active, unstructured from a lack of belonging to a formal institution such as work or school - due to rejection for a slight oddity to blink too much - and in constant conflict with his passive mother."

Unless within the story he is put in a formal institution (to conflict and challenge his lack thereof) which emphasizes his hyperactivity and blinking problem as being a significant problem and his conflicts with his passive mother has some real impact on the story they are just mostly wasted details. Wanting to be loved by a maternal figure who expects a lot and is rough around the edges is also just wasted detail unless he is in some way (even if indirectly) proactive about it and the person is specific (or winds up leading him on a crash course with specific people that do not fit the bill). The journey determines the worth of the details. Accomplishing a worthy goal takes a worthy person.

A goal is something specific, something the reader should understand and possibly identify with, and the character may not immediately enter the story with it but happen upon it. He may want to be loved and then happens upon a girl he is head over heels for and winning her affection become his goal and in the course of this journey all sorts of conflicts arise (maybe she currently has a boyfriend or a crazy ex) that he must contend with to win her affection (or not).

Once the journey has been defined then you should create details that suit it, details that add more drama to the conflicts and are relevant to the story. It is like working on a painting, the journey is your base sketch before you start filling it in with the details that ultimately bring out the work as a whole.





Also, "traits" are recurring mannerisms or behaviors, or physical or mental features, not driving forces (as far as a plot is concerned).

Noun: trait
A distinguishing feature of your personal nature

Noun: goal
The state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it

By the way, you do know Prom Week (http://promweek.soe.ucsc.edu/), ye? You might also be interested in the presentation (http://files.aigamedev.com/coverage/GAIC11_JoshMcCoy.pdf) they held at last years Paris Game/AI Conference and in the papers listed here (http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/project/prom-week/).

Regarding your game, Toast_Trip, maybe something along these lines:

Goal (Specific)
       |
    Values
       |
   Conflicts
       |
     Traits

A character's goal is what they are specifically striving for, a character's values are a measure of what lengths they are comfortable with going to to reach their goal (violation of these values, either by the character or others, is often a source of conflict), the conflicts are the obstacles the character contends with along the path to achieve the goal (how the character does so is what really defines him), the traits make the character more dynamic and add drama to the conflicts.

mmmM.

It's all the same to me. Interesting stories are goal-based characters meeting conflict.

So, following with what I had, I could say that he's worked his way into a University department with a lot of female professors. His most important relationships are with 3 teachers in particular. We can say that maybe his social awkwardness gets him relegated to a limited role in interactions. He blinks, is generally strange, and is unpracticed at even relating to people around him. Maybe he's over-sensitive to the approval of those teachers, and often has to recoup from the damage of their off-handed manner in his other social engagements (with people his own age).

He needs the approval to be confident. He needs to be confident to be respected by his peers. He needs the respect of his peers to have the insight necessary to show his better side to the female authority figures. He has to balance a loop.

If he shows his passion too easily to the teachers they'll pull away. So he has to develop closeness gradually. The situation for him is like keeping a beast on a lead, moving at a steady pace. His hyper-activity and absent mindedness do not make this any easier.

Maybe his mother had low expectations because she was drugged up all the time, so largely oblivious. Ok. Now he wants tough love. He wants an opportunity to be given to him, then challenged to improve. But he has difficulty showing his passion for a more meaningful project without dipping into his desire for a mother figure - and making someone awkward. So he tries to do his menial tasks to an incredible degree, to get recognized for it, then be given something more substantial.

Maybe he's trying to hang with a tougher crowd to put the "I'm already a little tough" attitude into himself, so that the profs he works for will treat him more aggressively, apply more demanding tasks to his workload. But he has trouble doing this without sacrificing some of his moral standings, often staying silent about critical issues when they arise when trying to fit in, consistently applying pressure that tries to marginalize his role within that group. The cycle repeats.

Past creates goals, goals inspire action. Personal weakness finds natural conflict. Journey is produced.

The problem you're referring to is like when the guys who built the Jack character model for Mass Effect 2 - she's the one with a zillion tatoos, is angry, is destructive, can have sex with - said, "we have a story for every one of those tats!" This made the tats more meaningful, and I'm sure made the game a little more interesting if you paid attention to her markings, but it does not fill out her character. A lot of writers misunderstand the point of having a past. The only relevant past is the one that drives a goal the character pursues in the story you are telling.

There's no point creating goals that aren't worked towards. Details have to be relevant. If there's a detail then there better be a conflict in which the owner makes a decision that serves his goals that is based on it. Keep everything in proportion. The more central the goal in the story-line, the more detailed the reasons for pursuing that goal need to be.

We're both talking about the same thing. All of the elements of a good story need to be considered at the same time. A procedurally generated story will come out of good characters doing things. A character "with goals" that isn't pursuing them doesn't actually have those goals. In that case the writer is just saying that some goals exist, but the story says otherwise. A character who actually has goals acts on them and meets conflict.

If there's no conflict then there is no goal because it has already been reached. If there's only a small conflict then the goal is reached quickly and the game is short, and that's fair. If the conflict prevents the character from progressing at all, then the goal doesn't make any sense because a character can't desire something that is impossible. (That last sentence may take some explaining).

If the character's progress is uninteresting then they aren't goal-oriented. That's a common occurrence in real life. To make a passive character interesting on their own you need cut out parts of their story where progress wanes. You can also make them interesting by presenting other truths about life through their passivity, creating an implied conflict within the viewer about what will be revealed.

This is all just terms I think. Maybe mine are unclear.

Ok. I caught your definitions. I'll clarify some differences.

A human's behaviour is directly proportional to their goals. Values are just me looking at goals from a new angle. You can say values and goals are different, but I also think its fair to say that a value refers to less practical goals, "spiritual" (ethical) goals.

In a story we only see a piece of a character's theoretical behaviour. I could hypothetically take any human and generate an infinite set of circumstance to put him through. I put him through one and write down how he reacts. I hit the reset button, so that he forgets, then do it again, for every circumstance. What I end up with is a list of behaviours. These behaviours form a 1-to-1 relationship with that persons conscious and subconscious goals.

When I say behaviour I mean those theoretical behaviours. You're talking about the behaviours that only show up in a story. Here comes a good example of having an engine. You want to define a character in such a way so that you can shift their goals dynamically and watch their behaviour shift with it, or adjust circumstance slightly - leaving the goals - and see their behaviour shift with it also. With a system like that it becomes very easy to test the robustness of both a character's goals - i.e. how interesting they are and how well they suit the environment - and your system's ability to translate those goals into behaviour.

Since all goals should be achievable in game, and all character should have weaknesses, conflicts will arise naturally. If goals are reached too quickly that just means the character wasn't dreaming big enough. You can define them accordingly. (A plausible human-life character always dreams, at least implicitly, big. No one doesn't want the things in a big dream, whatever that may be (according to what satisfies them), even if we don't consciously acknowledge it.)

You can also control conflict by biasing goals and the environments characters are in.

A lot of games do what ME2 does. They attach meanings to things that aren't meaningful hoping to inject life into the world, but the problem is that if they aren't meaningful to the story at hand they are largely just excess information that most players will look past. In other words, wasted writing and wasted time.

If the player cares about the story they inherently care about anything important to the story (which allows them to continue to follow along and see what happens next). I always felt Skyrim could have been much better if they made each of the quests like an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.

Each episode of BM:TAS plays out like a self-contained movie. Everything you need to know about the story is contained in the story and the events that unfold and scene locations are always relevant to Batman's ultimate goal in the episode. Even if you know nothing about the Batman lore or anything about Gotham City you can still follow along comfortably.

Skyrim, like most western RPGs, always tries to tell you the story outside the quest from a bunch of NPCs that don't matter through a bunch of dungeons that are mostly "just there". This not only brutalizes the story pacing, but often because of the gaps it creates between one event and another you get side-tracked and forget about the quest altogether only to come back later when half the quest story has already faded into the background.

In comics they try to emphasize ending every page with a cliffhanger so that the reader is always tempted to turn the page and see what happens next, and in this way plot momentum is maintained. I think that is what games really need to try for, ending every block of events on a cliffhanger and ensuring that the next block is never too far away, leading the player to the resolution like a trail of bread crumbs.



Edit: Regarding your post just before this one, I won't try and debate that because I think we'd just wind up going in circles (if we're not already), but I think either approach is fine if it actually leads you (the individual) to creating a good story (or a good procedural story system or whatever). So while I still prefer my approach (or terms) I can see the validity in what you're saying.

I've heard good things about BM:TAS. I'll probably have to view it some time.

Comics leave pages on a cliffhanger. A lot of games don't think about the play experience and the narrative experience as being the same thing. Each follows its own pacing rules. This is not good. There are a lot of ways one can serve the other.

In FF6/7 you get a story blast after a boss. Then you grind and wander. The story hits you when you were at your most vulnerable. You were proud and tired, more so than usual, and itching for a break in both the kind of content you were absorbing and the degree of effort you had to put into the game. This paces your grinding out, so the technical monotony is mentally refreshing. You also get more freedom at this point.

After you've had your fill of open-world you start to get pulled along again by events. A promise of an interesting boss and another story hit beckon you. One blast of energy pushes you into the void and the temptation of the next pulls you from it. The experience breathes in and out. Everything compresses and hammers you, then sighs, releasing all of your restraints.

It's even better when the story line reflects the degree of challenge you personally encountered. Secret of Evermore f-ing nails this. That's an underrated game. (It does have its flaws....)


edit:

Nah. I don't think there is any difference in approach. I don't have an approach. I just want a good result. If a story is bad I try to make it good in the fastest way possible. That's it. No other rules.

The internet always circles.

Another game that does it amazingly well is Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (even though its literal "To be continued..." ending is the laziest, crappiest ending ever).

There is never enough story to take control out of your hands for more than a minute or two but there is enough of it that you are constantly experiencing the story all throughout the game. Rarely are you engaged in action for longer than 10-15 minutes before you get another taste of the plot's mystery egging you on.

You don't have to know anything about Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, the setting, or the characters prior to playing the game. Everything you need to know is dished out to you once juicy morsel after another and you're always kept hungry for more.

The intro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFiLNc46jAM) is especially impressive, it pretty much lays the gist of the whole game out to you in just a little over 3 minutes. It is like the entire act 1 of the 3 act structure played out before the game even starts, throwing you right in the middle of the action of act 2.

*adding games to list*

I'm going through them. Thanks.

Great thread. Your idea of a game without dialogue that still has the interactions between the player and his environment is really interesting and I think there is a game in there which could be quite unique; let's say your character starts out with next to no means of communicating with others (like a child with Asperger's) and then through the course of the game learns/acquires/masters different emotions/behaviours that allow him/her to communicate with the game characters and environment. Think like Pokemon but with communication instead of fighting. Now you can have entire plot lines that are dependent on a specific behaviour or emotion allowing you to interact with a certain character. Instead of a one-directional story, you have 360 degrees possible depending on what kind of moods/behaviours you learn.

Depending on your own choices (pursuing the angst or optimism or rage and revenge emotions) you can have different AIs having different allegiances to you (something that was done well in TESIII:Morrowind), which in turn alter the story line. But as well as this you can pursue the idea of emotions and behaviours not as experiences but as tools; you aren't expressing your sadness because you are actually sad, but because you are hoping to advance this plot line. Then you can emulate what Braid does really well: the integration of the story line and the gameplay elements, seamlessly linking the actions in the game and the emotions it inspires.

TL;DR - The player acquires emotions, which alter AIs disposition towards them and hence the available plot lines.
Maybe this is completely unrelated to what you meant, but I thought it was an interesting idea.

@toast
Sorry to burst your bubble but what you are describing is flavor and ornaments. This is totally parallel to strong structure, without structure they come out as shallow (typical video game lore verbosity) but structure alone is dry. Experience writer find the structure first from hints of flavor and elaborate iteratively from it. Good design is always about knowing how to kill the darlings, you are still to enamoured with them to see through imo.

http://www.dramatica.com/theory/theory_book/dtb.html

Somewhere on the site there is a pdf version, master this theory before thinking about flavor. There is also a demo software to experience interactively with.

Like little Chinese girls. I wonder how the world would be if we didn't kill our darlings.

@zigzag

No, that's related. You described it pretty well. I like the analogy with the kid with aspergers. I want all of the things that you described to be true about the game.

In fact, the player starts off as an ethereal entity, watching the events of a world. They have no idea how to play. Through the pressing of arbitrary buttons, and watching the consequences, they slowly understand how to affect things, change them, guiding beings in constructive ways or not.

Over time their ability to impact what is happening develops, becomes more complex and deep, and personal, and permanent. They become more "permanent." At some point their decisions materialize as a consistent entity, that is them. Their developing being is a reflection of their decisions. (like the Fable good/evil system, but not 1-dimensional).

Then they can continue building their relationships, abilities, and skill in communicating. The player is a "new arrival" in a strange world, I suppose....




@Gimmy

Hehehe? No I'm not! But that's okay.... We can talk games forever and I'd eventually convince you that its a real story line and everything. For example, I've written the core constructs of every major character in television that inspire me - well.... I've done it for a whole lot. Anyway, whether or not I'm talking about "ornaments" is a reflection of my ability to identify what makes those character's tick.

What you're saying is similar to identifying the relationship I have with my parents and saying, "I bet that's really hollow...." Maybe! It depends! You probably have to meet them first and see me with them.

Your link. Yeah, yeah. I have an education in story theory too! I've read enough books on film structure and plot structure so that I can map out a given work blindly and fluently. A few times now you've taken my "philosophy" to mean "not really real." That's fair. But remember... I'm the math degree. I'd never lose sight of how something is programmed. I would also never waste time in theory that doesn't produce a good game.

"Structure" and character are indivisible parts. You want to talk about structure and character as these separate things. It's like AI guys - again with the AI :)... but AI programming relies on the same theory as all this other stuff.... They want a story line for this side-quest and one for that one, and one for that one over there. Then they want one for the side-kick, then one for each enemy, then one that controls all of them in some way to create dramatic structure, at least in a small way. Then they want a pathfinding one, and holy FUCK TON of individual rules that link each of your decisions to the behaviours of each NPC. It is this isolation of systems that produces terrible AI... design... etc.

Structure is meaningless without good character. You could say good character isn't a story without good structure. I'm not denying either of these things. I think you're saying the same thing, that it is all connected (right?). We just happen to be talking about "flavour," because structure is the easy part to program. Humanity is the hard part.

A lot of structure has to do with "things a character does," or "changes within them." For example, Act 1 is the place where we are introduced to the critical elements that make a character interesting and someone who has a goal/weakness that will play critical roles for the rest of the story. Act 2 is development, tension, resolution. Act 3 is results and loose-ends, maybe with another mini-climax or two - James Bond often puts a second, smaller, climax into Act 3.

All that is textbook. You can drill down super deep. That stuff may be as challenging to understand as anything else, but it's still well primed to be programmed. The parts where it becomes challenging are the parts where it interacts with character.

How does one determine the relevant elements of a character to introduce? What if circumstances change slightly, or a "quest line" is being formed dynamically? The relevant "introductory" details change. Maybe the player has seen some of these details already, from a previous "quest." How do we compare what they know to what they need to know, which in itself is abstract?

You need a way to take a character and slice them up according to whatever parameters you have. Maybe the characters are in a particular situation, let's say in some environment and participating in a battle against an enemy (alongside the player). Maybe they each have a "mood" that is a reflection of how the grind has been going over the last hour. Ok, now we've decided is the time for introductory details. We have new constraints. How should the NPC demonstrate the necessary knowledge to suit both his mood and environment? How should he do so in a way that blends with his current behaviour which is also guided by the goal to vanquish the enemy in whatever way he is currently pursuing? Is this even the right time for everything? Maybe different details should come out now because they better suit the circumstances?

Structure is easy. Applying structure to a character - an abstract thing - is hard. So I'm talking about the deconstruction of characters. Yes, they need a structure to play themselves out and all that. I'm not denying the value of structure. I'm just saying... I don't know what I'm saying. Structure and character are both important.

Also, thanks for the link. Your links are always good. This one is 1 under par.

When I work the story I consider structure and character simultaneously. When I talk about AI, I only care about the character, because that's the hard part.

When I develop the game structure and character will evolve together. There's no argument there. Even when I have 1-d personalities running around there will a core game loop, "3 acts" (you know what I mean...) and whatever degree of detail I need.

There's no confusion here. I'm just really, super, accustomed to AI design. So I hone in on the juicy bits first. Applying structure inside an AI is straight-forward. It is important, but straight forward. I don't need to talk about how to do that, unless you want to. Applying character to AI is the new part. That part no one does well. It's the reason why when structure exists in a dynamic story-line game it doesn't matter, because the characters and conflicts are boring.

In other words, structure is a thing that the world knows about. Proc-gen stories fail from an inability to deconstruct the abstract in meaningful ways, not the logical. There will be structure all up ins my game. Don't worry about that.

Good link.


edit:

You could say anything is about knowing when to cut an idea. Goodness comes from producing ideas. Greatness comes from cutting them.
  - Me


@1982

A lot worse. ... oh, you mean real people. Yeah, China.

What I'm saying is that you tell a lot of things but say you will get there explain their importance yet fail to demonstrate how.

Also that dramatica theory really look into it, it's not random link toss because you don't know theory. All your questions about character and how to bridge structure, process and flavor are answered.
also one big thing is to treat structure not as big inflexible how to, but a multi rez lend. 3 acts structure goes down to animation (tension and release) and is generally a very nested structure in any work (superposition of various arc, using it only as an overarching structure is loosing its efficiency.

Therefore if you can link function and flavor, more power to you, but you can't do it without a good inventory of all functions. Simple character map simple function in a singular story arc, like who is the hero, the opponent, the mentor. Complex story mixed character function, shift them over time, superpose meaning of story arc in one action, etc... Also strong structure give genre, people like genre which is a proof that they can like structure for itself beyond the character, also same character can be use in totally different setting and genre while remaining consistent, this highlight there might some independence from each other.

Hunh?

I'm not trying to fight you. I'm just talking about the things that are on my mind. I don't know what you want explained.... (:))

A game is a million pieces. I am talking about 1/100 of those. I'm not saying that the others aren't critical. I'm happy to explain some other piece you'd like me to, you just have to ask. Saying, "show me how it really works" is super vague. I'm a nice person, and I get something out of sharing, but I don't understand what it is that you're referring to.

Building a dynamic character is a big process. It is really fucking big. I think maybe one of the issues designers have is underestimating how big of a deal design theory is in general.... I'm not saying that's you. I'm just saying that in general.

Bridging structure and character aren't questions I have. I'm just doing the work. A character needs to be deconstructed into constituent parts. You need to identify each of the pieces, the same way you make a blueprint of a building. You need to see everything, in incredible detail, and how it all fits together. Writers normally don't do this because an intuitive understanding is enough. They can build such a "blueprint" in their minds by considering all the various properties their characters have, such as how they'd react to a situation they have planned in the story, whether they eventually include that situation in the story or not.

With AI that strategy doesn't work. Plugging structure into characters is trivial. Defining a character is what's hard. You can't rely on an intuition of "what a character is" when you're writing a dynamic story, because you have to teach a computer to understand the same things. The computer needs the same understanding of a character as a writer would, so the character has to be deconstructed in a technical way.

The same thing is true for dynamic designs. If you want a machine to construct a level, for example, it would need a designer-level understanding of how all its available level-constructs relate to one another in creating an experience for the player.

Hunh. I wasn't dissing your link. "1 under par" means good. In golf, a birdie is a very good thing. It was a compliment! :).

I will read any good source on story structure. Most books on "structure" that I read are written from a writer's perspective, so they're filled with writer-like details. The link you gave me is a little more technical, so it rounds out my library well.

I promise, I will read that thing through 3 times before I release. I have an ever-growing list of structural analysis resources.

Yeah, 3-act structure is a general template. It tessellates down. The general theory is this: introduce viewer to elements, show how elements play out, explore results and recap what happened. You can apply that template to any attempt to communicate to find flaws.

If you want a "how" or something, that's personally interesting, I'll be happy to explain it. I'm just not sure which how's you're looking for. A lot has to be implied in writing. I mean, I never talk about decision trees. A decision tree isn't powerful enough to handle the kinds of ideas I'm talking about. You can use it for very simple characters, but they become unwieldy fast. You need to introduce whole new structures to manage characters that are as rich as those in stories and as dynamic as we'd like them to be in games.

But I haven't talked about that because no one has asked. I haven't talked about threading strategies either, or ways to reduce load times, or ways to animate characters procedurally. There's a lot of patterns in development that you have to follow to ensure that you can develop fluid animations that reflect what you want, and that suit the characters and mechanics that you are developing. Splitting that workload among a team requires an even more articulate process. But I haven't talked about those things... just because. No reason. I mean, I'll probably talk about those kinds of things later... probably when I start doing a lot of animation. But if anyone's curious I'll explain.

There's some hidden "how" that you've hinted at in this discussion and our other one (about design). I know how to take the structure I've presented and turn it into the results we're both talking about, but there are 50 other steps involved, and I don't which ones I've implied that I need to explain. Sometimes very simple changes in definition can make a lot of things clear that weren't before.

I can produce a game that makes people feel as expressive as they do in Mario, or Minecraft, and shift it to other kinds of feelings given what I've said... then expand on it to give the player both more guidance and freedom. It would take lots of work; that's why my game is taking so long.

If I explain 1/10 of the process of something, and you say, "but how does it really" work, all that means to me is that somewhere in the other 9/10ths is something that is unclear. But I don't know where that location is without an example or something. So I just guess and talk around for the exercise, to keep my blood flowing, and I enjoy it. But it's not the best strategy for becoming clear. If you want me to take my theory and apply it to Zelda or something, while maintaining the series' modern level of accessibility, I can do that, if you point to the few areas where it seems to not work. But you've got to point to those areas for me to do that, of course if you're interested. I can't tell. I'm happy either way. We're all here to talk about ourselves anyway :).

I know I haven't explained most areas. Writing good characters is a lot of work. Writing a dynamic story is more work than writing a normal story. You have to do all these extra things. A bunch of posts barely explains anything. I need to know what you know, and what you're looking for, to understand what information might be interesting or useful.


Yeah, I know. Studying raw structure is better seen as a way to know how to apply it everywhere. That's how theory works: flexibility. We're on the same page on that one.

Why else would I be so crazy about theory :|. It's the argument that prioritizes example that sees theory as hard structure.


Mmm. I see what you're saying. This is what we were talking about way before....

Inventory of good functions. Yes. You need that. I do not deny.

I'll give you an example. Say you want to be a sculptor. Say you want to create the most beautiful and evocative sculptures possible. But let's also say you live in a time when sculpturing is a new art form and people don't really do it. There are no good tools. Now let's forget that a lot of sculptors just use a hammer and chisel and a lot of patience and skill.... Assume you want a box of tools, just for the analogy.

Ok. If you want to design good tools you'll need a working knowledge of sculpting itself. You need a box of tools to create the world's best sculptures, because that is our assumption. But you also need to know how to sculpt to know what tools would be the most useful. You need the knowledge of sculpting well to design the tools, the tools to produce well made sculptures.... It's a catch-22 common in programming.

The tools and skill-set have to develop together. As one improves it opens new opportunities to improve the other. I do not deny this.

All I am saying is that designing the tools in total isolation, without considering how they might be usefully applied to an actual product, isn't the best idea. A sculptor designing all the tools before working on actually sculpting is headed for a weak product.

I am reminded of the "step ladder" process that is way too ubiquitous in big-business game development. You probably know it. It's like, "draft outline, scope required resources, produce outline, research implementation requirements, create implementation plan, implement, user-test, polish, real-world test, release, support." Something like that. Nice easy steps, 1 through 8 or whatever. Start with a plan, produce a product, polish and ship. This obviously isn't the best plan for games, which need to be super iterative.

Theory design is the same way. You have to cycle around, developing your tools alongside the projected games that they could be used to build.

A lot of design theory suffers from asking questions that are too small. Design theorists find ways to structurally analyze the aspect of games that play small roles in a game's value to a player. I still have yet to see a single proper deconstruction of Mario. Jon Blow is the only guy I've seen talk about orthogonality... which is insanely important in good software design, and game design, both for creating deep mechanics and choosing initial mechanics (at an early stage in development) that have a very high likelihood of being malleable in the ways that you'd want them to be, so that they can hit the targets you'd like to meet but haven't defined yet, because you aren't that far along.

Orthogonality is also very important to designing characters that are very likely to play well off of one another. If you fill out a structure with characters, then try to manipulate it, you might be headed for trouble. ... though I don't know if that's part of the discussion.

...

I talk about all the "philosophy" stuff because I want tools that are most likely to be useful. If you talk about structure without considering why Mario is engaging, you'll probably produce a structure that will help only a little in reconstructing the value of Mario. If you consider why Mario is Mario while developing your (structural) analysis, whatever structure you produce will be of far more value.

If you create a bunch of tools, then consider "all the bullshit" later, you'll produce sound tools that will help you a good amount. But it will still be up to the developer to do the meaningful work. If you create a bunch of tools while considering "all the bullshit," then you'll produce sounds tools that will do a lot of the meaningful work themselves, freeing the developer to work on even more meaningful ideas.

The catch is that an AI can only understand the structure. All it can use are tools. If there isn't a defined relationship between one tool and its use, then the AI can't use it. An AI is a tool; it can only use tools. If your tools are designed in such a way so that much of the burden of creative creation is on the manipulator, then they will be very useful to a human, not to an AI.

The fact that good AIs don't exist is strong proof that most of our design theory is far removed from what makes a game interesting. Once structure is made clear, AI becomes a natural follow-through. You can use one to judge the other. In other words, if you can explain a thing to a computer, then by definition you understand it at a mathematical level.

I do not deny the value of strong structure.

Yes, there is some independence between "structure" and "contents."

I still think we're mostly just talking about semantics.

What sort of tools are you looking to develop?


---
edit:

I think we'll both easily agree that a story with lots of structure and 0 anything else is totally uninteresting.

However, structure is valuable because a person can use it to create something excellent. The structure doesn't write a story for the writer, but it provides a useful box of tools for the writer to use intelligently to write an excellent story themselves.

I value the pursuit of structure, just for structure's sake. There is a lot of value in structure all by itself.

However. When you want to start generating levels, and things like that - human things - the AI needs to understand how to apply structure, and manipulate the "non-structural" contents. If it doesn't it will generate stories that are just as bland as the writer "filling out" the structural formula.

I care about tools too. In our other discussion I would've been happy to just discuss tools. But you wanted to pursue why I used so much abstract stuff instead. This is the reason. Generative-anything requires it. But if you wanted to just talk about tools, I would've just talked about tools. I need tools just as much as you do. I just approach each one by thinking, "how would this tool be useful?" So I explain everything in a really abstract tongue. The reason I wasn't giving you what you were looking for was because I didn't understand what that was, not because I was defending some strange position. Give me a result, I'll give you a solution, otherwise I just talk about whatever is on my mind.

Also, as an aside, tools that put creative power in the hands of an AI, are also easier to distribute. If I take the structure of a building, I can divide the workload of its constructions among workers, because the plan has all the necessary details. If I do the same thing with a game, I am fucked, because a design implies so much interpretation. If there was a way to divide a game into pieces so you could isolate the dependencies between tasks, you could distribute them among people in such a way that didn't restrict creative freedom. The kind of theory that could do that is the same kind that allows an AI to be creative.

Just saying, because I'm like that.


edit edit:

I think this might be a case of artist and programmer can't communicate, especially over internet. Semantics, semantics.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21009942/finishHim.jpg)

That made me a lot happier than I'd like to admit. I actually laughed, out loud, like a real person. ... I feel a little guilty.

Gimmy, no hard feelings.

Yo toast, sorry if I sound like rude, I tried to get my point fast as i'm on borrowed phone and I have no time, so the form of the message might suffer a little.

However there is many point where I would disagree since it look like an ideal vision of creation, the so called romantic take of omg emotion is so volatile! The truth is that making good work is pretty easy, just follow all the discovered rules, that's why you can have it as a work, actually some people are excellent at this while not liking the art/genre they work with. However what's difficult is doing something new OR something that express a particular feeling that touch your sensibilities, the unique snowflake syndrome.

I believe those difficulties is more a byproduct of the difficulties of knowing ourself and the obscure part we don't necessarily want to get into, ie ambivalent feeling, rather than a distinct element of the art. Emotion is consistently moving, what's touching at one moment of our lifes might became disgusting the next, a simple story with rigid character can impact us because it's just the right moment for you (or a generation), regarding that there will never be a right good ay to do thing, I think that's what you called expression that can be a zillion things, it's the illusion born from the dance of feelings.

But all those things are still down to a bunch of word/structure function, all matter in the world are still down to a bunch of atoms. Therefore while chasing this volatile expression is okay, it will always be there as long there is creator, good tools or bad tools, after all platformer can still convey complex emotion (see rohrer's work), the problem is that we don't understand them enough to replicate them, at least good enough than even a computer can create a subset of them. Good tools/structure is not thinking about the math or logic but to find a way to have a container, just like grammar is for all work from shakespearean to troll insult on internet, it's not about good work, it's about covering the whole range of possible expression. If you can do that, then someone will figure out to make taxi driver base on a theory on montage.

When I employ the word expression this is what I mean, the huge range of work, from good to bad, the functional mechanics that bring the big bang of the universe, I want dna (four letter) that brings all the life form from a same base. You can't chase both, because you will limit yourself, I want unlimited expression, not just good (which generally mean What I like).

I also working on procedural stories, and I learned I get better result by breaking it down to component and studying their relationship: for exemple I have character function, stake, progression arc, storytelling, hammerspace, theme. This allowed me to find that I could generalize all plot to only 3 theme components: survival, social, acheivement, basically a summary of maslow ladder because it contain a description of all human need which give in return stories stake components.

For example I could take the story exemple you gave and feed it into my system and explain all the range of possible thing that can happen, where it breaks and what you can use it to create effect.

Let's look for exemple on the premise of romeo and juliet, purely from a structural point. It has 4 components:

Romeo is a montaigu
Juliet is a capulet
montaigu and capulet hate each other
romeo and juliet love each other.

It's obvious where the stake is even if it's implicit, there a paradox from hate/love, the information add up to a contradiction, this logical leap is called a conceptual breakthrough. I know I can present this in any order because you need all piece for the breakthrough to happen, there is no tragedy if one piece is missing, we can relate to this structure without knowing the character because it speak to our humanity (forbidden love, which is a mixed of social (sub theme is affection) and survival (sub theme is threat) theme). Therefore the use of flavor or ornament need only to highlight or understate those element through time to create the emotional roller coaster, talent will only amplify the ride.

Now we have a contradiction, a conflict at the heart of the structure, because the component are known we can see what are the outcome, basically for the contradiction to end there must be a change in the components states, it can be that one character cease to belong a group, that the groups stop hating each other, or that character cease to love each other, or you can introduce a new element that add a new stake on top of the existing. If you look at the story of romeo and juliet, you can see that the author choose the change in character groups, by faking death, juliet is effectively removing herself from the capulet, however it add a new stake since now romeo think she is really dead which bring the twist of her killing her lover indirectly which prompt her real death, thus terminating the contradictions chain. This is all structure, yet the story is compelling, the journey tell us something about humanity, we relate to the ongoing tragedy for itself. Interpretation of the story can bring new flavor or can bring new character without destroying the core appeal of the story, good structure give you timeless stories.

This deconstruction of romeo and juliet is pretty clear and is totally programmable, you can have a multi ending game based on it, with different strategy about resolving the contradictions. It give us also more power if we want to pick the theater piece and turn it into a whole tv season, we know we can pad by bringing stake on top of stake, (for exemple extreme padding would establish what it mean to be romeo in one season by bringing the character element and create conflict that are compatible with his traits, then follow by 4 seasons that only focus on one of the components with the final piece of information (for exemple that the two loving character belongs to rival faction) at the very end of the fourth season, you would have 52 episodes of 54mn just from the premise of the story. Some great series actually do just that and it's fine! Not sure I would consider this a great series but smallville got 10 seasons with this trick. It's pretty independent from qualities and give us a lot of power on focusing on just being good.

In short: focus on creating good structure before creating ornament/flavor generation. Once we solve the structure things, we got all leisure to perfect it with flavor. Mixing the two is a bad idea IMO.

The reality is you can take just about any character (composed of any details) and throw them in just about any situation for any reason and end up with a story, but unless there is a coherent point to it all that the reader/viewer/player can take away from it then it isn't likely to be a very interesting story (it becomes a joke without a punchline (http://www.peoplesrepublicofcork.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-34904.html)).

The goal of any structure is to pace the story and to help ensure that it stays on course and drives that point home. It is possible you can create a good story without knowing much about story structure just as it is possible you can create a color-balanced painting without knowing much about color theory, but in all likelihood you are just intuitively coming to the same conclusions the structures present.

Structure is important in written art for the same reason it is important in comedy acts, music, drawing, painting, martial arts, etc. It's a framework passed down through generations of studying to quickly teach subsequent generations core skills they can further grow, expand, and pass down.

I do agree wholly with Gimmy that you should lay out the structure first (so long as you have already decided the point of the story), though I don't necessarily agree that you should do the details, or ornamentation and flavor as he put it, last. I think most of that will come about as you lay out the structure so they kind of go hand in hand. The structure is your bus driving the story along the path to the point, your conflicts and details are the passengers it picks up along the way. Doing this ensures that you're picking up the right kind of passengers for the place you are going and that everyone's getting there on time.

I didn't say it come last, it's more that once you have a vague idea of what to express laying a complete structure first is a the next move. Only when you have a structure you can ITERATE on it with the flavor, you will have new idea or more precise sense of feelings, flavor and structure will influence each other, however you will have clear view of where things doesn't seems to work. The first draft is never the last, only the seed.

Ah okay, then we're pretty much on the same page there.

It's going to take me some time to come up with a good reply. I'll do it. I'll probably need to bring up some examples.

Most stories made by hand are already bad. Just something to think about.

Yeah, this is true. But that's for a number of reasons. First most game writers have big heads. They have big games so they think they have good stories. They get confused.

Second, it depends what you mean by story. Mario has a story that's told through its mechanics and the player's imagination. There is narrative when you jump on a bat's head. He swoops down and surprises you, you react unsteadily, but even-out into a corner-clip of his head. You knew you could make it, did so, then launch a shell off a wall to celebrate, making yourself small. Idiot.

In that case Mario isn't affecting the world in abstract ways, the way one would hope a "story decision" would in a proc-gen (story) game. But he could, and the reactions could be expressed purely through mechanics, in the way they already are.

It's kind of silly saying I want a good story _and_ have it generated, but it becomes much easier when I tie everything back down to the mechanics. At the current stage (of design) my game has no text, partially because of the "non-universality" of language/literacy, even in the menus. So everything will theoretically be expressed in means that have both a mechanics and narrative interpretation. The player learns the language through play, then plays to interact in that language.

I hope to keep the game close to the roots of games: interaction.

.

General note. I wrote a blog post, as a response to my various wall-fights with Gimmy. I tried to illustrate "how" some questions can be answered that I hadn't yet. It is really long. But it is very general, non-technical. You probably need some comfort with design theory to get something out of it, and maybe a little understanding of programming. AI would help a ton. I've thought in AI terms for so long I lose sight of "what pieces" of my ideas can be implemented with common knowledge and which require a technique or two. It's just a lack of perspective.

Anyway it is very long. It's also unfinished. But I realized I'll probably never finish it because of other work, and when I return to the topic I'll probably just write something different, or I'll just work on the game. So I figured I may as well share it. If anyone has the gusto to get through it I'd appreciate any feedback about which things feel light on the "how would this actually be implemented" front. That's where I need the most work in my explanations. It would also just help me in general. If you have any questions I'll probably answer them, eventually.

If you do go to it, trust me on one thing, all the techniques are me discussing things that do work with the right application, in the ways I suggest. Err on the side of me not explaining fully rather than me not understanding the problem. My solutions work but my explanations are... what they are.

Anyway, if you _like_ proc-gen I'm sure there's something there worth thinking about... maybe. You know, whatever.

Here it is: http://coldtheory.blogspot.ca/

edit: It's a little disjoint but the content is sound. (that's what I mean by unfinished).

You know how games like, can put you in the right mind set?

Like, when you go home to visit your Mom, her personality, and the smell of her food brings back your past? Or like, the water-front does this to me. I put on a Pat Metheny album and I remember how cool I am sometimes.... in my imagination. Or I do something else, like put on a Trance playlist and imagine a thousand people dancing outside under the stars... and there I am flashing with my clothes trailing out around me as I weave through the music, building up to something and releasing, again and again.

These kinds of associations are the "basis" (?) of memory. It's the basis of communication... and that's kind of a truism. What I mean is that we relate things to other things. In abstract mediums we relate using common principles. That's what some of the study of "music" and "game design" is about.

... I'll get back to this thought later. (It's related to the game).

I have read the blog, game you should play (i mean study, even with faqs):

thousand arms
princess maker 2
tokimeki memorial game boy color
sakura wars
valkyria chronicles
Valkyrie profile: feather of convenant (something like that)
Harvest moon a wonderful life
Gothic 3

What you have done have been already describe and structured, cotillion from evans and short notably, also the GDC about left 4 dead banter system, dating sims provide an (underused) framework that does mostly that (quite similar to facade drama management in general ways).

I can see we strongly diverge in the co author depth of story playing, I want a full debate, you want a flexible ride.

Also when I say we need more structure, you discuss them as a syntax level and I discuss it at the discourse level, we didn't meet eye to eye because I have already done (i'm not alone) all the observation you are doing now, there is no revelation for us (see emshort corpus of work) but I guess you are in the process of organizing the data for yourself.

Here is my early work:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/Love%20revo%20gamedesign%20not1.pdf
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/dnaofgame3.jpg
It cover implicitly anything you told about (beware of early gimmy speak and french diagram)
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/linear-interactive-storytelling.pdf
here is a thesis that describe some of thing you told about

In fact i'm more interested in the part of mario/HL2/Minecraft

MM... I don't really feel that way.

There is definitely some stuff I see you do, for sure. Right now I feel like I have enough theory to last me for a while. I don't think we diverge that much at all. It's just... how do I put this?

Deconstructions, like finding the grounding principles in a story structure for example, I did that like 3 years ago, then I broke down characters 2 years ago, along with mechanics. Right now I'm not really "exploring" anything. It's more like I'm summarizing (when it comes to AI design).

Like I see all these "simulation" kind of games and they're sort of behind me. It's not for the disrespect; they just are beginning to dabble in AI. So if you think I'm in that area, I mean, we're really not communicating.

The single most important aspect in good AI design is isolating the most compelling parts of a person's decision-making. If you want to have a character who "loves" you, and you want to now betray them, how do you determine what their best course of action is, to maintain reasonable consistency? Particularly, you want to get the most mileage for the data you have.

You have to define what "love" means. A lot of AI designers spend a lot of time on structure, and that's fine, but then they try to apply this structure to some scenario and it doesn't fit. The reason is because every situation is unique. You need to define betrayal as a series of behaviours/thoughts, and love the same way. That's the hard part.

I want a full debate, a flexible ride; I want everything. I don't know where you get this from. I don't make strong debates about the theory you have that I don't see. But you make strong ones about mine. It doesn't bother me. I just don't understand.

AIs need to be so flexible that every definition you give of a concept can be defined as an abstract series of relationships with every other concept, which themselves are all abstractly related. That's how a human brain is built. We associate with other associations. AIs need to be like this.

The idea that "some theory" can be found that produces a data structure that "all" behaviour can fit into is the single biggest misconception in AI design. It literally holds everyone back who thinks that way. Trust me... I left University because the AI schooling was so weak I could learn more on my own.

No one else on the planet can write a functional Poker AI - yet, but soon - because their designs are too restrictive. They don't account for the inherent flexibility of Poker. In chess you can "figure out" the game. But in Poker all that matters is finding patterns in your opponent, and they, being human, can create any pattern at all. Game Theory is the wrong place to start there, and that's where all the AI designers like to start, because it's easier. And that's why the world's best Poker AIs can't play even moderate limits of No-Limit, while Chess AIs can beat the world pros. And on top of that, Poker AI is 10 times more lucrative.

I have never seen an AI design that has the kind of flexibility in it to allow "concepts" to be defined in entirely abstract terms. There is always some "structure." Like, if your AI uses Behaviour Trees you are doing it wrong. There is no "theory of life" that we can find and run our AIs off of. You can find a theory for a particular situation, but not everything. There's a point where you've deconstructed so many scenarios that you realize that you will never be done, ever.

You could say I'm more interested in the process for deconstructing. In a simple sense my game is about putting players into a position where they run deconstructions for me. They feed content into the system, then isolate the relationships those concepts have with others, and I automatically use them as building blocks for the generators.

The reason I keep using analogies is because "theories" are only tools. What you need to pump up your AI is experience. You have to take your theory and just tear ideas apart, over and over again. You never stop. So I don't. Your AI should never run out of fuel.

Why does Chris Hecker's design fail? Why do most proc-gen stories feel forced or uninteresting? I mean, try and plug Facade into Mario so that the player expresses himself through mechanics? Are they close to that? Well, sort-of actually. I'm not dissing them; I'm just like that. They fall apart because their "structure" limits the definition of ideas. Once you pick a "theory of games" that your generators follow to produce ideas, you now have to define every idea using that structure. It will _always_ limit you. The most definitive part of the brain is the fact that any piece is flexible. That's what AIs have to look like. Then we have to feed them reams of data, from horror movies, from our love lives, from our favourite games.

You see me deconstructing all the time because I'm flexing my muscles. It's like you're like, "real writers have a theory for writing, and don't need to explore writing different things all the time." And I'm like, "the best way to improve your writing is to always write. It's when you think you've 'found the formula' that your creativity falters."

I know it always feels like we get into these argument, but I don't mean for it to be that way. The internet is just like that, or I suck at it.


----

Notes.

1. My blog was just on some basics, because I don't know what people know or do not know, or whatever.

2. I think by "flexible ride" you mean structured story. That was the focus on that post. I wrote half of the next one which gets into the, "how to turn that into something totally free-form area." I just started where it was easiest.

As an illustration, currently my game has this formula:
  a. It plays like a movie. It will just go an go forever, with everyone doing everything. The world will grow w/o the player, until...
  b. The player does something, then it starts to adapt to everything he does.
  c. The player can affect anything.
  d. I'm trying to put my generators as "low" into the process as possible, so things like the textures get generated (dynamically) based on several things, and hopefully as much else as I can.

3. Discourse is more complex to talk about. That's why I avoid it. Discourse is a personal discussion. Having a "theory of discourse" I already have. At this point all I need is more experience doing it. That's better left to the real world, applying my theory to find patterns. You think that because I don't discuss theories on this area I don't value it. So I dissect things and you go, "oh, _I've_ already found a formula for this; he's just not caught up." And I'm going, "nope. I've got your formula too, and I know that shit only lasts for a little while, and now I'm dissecting everything I touch, because I can never dissect enough."

You're like, "here's the formula for deconstructing combat systems." And I'm like, "here's 20 combat systems." I have so many formulas I can't express them in a post. It is literally thousands of pages of crap. That's what the game is for. That's where I express those. Here I just keep on deconstructing. When I get to the higher level deconstructions - the ones I'm actually working on - like "love" you get all, "save that for later bitch," and I'm like, "that's where I am man." I have the base formula that suits my purposes. You keep going back to that, and I'm like, "I really value your insights, but I don't need to write about that anymore."

And on that, I really _do_ value your insights. Nearly 4/5 times I read some guy who's like, "here how you generate stuff, or here's the "theory" for game design, or whatever," I'm like, "I _knew_ this shit when I was 19. Get over yourself." But I like your writing because it is to the point. You never quite deconstruct things in the same way, and you certainly don't stretch it so I have to re-read Mr. Mom's theory for the 27th time, and I appreciate that.

Gimmy love, all right.

You have a lot of perspective. Your life is valuable. Your personal insights make you a unique person. But when it comes to AI, when it comes to proc-gen, I just don't understand how the next move is going to come from someone who isn't technical. Right now game design is weak because we haven't learned how to forge art and design together. They have to come together. We don't program in the right way for real AI yet. What we need is a union of creative expression and technical implementation.

I give deconstructions and not their implementation because implementation is what programmers do. I can't draw to save my life, but I can take abstract scenarios and program them because that's what I've been doing for 10 years. I don't need to go over that shit _again_.  Finding the common constructs in a series of abstract concept is what programming _is_. That's programming. So I give my insights into concepts. That's the part I always need to flex.

I think we're a lot closer than you think we are.

Hopefully you take that all in a friendly tone. I have a good deal of respect for you and I don't mean any of that in an aggressive way. I write for the exercise.


----------

Ok, so I skimmed over your final link. Yes, it's kind of funny the similarities. Never before had I had to describe why certain tools would work, like why player expectation is critical etc. It's almost like deja-vu.

Here are the differences, that may not be obvious:
  1. The essence of my post is the tools, not their justification.
  2. My tools are far more powerful.
 
This might seem backwards. That thesis you have produces a similar theory as every other. It tries to define the basic components of people and story using a single structure. That's fine to begin with, but it will fail you once you start up with more complex topics. "Technically" the tools they describe are the same, but they aren't described in their most basic state.

The article admits that it can't create compelling book-quality stories with dynamism. Mine can. Not a joke. You need to take the tools it presents and abstract them further, into fundamental pieces, then see how they can most quickly be applied to existing life-experiences, how their output can be tested and refined efficiently, and so on. That is the next step.

-----------

I'll create a summary for you.

You have this list of deconstructions. You deconstruct the story, and the character, and the conflict, and the climax, and the combat system, and movement of information between players in a competitive game, and so on. And you're like, "we are _this_ close to covering _everything_." And I'm like, "no theory will cover everything." Write a theory that produces a single character that is as interesting as Don Corleone (from the Godfather - easy reference), and procedural? No?

Here you would say, "save that stuff for later," and I say, "the theory that deconstructs a single good character will be very different than the theory that deconstructs another." _That_ is the essence of good deconstruction. This is why AIs always feel so promising but never, ever come close to their aspirations. Because everybody tries to find, "the structure that will work."

Don Corleone is complex, like every other good character. Your theory will deconstruct some of him, but will then leave enormous chunks alone. In fact, it will leave the most compelling chunks alone. The artistic process is a real thing. We go through it because relating to things is hard. There is no theory. That's why it is a personal challenge, because we have to find our own personal way of relating.  Each character construction is unique to that character. Find me the theory for good character design? We've been writing books _forever_. So where is it? Surely if you can find the theory someone found it 300 years ago? No? Why?

This is what makes life meaningful. Expression is about finding the uniquness in ourselves. If there was some theory to produce our experiences then our individuality would be meaningless. To pursue a simple structure to define life is to trivialize it.

So it brings up the obvious question. What is the general pattern for deconstruction? What is the most effective way to define a character in general? I mean the most important pieces? If I had to define Don Corleone in 3 sentences, what should those sentences focus on? If I had 3 metrics that controlled 3 variables in my game, what should those variables be? If I wanted to use the same 3 variables for every character what should they be? What's the common structure _there_?

The best deconstruction for a single character is radically different than for another. Write the, "best summary," for 3 different characters from 3 different books in half a page. How different are they? _Hugely_. What is the common structure to express ideas in which all 3 summaries could live? And thus be manipulated through some obfuscated interface by the player?

It's this diversity in deconstruction, and necessity for flexible architecture, that underlies the proper design for an actual generative environment that produces content of artistic quality comparable to every other medium. If someone hasn't come to realize this I just start going, "you need to deconstruct more, keep going, you'll learn." Whatever structure you get will just break once you use it enough. That's why you can't find it _then_ build it.

It's like game design. Idea, prototype, test. You need to learn from your failures to find the common element in all of your ideas. You need to produce enough structure to realize than any structure only goes so far. Each time you carry a piece with you and learn a little about what the common element is among all of them. And I promise you, the most base element there is flexibility. When it comes to communicating with humans, expression, life-experience, the only core concept is change.

You could say that my system "generates" structure, and allows any new structure to defined dynamically, by relating it to any set of components, then be tuned using any language you wish. You can say, "oh, make him a little more like James Bond, but less cool, and more forth-coming." If I have other concepts in the system that are defined using any of those concepts, then it will understand that definition. So I can deconstruct a character using this system, then another using some other system, and the AI just uses both, and finds which one produces the more compelling being and learns which structure is more situationally useful.

I don't have to pick one system. I just keep throwing every one I've got in there. My characters are defined using as many systems as I can get my hands on. So you could come in and define a character using yours, and someone else could use theirs, and so on. I don't restrict the ways things have to be defined.

I've been doing this a long time too.

But I love your posts. You get me to write. Thank you.

Phew.


---

What part of Mario/HL2/Minecraft?

(thanks for reading btw).

It's too bad you lump everything I said into STRUCTURE and also leave out another point that is FUNCTION! But what I pointing out is the old dichotomy of data and structure, if you don't separate them you have poor power over the outcomes. Basically find the structure to fill it with data. All shakespear's works is contain inside grammatical structure.

However it's like you are saying "Knowing grammar very well does not make you an awesome writer" when say "not knowing grammar will make you a poor writer". Guess what! we are both right!

You said you have deconstruct character and story many case ago, fine, but you don't say how you have deconstruct CONTEXT which is what give "concept" their meaning, and to create context you need STRUCTURE.

Obviously you didn't play any of those game, especially tokimeki memorial I will use as an example here. Tokimeki is a very simple Japanese game and I don't speak japanese. The beauty came into that with simple expression and simple mechanics, they were able to cover a great deal of expression. Every girl is different and with the same set of of emotion you could still infer their own personality, desire, wants, emotional state, etc... Okay it's not Anna Karenin but a hint of what's important ... CONTEXT. Think about it a smile when you meet a girl is not the same when you know her for a long time, you know her more deeply and he might clue to something totally different, also maybe after a harsh talk the same smile won't be the same than after a kiss.

Also to be frank ai is simply choosing a coherent action, simple ai choose one action among many, complex ai blend them together to form complex behavior. At the scale of a character there is two actions: mental (action from the internal state) and physical (action in the external world). AI for character don't have to be awesomely complex, they can be baked to some degree (my EXPERIMENTATION lead me to believe this), the hard part is actually visual "believability" or some kind of visual animation realism, which is outside the scope of WRITING.

No, there's no lumping. It's just grasping for closest analogy. I'd expect you to read between the lines.


Duh. I don't diss grammar. I study it too. That's why I respond to your writing. All I am saying is that studying grammar alone without constantly turning around to produce increasingly meaningful game designs with it will stunt the power of that grammar. If you want a universal grammar then that strategy is not a bad one. If you want an AI, then it won't be perfect.

There is nothing wrong with what you are doing. I'm just explaining where I am at.


Duh. What do you want me to do? Give you all of my notes, and my brain? If you want to ask a specific question I'll answer it. But saying, "I don't know how to build your AI," is really vague. No shit. If you could build it that would kind of nullify the value of all my work....



Yes, I did not, not since you wrote that. I have my experiences and you have yours, and I've only got so much time in the day. Part of game design is designing based on what you do know, as well as learning as you go. I will play your games. I take your suggestions seriously. Sometimes I try to ride the line between aggression and respect. Why can't I be aggressive _and_ respectful. I am naturally both. :).

Yes, context is critical. You could say the best "grammar" for a section of story is context dependent.

mm... I define context sort-of like this:
  1. Everything about the game's state is measured.
  2. There is some action-reaction relationship: like a smile and a reactionary interpretation.
  3. There is some manually defined theory about what the smile means in general, sort-of like this:
       . smile is like happiness,
       . smile is like beauty
       . that particular smile from that character is like hope/love (for recipient)
       . smile has a sound effect(?), animation, and subtle lighting change, each generated from a series of principles that have their own associations, that in combination produce an associational weighting
  4. There is some definition of context:
       . every character's state
       . every generated thing
       . every manually defined property of the environment - these are all carefully tuned
       . a whole host of generated/automatically-tested values, like:
           - the sun is shining, and that brings energy, unless it's extremely cold, in which case relief is the strongest element (though it still brings energy)
           - the player's recent jumping, in a dangerous environment, is interpreted as "panic," from how he does it
           - the level design gives a sense of exploration, defined like this: 2 parts Indiana Jones, 3 parts uncertainty, 4 parts "like that other level" in 30% of play-tests that share a common trait with the current player
           - etc.
  5. There are some formulas that link reactions to context, by understanding that context i.e:
       . the relationship has just gone through a fight, so happiness here counts as a possible resolution
       . the partner has recently been lying, so happiness may mean dismissal
       . unless the partner is doing something obviously threatening, like pointing a gun, then the happiness means insanity, or cruelty  or something


Yes, it's outside of the scope of writing. It falls in proc-gen. It just so happens that key complexities between generated stories and character behaviors - i.e. animation - are basically the same. The only _real_ difference is the actual animating. The procedural parts are the same.

AI for character does not have to be awesomely complex. You're right. But the structure does have to apply to most meaningful parts of them (the characters). You have to find the most "summary" aspects of a behaviour and define it.

For example, take Luke Skywalker - he's well known.
  . he's brave
  . he's hopeful
  . he's complex

Ok, say the player controls Han Solo. Let's say Luke screws up. Now Han berates him. How should Luke react?

How does Luke respond to being berated? Let's look at his relationship with Han:
  . respects him
  . distrusts him a little
  . sees him as an icon of the "free life"
  . sees him as "practical," as-in not idealistic

Now Luke gets berated. How does he feel:
  . angry?
It depends on the context. If he's being berated for his naivete, he probably won't. If he's being berated for his idealism, than he will. I'd have to watch the movie again for clues.

Say Luke is defined like this:
  . bravery: when fighting the "good fight," not when having to abandon his existing duties, even if they are less important
  . hopeful: only when he can see a clear path, even if he has to underestimate the complexities of the future to do it; not when there are minor setbacks, particularly when they provide an issue he can't relate to
  . wants to be the hero: wants to be respected, but is also willing to learn to get there.

Pretty basic. The goal is to find the most "central" elements of each character/relationship. That way you can have constructs like:
  . this piece of dialogue demonstrates 30% bravery, 70% hope
  . this animation/sequence demonstrates 20% bravery in the face of physical danger, 50% bravery in the face of life-threatening danger, 30% distrust that the other speaker will follow through on his promises
  -> the number don't have to add up to 100... only in the dimensions that qualities share - you get it

But just "bravery" is useless. You need to have an idea of "Luke's bravery," and how it is expressed. Then you need to divide it into pieces. You might have: his bravery under pressure, his bravery when others are around, his bravery when alone, his bravery around his dependents, his bravery when his friends are in danger. Each type will have "core" qualities of expression, elements in the writing style (etc) that demonstrate each one the best.

How does Luke react to Han? Maybe you want to see just the impact on bravery? Now you need to know:
  . the context - let's say it's: Han is questioning Luke's ideals, particularly the ones to do harm to a friend for the greater good (i.e. commit the small evil for the larger good)
  . how Luke feels about that particular ideal - is he sensitive to it? is he afraid of it? is he normally questioned in that way by authority figures?

I don't know if this is clear: character design comes down to finding the most elementary elements of a character i.e. finding the 3 "ideas" that in various combinations cover the widest range of who that character is. Constructing them entirely of "hate, anger, sorrow" etc. won't work in the best way, because the most fundamental part of any good character is some rich complexity. The most defining element of any human is inherently abstract. If you now want to divide a human in two, you need a complex divider.

You need a complex deconstruction to produce simple tools. What I always see in AI design is simple tools trying to be leveraged into complex characters. And every time, people go, "oh shit, this won't work!" And that's because the tools don't stretch. They get mired in tools, the designers.

Your approach is constructive. I'm just showing you where I come from when I try to define all these really abstract concepts.
----

Deconstructions
(and context or something)

A final example. If you focus purely on the "grammar" you'll stay low-down on the pole. Humans are constructed of emotions, certainly. But deconstructing a human to that degree is an enormous task. It is a lot easier for me to start with the simpler problem. Instead of defining myself as the product of 8 emotions that occur situationally - that define every aspect of my character (however that works....) - let's try and define me using only 2 qualities.

What should these qualities be? I don't know. But I bet you their definitions will be very complex. Happiness and anger? Hell no. What character is defined just of those two? Cardboard characters. The grammer-first AI design always produces cardboard, for this reason. I'm complex. If you want to approximate that complexity you need to either:
  a. Deconstruct an entire human - an awesome task
  b. Be smart in your deconstructions.
So maybe I can divide myself into two fundamental qualities. Let's call them quality A, and B. We can combine them, situationally, to define my character. So we'd get:
  . 10% A + 30% B, or
  . 100% A + 100% B, or
  . 0% A+ 2% B etc
We can even create a quality in the sound effects and animation that represents A most effectively, and B most effectively.

What should A and B be defined as? Plan:
  1. Collect everything that defines a character: writing, concept art, whatever.
  2. Try to find the most even division among this stuff, so that two things are true:
       a. Overlap is minimized.
       b. The importance each pile has in the definition of me is equal.

Woah! This will produce an A and B that when used in random combinations produces the greatest coverage of me. Trust me on that. Tips:
  . lack of overlap and distribution of power produces orthogonality
(There is a function to determine the best distribution _exactly_, but we'll cover that later, maybe).

You require for each item in the piles:
  . a thorough definition of self - a break-down of its components - here's where you apply all your theories, as many as you want
  . a estimation of value (to the global definition) - like the picture of my mother is 2% of who I am, out of everything that is there

Example. Say I wanted to deconstruct cheese, as-in the component of my personality related directly to chese. Components (items in the pile):
  . delicious - wikipedia definition
  . pictures of cheese (with ratings on which ones mean the most to me)
  . a story about cheese eating as a kid

Now I need to say, look at the pictures. I do this:
  . split them by by type
  . split them by deliciousness
  . split them by price
  . split them by how much my sister likes them

In each split I assign a value - this is the amount each section means to me in the way I feel about cheese:
  . maybe gouda is 30%, chedder is 50%, and the rest is 30%
  . cheap cheese is 80%, expensive is 20%
  . cheeses my sister likes is 90%, and the ones she doesn't is 10% - weird!

I can divide them by association:
  . cheeses that remind me of rock music is 50%, 20% for classical, 30% for reggae
  . cheeses that I'd describe as "shakespearean" are 15%, dickens as 85%
  . cheeses that are bold are 20%, are smelly are 30%, are weak are 30%, and are nutty are 20%

A cheese can only fall in one category in each division. Of course we can do this:
  . divide into goudas, then divide into goudas from france, italy etc.

Divisions can be whatever you want. You can mix and match! You can deconstruct using whatever qualities you want. Want to do you emotions here?
  . cheeses divided by: anger, sadness, happiness, hope
  . then divided again by the same qualities, and again.
  . so you get: cheese falls into anger in first division, then anger again in the second, then sadness.
     -> this produces something like "mostly angry and a little sad"
Note! Each definition is based on its relative association with everything else!

I repeat for each thing in the pile. I can deconstruct, for example, the definition of cheese into sub-components, such as individual phrases. I can deconstruct anything that can be cleanly split in two.

:P. This is a formal way for producing two piles: cheese A, and cheese B. Each pile holds _anything_ that relates to cheese: pictures, descriptions, everything. Each item has an associational weighting relative to every other item, and value relative to every other item.

Then we run some function to split into the A/B that gives the most coverage, and we implement our animation primitives - or whatever - so that one demonstrates an A on a scale, and the other B.

_Then_ you can define a state change however you like. You can use any item in the pile - anything - and include it in your definition, and your generator will make the approximation, through dialogue, sound, whatever. And it will do so with the minimal number of core constructs. Yeah!

You don't need to commit to one deconstruction, and you get the most mileage for each piece of data you do construct, and more importantly, you use the smallest number of constructs in the game itself. You can deconstruct a character in any way you want. Hells yeah.

That probably only made a little sense. I'm just trying to give the gist.

You have just describe "prom week" (among other attempts of the same sort) ...

You need a complex deconstruction to produce simple tools. What I always see in AI design is simple tools trying to be leveraged into complex characters. And every time, people go, "oh shit, this won't work!" And that's because the tools don't stretch. They get mired in tools, the designers.

The reverse is also true: ART GAMES produce shallow experience despite trying to leverage flavor without structure.


Btw one of your structure is mostly [object][type of relation][strength of relation][relation target]

[cheese][reminds me][30%][of Dickens]

If one thing is missing from the structure it simply won't work

it's a low level structure, but without a high level structure you are likely to run into problem of mismatch and lack of understanding.

I think you confuse structure with content: It's not that I hold a structure that define all "lexicon", but HOW lexicon and semantic unit are tied together "the concept". Basically the syntax highlight fault, misstep and coherence. The structure is not the content, nor its description.

Take conversation in game, dialog tree are seen as a larger problem that simply linear delivery, why? because there is a function mismatch most of the time. Most game use conversation as gating, which is important in progression structure, adding more "gameplay" only clutter more this main function (arbitrary slow down, nothing progress).. But there is a mismatch between in game conversation and real conversation, looking at structure we see real conversation have different function than in game, because in reality we are in a progression structure, gating make less sense, however in game the real structure is not supported by progression as a structure. Because we have a clear view we can reconstruct function and structure that actually align with our goals.

I can see how you want to structure your game, basically it's a sims like without "genericity", character have definitive traits and behavior unique to them, certainly along a world model with a clear direction. I guess you hope to have a balance of goals and relationship personal to character so it move itself (like in cotillon but less open ended). However I'm not sure you have a strong internal economy structure for it to carry on without usual pitfall like deadlock, oscillation, local minima/maxima or plain dilution. I also don't see how you will handle common problem of story perception with out of focus action and clear feedback on agency of each character to keep the experience consistent for the player. Basically there is no CONTEXT structure and no CHARACTER AS STORY FUNCTION structure. It doesn't matter how finicky flavor and character are brought if the system produce loose overall experience,it's been done before.

My design handles all of these problems. You need to look a little deeper.

I only deconstructed a character in the example, but you could also deconstruct abstract concepts like, "a good story." There is no difference between the structure that keeps a character's actions in-line with his/her personality, and the structure that keeps his/her actions in line with whatever structure I've defined for the story.

I can say, "be tense for 20 minutes, taper off for 10, rise and climax in 30 - climax with a theme of love - and resolve in 5." As long as I define all of those concepts what is allowed and not allowed is handled in the same way for every element.

For example, if a character has a certain quality, and definition, then is put in a certain situation, there is a certain "reasonableness" for each possible reaction. I can also restrict what is reasonable by defining that character's role in the story. Say I have some simple concepts like antagonist and comic relief. I have some definition like conflict. Then for one section of the story I apply the antagonist structure to the character, and ask for a conflict, which may be required by a possible permutation of my definition for tension.

The secret to AI is finding a way to treat every element like every other. My definition of "context" is just as transient as my definition of Sherlock Holmes, if I choose to use my inspiration from him in my story. Context is completely removed from the AI's design. The AI is just a system for building associations. I can fill it with any concept I like.

But I admit that may not be entirely clear.

[tension][is a product of][conflict, uncertainty (or something)]
[compelling narratives are constructed of][introduction, rising tension, and denouement "story pieces"]
[a story piece is defined by][a sequence of independent events that relate in some way]

I can define any idea in any way I like. I can define conflict, and uncertainty, and so on, right down to their realization in character behavior. I make no distinction between the deconstruction of "cheese" and the deconstruction of "proper character introduction." Obviously the latter is more complex.

.

My definition of context is free-form. I don't discuss it because it's just as relevant as discussing my character designs based on my love for Naruto. You understand that once you understand how to represent a character structurally you don't need to re-learn how to structure a different character, you just have to analyze that new character and apply the structure. The same is true for any element of a story: how pacing is controlled, how long-term conflicts are introduced, how relationships develop so climaxes can be planned. It's all the same. I don't need a particular analysis of how stories are molded, because the AI will understand any. How I define a character and how I define any other structure are totally independent from one another. Make sense?

I think maybe there's a lot more to how my stuff is structured than even I understand. I'm so close to the work that I don't know how to perceive it in a way to explain things that are probably necessary for comprehension. I apologize for that.

If you're ever curious, and you have the time, if you give me a solid example of a way you are defining a character or something, and you want to manipulate him in some way but you can't do it, then show me, and I'll try to show you how I'd define your character in my system, and get him to suit whatever context you are looking for.

I think I'm realizing it's too difficult for me to explain things just with abstractions.

edit:

btw, my blog post was all about keeping abstractly defined characters on some kind of abstractly defined set of rails. as long as you define your rails well you can get whatever you want, and the more abstractly you define them the more freedom the player gets.

also, did you read that shit? it was literally about how to take any given structure and have your characters march around inside it.

What do you think about this?
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1116/prom_week_can_you_really_simulate_.php?print=1

I'll have to get to it when I have some time.

It's all right.

My biggest compliments are that those guys knew the strengths of their game. They didn't let their scope get out of hand - as is insanely common with proc-gen - and they respected the value of generated story.

Their biggest weaknesses were pointed out by them. That's nice too.

I think the best next step for that game would be be to handle complexity, make the gameplay deeper, tie the ability to influence story into more game-like mechanics, establish richer problems that require story influence to solve - they admit their designed problems were basic - handle richer characters, etc.

What do you think?

I like the thing of characters being able to reference past history governed by player actions. Big potential for interesting design with just that.

I might be taking a cue or two from Prom Week in the next romance game I make. (from Tokimemo as well, but there is already too much Tokimemo influence on my games as it is)
Or I might end up taking the easier road and generating only details not directly related to their personalities, such as phone #, home address, birthdate, and such. I plan to procedurally generate the game's geography regardless; procedurally generating geographies is a piece of cake compared to all this. 

honestly, everything Michael Mateas has been involved with (which pretty much amounts to Facade and Prom Week) has been shit.

the reason for this is simply that they never cared about making games in the first place. why? because they are obsessed with artificial intelligence, that's why.

you see, AI comes *after* one makes a game, not while one is making it, and certainly not before one makes it. the point of AI in games (as is the case with computers in general) is to MAKE GAMES MORE CONVENIENT, since AI will never be able to do better than real humans, since AI will always be poor replacement for humans. so, before you make a CONVENIENT game, how about you make an ENJOYABLE game first? how about you make a multiplayer game first, even if massively-multiplayer, for after all your game requires intelligence and human intelligence already exists, it's already made -- all you need is a bunch of enthusiastic friends or a bank account full enough to hire professional playtesters. and voila -- your game has intelligent NPC's! and only after many playtesting sessions should you move onto making your game more convenient, and only after making sure that your game is really good should you move onto replacing humans with AI.

as far as i can imagine, there is simply no point in programming AI if you don't have a good game. it's a waste of time.

I think that they still has a problem, which they mention, about conveying even the simple mechanism and game state to player. As is it's a cool demo, but almost every procedural story generation has stumble onto this.

The problem is: is there a solution to convey those complex things to player so he can play? That's why I mention other research and game, tokimemo kind of handle this, cotillon suffer from this (npc chit chat behind the player's back, but the player might not understabd why the npc suddenly change is behavior. We had the same problem with FPS AI, when ai where able to exchange ammo between them, except the player never get to see them (they cover) so it does not change the experience. It's not just a problem of AI, it's an entirely new format of telling that need to be build. Simpler game structure such as harvest moon have it, because it's all tied to the player perspective, except nobody had made something complex with them at all, dismissing them because simple game use them in simple way. I think player's perspective event based system and hammerspace is a solution to create plausible outcome base on current world state.

Well this is a universal problem with all deep games. It's a classic issue with AAA today. They want games that appeal to the hardcore but that everyone can understand. How do you make CounterStrike on the console for the people who get Mario, or Wii Sports, or even just Halo?

A lot of the time the issue can be solved just with level design. There's a right way to teach a new subject to a person. If I want to teach you how to garden effectively there's a right to do it. There are common elements involved in teaching anyone anything. Most games suffer because they just suck at this. They don't think about the ideal way to teach the player something and then bake that into level design.

One of the major issues with AI is that they don't express themselves through the mechanics. Ammo swapping for example would require that the player see what was happening. The AIs would have to express some kind of fear that they were running out of ammo. They would need friends that they are more likely to rely on. Their friendships would have to be reflected in how well they coordinate. If the growing desire to share/take ammo was constantly signaled to the player through the AIs behaviour in a way that was mechanically relevant then there wouldn't be many issues, at least not the kind that make the behaviour invisible to the player.

This is a common error with AI design. The designers build constructs they think are cool without thinking about how much of an impact they would have on the player. Before you know it they've got 10 behaviours for the AI to have, because some combination of 3 of them sounded cool to them, and not one of them was built in such a way to have direct relevance to gameplay.

Here's an example. Mass Effect has the story and the combat/exploration. One doesn't teach you about the other. Combat is the _perfect_ opportunity to teach player's things about the game. In fact, making combat about learning makes it more interesting. Mass Effect's combat is a little stretched for variety as it is. If it was impacted in meaningful ways by how characters feel then not only would it become more interesting, but also, the benefits of the structure used for teaching the player the combat system would carry over to teaching him about everything the AI can do. There are other benefits as well.

You want to teach the player fluently. You start with the basic skills, then you ramp up to more compound skills. Maybe in a shooter you teach them basics of movement and shooting. There's a lot of variety there. Then you teach them moving while shooting. Then you teach them basic positional strategy. Then you teach them advanced movement, like precision platforming, or more acute use of cover. Then you teach them basic enemy prediction, how to efficiently unload clips at the right time. At each stage the number of possible scenarios you can give for the player to master increases. What you want to do is constantly fluctuate between difficulties in each category of challenge, slowly increasing them. At the beginning you include the opportunity for advanced strategy but focus on the basics, so the player can explore and not get bored. Then you throw something too hard at them.... and so on. The training path is an "experience-focused" aspect of design like everything else in the game.

AI is the same. Build it so each core behaviour is of founding relevance to the behaviours based on it, and has direct consequences in the mechanics, then teach the player to understand these behaviours by starting at the core and moving outwards. Player skill sets should be built in layers by the time they reach the end of the game, and so should your most advanced AIs.

What's hammerspace? Or perspective event based systems?

---
Well, these games are more like experiments. They're interesting the way science journal articles are interesting. They show you a piece of what could be. Prom Week was a University project, not a commercial one. It's more like a lesson. I don't think it's supposed to be fun. I do think it will have an impact though. It serves to educate commercial devs how to build certain concepts. For sure Prom Week will contribute to better AIs in bigger games.

I do not think AI should be an after thought. I've been designing AIs, or studying AIs (or whatever) for a long time. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to think of AI as an after-thought. The structure of an AI is highly dependent on what it needs to know. Often levels, and entire games, are designed in such a way that the AIs need a ton of boiler-plate programming just to perform basic functions. Often a slew of crap needs to be taught to them for each new skill they gain. When the mechanics of the game and its entire progression (i.e. through its difficulty) are considered independently of AI design then the AI can be seriously limited.

Often there is this confusion that AI is a series of formulas we just apply. What AI really is just a series of skills built on top of each other. Each skill is like any other program. What makes it an AI is the ability for these skills to relate to one another, creating an "intelligence." It is far easier to design a game based around a refined set of skills you know you can program, than to design a game and do whatever it takes to get your AI to play it. If your AI plays a critical role in your game then it is just as interdependent with every other element as is every other element.

The reason Prom Week and Facade teach people something is because they could do something with AI that most games have tried to do and didn't accomplish. They managed to do this b/c they focused on AI first. It prevented them from being good games, but if they focused on their "quality" first then we'd just have more commercial titles with average AI. AI is non-trivial.


Yes, learning based on player behaviour is incredible. I went 1 hour of open-field random-encounter-filled flying in Skies of Arcadia to hear what my Dad had to say after I had made it out in the world on my own. His text hadn't changed. I was young. We care a lot about the world changing to reflect us and our history.

Details like address and birth date aren't that interesting. Dwarf Fortress kind of has that stuff. Some people like it. How do you plan on making it interesting?

One thing I'm doing is generating the world, creating rules that let players grow/develop according to how they live their lives, and rules for trying to live. Then my AIs are literally products of their environments. There's also some stuff with generating the world in such a way to produce AIs that serve particular functions in the possible story-lines... but that's something you can handle manually if you don't want to be that crazy. If a guy needs to be tough make him grow up in an environment where he has to be tough to survive etc.

i think you missed my point entirely, which is: the point of game AI is to replace human players with the sole purpose of making the act of playing games more convenient/practical. what should this really mean? it should mean that whenever you design a game which relies on some sort of intelligence, it's always better to playtest it using real human intelligence. so, for example, instead of NPC's being controlled by an AI, you have a bunch of real players controlling them or a single player playing a role of a gamemaster/director/screenwriter. this way you get to focus on the rules of the game, on the rules that direct the behavior of the "main player" (the one for whom you're designing the game) and the "side players" (the ones who will eventually be replaced by an AI, unless you end up making an awesome game for them too).

How do you plan to account for level design within this? Most single-player games have level designs entirely based around how the AI behaves and which were probably developed concurrently with the AI itself -- if you start with human "NPCs" and then replace them with a stupid approximation of those human players then I can imagine a lot of the balancing you've already done going out of whack. And this isn't even to mention the massive amount of resources that would have to go into making every enemy NPC playable over a network, then having to scrap that functionality later on (not to mention that for many enemies it's even kind of dumb to have them as intelligent as human beings in testing -- what if your enemies are e.g. alien spiders?). Perhaps it could work for some particular cases (all of these would probably be advanced 3D FPSes/stealth games or something) but I don't see the idea working too well in the general case.

As for Facade it's undoubtedly a shitty game but still a decently cool tech demo, I'd like to see the concepts improved (probably going to happen in the academic/research arena?) and then used by actual game designers. I don't know about Prom Week but I really doubt I could take it seriously as a videogame judging from that article and the pictures either -- the entire point is evidently how your social interactions influence other characters, and yet those other characters' dialogue is shit like "you think after that time when you two-timed on Mave with that sexy three-time squash champion I'd be willing to go to the prom with you?" aka dump backstory exposition mid-sentence and hope no one notices that human beings don't talk like this. Also, pick-up lines as an actual mechanic wtf have these people ever actually talked to a female human being (in a high school, where everyone should ostensibly know each other, at that), and that isn't even mentioning the social compatibility meters I noticed, it's like something out of a bad online quiz.

I don't think so. I don't think I missed your point. The "purpose" of AI isn't to replace human players. That's something you just made up. It is often thought of that way usually to great detriment. AIs have their strengths and so do people. AIs that approximate people are interesting but are in no way necessary.

Think about a boss in Final Fantasy 6. It has a rudimentary AI. No human player would want to play as a FF6 boss because the challenge would be so reduced, and limited. A boss's challenge comes effectively from its high health, not its intelligence. But you could make one more intelligent so that players could have a more engaging time fighting it. That would count as AI. You could have that boss walk around the world and say interesting things. That's AI too. Saying AI should play a game built for players is like saying every character in a novel should see events in a way that is just as compelling as the way the main character sees them. This isn't something you want. The player is the golden egg. He's the one you want to protect and treat well. So you build AIs that serve that purpose. They are a tool for creating a dynamic path for the player through the game.

But your point that AIs should do something interesting is a good one. When I think about AI I first think about a story I would like to tell, and then I transfer responsibility over to it. Each AI is modeled on what I feel would be a good linear way to create content. Level designs are hand-made before being generated, story lines are hand-made before being generated and so on.

There's also a lot of things AIs do better than people. They crunch numbers well. They learn certain things faster. They have perfect memories. In fact, the strengths of an AI are so radically different than those of a person that a game designed for people would be very hard to create a competent AI for. This is a trap. Often AIs hit the dirt before they even get going because their creators spend so much time trying to mimic human complexity without trying to understand what it is that the AI needs to do first. An AI is like an entirely different being. It is like an alien. You don't design a game for kids, play test it with them, then redesign it for adults later. That doesn't make any sense. The same goes for AI. Focusing on core mechanics is very important, definitely, and you want to test as much of your game's mechanics with actual humans as much as possible - as you would base your story-writing AI's abilities on good examples of actual stories - but you don't want to think of your AI as a dumb human. Humans can talk and pick a key out of a pile of crap on a desk. AIs can't do either of these things without serious horsepower. But they can do other things far better.

AI should not be an after-thought. It should be developed right along side everything else. AIs are like level design. You don't design mechanics then levels. You design both together all the time. That way you gain insight on how one interacts with the other. Poor AI is more the result of not building its skill-set incrementally than anything else.

Prom Week is what it is not because the devs made the AI first. It's that way because making an AI interesting is hard. They tried their best with a reduced scope. If they wanted better gameplay they could have made a game first then made AI - I could make a killer AI for Starcraft - but that would have only helped them a little. It would not have produced a much better AI. That AI would have been much worse. It would have been much harder to develop.




Well that's an obvious observation. The dialogue is obviously poor. It's not like noticing the poor dialogue is the secret ingredient. "Ok, well... you've got a story, you just need to make it good." No shit. The AI they have built is simple. It can handle a story of the complexity that they have created. Good stories are filled with nuance. Not only do you need the ability to write a good story in the first place but you have to deconstruct it and isolate all of its dependencies in code. The problems involved escalate in difficulty very quickly.



So the better approach is to have the AI learn from players. For example, create some dungeons or whatever in the normal way. Then create monsters and so on to make the dungeons interesting. Fill them with style. Each monster has abilities and an intelligence. Now put players in, but give the players all the possibilities of play available to the monsters. So effectively a player could do anything a monster could do if he levels in the right way or does whatever is required. So you'd get real level design, filled with AI, and filled with players that could take on the equivalent role of the AIs. The players could lie in wait for other players, or design dungeons themselves, or design the environments that monsters grow up in so that entire groups of AIs are built in their image.

Then you take all kinds of metrics, and sort them and catalog them. You watch replays of players and generated summaries of what happened. You could put in stuff that automatically injects AIs with player behaviours that seemed to be interesting i.e. produced positive effects. If a behaviour seems constructive try it out in a few AIs, see how it goes, mix and match, grow the coverage of each behaviour evolution-style until it ends up in all the places it should be. AI is fun.

I'm planning a system in which npcs are assigned traits that each have some effect on their behavior. An npc with low Punctuality might show up late at locations on his schedule (npcs will have schedules governing where and when they can be encountered throughout the city). An npc with high Generosity has a high chance of giving the player stuff. An npc who is Talkative can be engaged in conversation longer. An npc with Possessiveness, once in a relationship with the pc, reacts negatively to the pc developing relationships with other npcs, etc.

Traits will also play a role in npcs' dispositions to be attracted to the pc, or to other npcs. For instance, an npc might have a disposition to be attracted to, or repelled by, any character with the Talkative trait. (This is a game about developing romances and friendships in which the player is in control of a single character, but some amount of simulation of npc-to-npc relationships will occur behind the scenes)

Relationships involving the pc will be determined by variables primarily raised through conversational interactions accomplished through a system that could probably pass for an RPG's combat system if the names of actions were changed.

Yeah I'm doing something similar. There's the combat and the interactions. The player makes these choices similar to the ones he'd make in a turn-based combat system or Mario or Prince of Persia and the other characters react. So there's this duality to every decision. When the PC fights in a certain way he fights in a certain way but also changes the way others present perceive him... and the relationship changes.

On hammerspace and other question ten years ago before the thread move on >.> ...

Hammerspace is a storytelling term that refer that anything outside the player's knowledge. Basically it use to make plausible thing pop out of thin air to balance the story, bad use is deux ex machina. Came from the bag in animation where they could almost get anything from, but also work for out of frame object that enter the scene ...

It is important because the problem i was outlining wasn't one of AI, it was one of storytelling, whatever happen in the background and the player does not know could has well not exist, the problem came in storytelling engine (or even simple design) where the player cannot connect information because of all what is happening in the backgroun, even if it happen in the most realistic simulation, for the player it appear random. SO playing data from the perspective of the player is a requirement to create consistent story engine, forewarning, hinting, clueing relevant feedback information is necessary for good experience. Hammerspace is tool that would allow that by only creating event that is consistent with player perception and all background element only exist in probability. That's why I was mentionning event driven game like tokimeki because they are doing just that!

Yeah that's a regular issue. I don't know what the trouble is. It seems like a pretty easy thing to deal with.

It's often important to have a world that simulates beyond what the player can see but it isn't necessary. My system currently works like the following. The world is divided into two pieces, that which the player is currently observant of and that which he is not. Now, sometimes when stuff happens it happens as the result of a calculation or a random number. When a player kicks another character the possible reactions exist within a determined space. There are certain things that can happen and certain things that definitely cannot - I'm talking about the kicked character's reaction. So what actually happens is partially random and partially calculated.

Maybe the kicked character's current state is like this... a little angry, a little flirty with the PC, and exhausted from the previous battle. Now the kick comes. There are many plausible reactions. Based on what the player has observed, as is meticulously recorded by the system, an angry reaction may be plausible, but so may a forgiving one. The player doesn't know everything that's been going on behind the scenes, particularly in the kicked character's head, so several next "pieces of the story" could be plausible. Let's say anger or forgiveness are the two possible reactions. Obviously they'd be a little more complex, there would be more options, and the difference between them would be more nuanced.

Here is an opportunity for the system to cheat. Maybe the kicked character took a detour half an hour ago. What happened during this detour? Maybe based on what the player knows we know 3 things: that the detour took 30 minutes, that it was exhausting for the character that took it, and at least something serious happened in a some un-visited location where other minor characters were hanging out. Now we get to cheat. There are some boundaries around deciding what happened during that detour. We don't need to decide what happened right away. All we have to decide are the properties of what happened right away - those properties are the ones listed.

Going back to the PC kicking the other character (the one who took the detour earlier), maybe an angry reaction opens up more freedom in determining what happened during the detour. A forgiving one offers less, but maybe a forgiving one offers more selection in choosing events in the detour that serve a particular story function. Maybe the "story manager" wants a moment of tension coming up in 20 minutes. It wants it to last 10 minutes. It wants it to focus around the relationship between two characters. Maybe it wants that tension to have a good chance of devolving into some sort of combat, especially if the player has been going through a dry spell lately. Maybe the story manager needs a device to help make that happen. Maybe certain properties of what happened during the detour make a desirable period of tension easier to construct. The story manager could assign these properties to the detour whenever it wanted and then when further decisions need to be made regarding it they take those properties into account.

Summary:
  1. Character O (for other) goes on detour.
  2. 30 minutes later O returns to the party.
  3. 3 things are communicated to the player about what happened during O's detour.
  4. Some time goes by as the player plays.
  5. The story manager decides that it needs a particular upcoming period to be a certain way. It starts assigning qualities to events that are uncertain to offer more freedom in inventing the past so that the future can be controlled. This means assigning particular qualities to the detour. Note, these new qualities must still exist in a realm that is plausible.
  6. Some of these new qualities of the detour may or may not impact character O and what he does, or other characters that were impacted by the detour.
  7. The PC kicks O.
  8. The system has to decide how O reacts, effectively inventing what happened during the detour to satisfy its complex demands for the evolving story.
  9. At some point in the near future some period of tension, with particular qualities, has to occur.

Basically as shit happens the unseen past is alluded to, and is invented on-the-fly to suit whatever demands the system's understanding of good story structure has.

That was probably a little confusing. In other words, decisions are made about the story only when they need to be. Everything is constructed at the last second based around the idea of what makes a compelling story, based on what the player has observed and understood. A neat trick movies can't do: test a player's knowledge of events through gameplay and hit them several times with things they didn't get in different ways until they do, or back off on ideas they get right away.

Since Oblivion, I"ve been thinking about worlds that exist without the player, and AI interactions.  Oblivion's Radiant AI really excited me.  Hearing about incidents like NPCs killing each other (over food, I think) was really awesome.  But they ended up dumbing the system down, instead of making it more complex so that things like that weren't screwy. 

So for these years, I've been thinking about it.  I've been thinking about a world where the NPCs had needs and wants, and went about fulfilling them through things that humans do daily.  It would start with simple reactions like going from being hungry to looking for food.  Then expand to buying the food, if there were none nearby.  Eventually, it would have to handle food shortages in the village, and some NPCs would have to be spurred into fixing that shortage.  Certainly, the baker would already be working on it because that's how they make money anyhow.  But others might butcher a cow, or buy from a trader.  Or even become a trader.

And while I find that world really compelling and interesting technically, I recently realized that it wouldn't be interesting as a story.  Without a pre-programmed plot happening, the events aren't significant.

Today, I finally got around to reading this thread, and on the previous page, I found that same statement by someone else. 

Now, I'm still really interested in such a world, but only as a backdrop.  It can be used to flavor a story, but won't really produce compelling stories on its own.  At least, not often enough.  Like monkeys with typewriters, you can eventually produce compelling stories randomly.  But I think that producing them reliably would mean stifling the system to such a point that they wouldn't be very varied.

Of course, there's room for all kinds of games.  I could have a lot of fun in a game that had no story, and the interactions were purely AI.  I could also have a lot of fun in a game that had minimal or no AI, and everything was pre-programmed.  But I think the best games will combine them.

Now what if a game were made to learn how to generate--or simply replay--the interesting stories through some means of in-game player feedback? If an infinite number of stories can be generated, there must necessarily be an infinite number of compelling stories that can be generated. I wonder how a game could be trained to build up a memory of the stories that have gone over well with players and select these stories for retelling, like a master storyteller who tells only his best stories.

I'll try a partial implementation of doing generative story, basically I postulate that story speak of human need and use a simplified maslow hierarchy of need to generate theme (survival, social, aspiration). Then I can run/generate character with variable that represent those need. When a character as "theme" need low enough he do not try to fulfill it, he just give feedback about it by emote, behaviour and reaction. Each cycle the system choose a NPC whose need has to be fulfill and then generate a goal with several step and obstacle to reach. The character then as to find a mean to reach the goal and go through the step. With this I will validate a first step toward my idea of generating story and then had dynamism by throwing the player in it, but that will be after I hijack the system to generate quest for regular game format.

Interesting, im developing a roguelike right now that randomly generates plot-lines for the game (Basicaly Short Stories), and i just finished up with about the first 3 quarters of it, ill go ahead and post a story it generates on here later so you can see. The stroies of course in this case really effect the game so its alot of randomly determined variables.Its definetly worth checking out though. ;D

Yeah a major quality to build into any story, like linear ones, is to explicitly define the needs of every character. Tension exists between conflicting needs of characters (or characters and abstract forces). Pacing is built by shifts in needs - or could say the progress towards fulfillment (of a need).

All of my characters function according to needs as well. "Internal economy," that you were talking about before, is well handled by defining characters' needs in a way to play well off each other then activating them with plot devices that you (the system) control(s).

Good luck with it.

Yeah people try this approach every so often. You hear about it a lot at least in the dev diary stuff when the devs talk about the original vision of the game. By the time they get to the actual release much of it has been removed. Then you get a game sort-of built inside a functioning - and severely limited - world.

fyi My game has this stuff planned. The world just goes and goes, forever and around again.


Yes this is true. Creating a story has to be done inside the world. The generative stuff is more like a backdrop. It builds atmosphere. It is like a play-pen that the real story occasionally drops the player in, returning for him later.

The other use for it is as a way to inspire ideas. Jon Blow *drop* says games are as much a tool for exploring a design as a product. I agree with this idea. A classic AI amateur mistake is to not understand this. You don't build AIs, you grow them.


Not necessarily. It is very challenging to bend a world to suit a story but nowhere near impossible. You just have to design your world in such a way to facilitate the kind of story you want to tell then develop constructs to control the player.

I talk a little about how to do it here: http://coldtheory.blogspot.ca/2012/09/player-control-over-narrative-these-are.html (same post I plugged before). It's very dense but covers the basics for what we're talking about. Extrapolating it to suit purely generative worlds is more work but isn't a stretch. I will say that given the state of AI in games today doing what we're suggesting is a big step ahead of what's currently being done.


Yes. Hopefully they will be combined to such a degree that the difference between something generated and something man-made is indistinguishable. They should be woven together so often and tightly that the mixture is like saltwater. You know there is both salt and water but to tell which is which requires a special device to separate them.

All that you have to do is have the right filters. Every day in the world millions of conflicts happen, and people change in what they belief. The stories we know and like are the ones that suit certain patterns we enjoy reading about. All that you have to do in such a system is use a character that can actually have the kind of story happen to him that we would enjoy. I have designed a software tool that does this, and the output is incredibly varied and interesting. It just comes down to looking in the right place.

The problem with procedural generated stories is not generating the start for it. A storyworld acts as a one-dimensional layer for a character that represent a theme or conflict. This is all good, and works amazingly to generate a world filled with interested elements and needy people. The problem is that for a story you need multi-dimensional characters, and one story can only hold one of those. Now you can generate the multi-dimensional character, but you will most likely want several stories, so you need several multi-dimensional characters, and sometimes in a story one character can change its own dimensionality (like in Game of Thrones). And this is when the data becomes unreliable to use in stories.

On the creation of grand narrative based on the players action: A storyworld on his own has its own very simple story that is based on prinicipal definition of story. A story is a value changed by conflict. A storyworld essentially has two variables that bind all the characters and other elements in the world to it, a grand conflict and a thematic subject. The bigger the change of value is within either of these variables during the story, the more impact the actions of the character has on the world around him, and the characters in it that align to these variables. The only thing that seperates a grand narrative from a normal narrative, is that the story of the storyworld is so big that everything in it is affected by it

I don't know what you are talking about.

Why can't you have several multi-dimensional characters in a single world? You can define needs in multiple dimensions. That's what the writers of a good show would do.

Imagine you are creating two stories, set within one world. One of a stewardess, and one of a cab driver. In the story of the stewardess, she is incredibly deep, and well developed. In the story of the cabdriver, he is. Now we write a third story where they both meet. If we strive to keep both characters as interesting and deep as in their own story, the audience will get confused as they will not know with who they should associate their own emotions with. The result is that the story will feel flat and confusing. So the result is that we have to decide who is leading, and the one that is isn't will be deprived of dimensions until the character has 1 or 2 dimensions left that compliment the leading one.

What writers of good shows do is that they switch the multi-dimensional character around every episode. So you get the know each one, in a short story that is made for them to lead in, and where the other characters step back a little.

The multi-dimensionality is not created by the world, its created by the storytellers when they interpertate the world they are presented with. The world itself is a very simply thing, that every character shares, and audiences can explain in one sentence.

Ok I see what you're saying but you're making a mistake.

Writers don't "remove" dimensions. In good writing the dimensions are always there. If they are not there the character will feel flat. The mark of good writing is the allusion to dimensionality with small moments.

If you want to follow your example you can swap around who takes the lead. You can even do this every line. A story generator would take multi-dimensional characters and put them in situations where the needs of one are highlighted over the other.

I don't see how this affects generation. If it can be done with linear media it can be done with procedural.

edit:


Says who? And even if it were true it wouldn't matter.

edit:

I've solved this problem so if you keep explaining your roadblock I might be able to explain away your issue. I just don't understand it yet.

Yes, but not for every character in one story. Robert McKee has an entire chapter dedicated to it in his book. There is always only one character that is not flat, the other ones enforce or weaken his traits. An easy example, does Hulk in the avenger movies show all the dimensions we have seen in his own series?



Its not about wether you can or not, its about your audience. Write a story where you do this, and test it on an audience. 

Here is the thing, its not being done in linear media. The structures you would be using for generation are an abstraction of the original stories. Try  abstracting a good story to its structure, and use that structure to create a new story.  Again, write a story in the same way your engine would do it, and test it out. If you are right, the new story would be just as good

Creating these systems are excpetionally hard, it took Chris Crawford 11 years before he had something working. And for good reason.

If you are still at this knowledge level about storyworlds I would suggest you to start reading some books on developing storyworlds for transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins is a good start

Uhh.... I think you're getting confused. A single character gets focus, and others may take the sides, but the narrator can switch focus whenever he wants. A well written scene will expose dimension in several characters by the end of it. Robert McKee sounds like a guy who knows things, but I think you may be taking something out of context i.e. too literal.

I haven't seen the Avengers yet. Long story.

There are no restrictions on scene structure. You can tell whatever story you want. If your characters have needs and they act in the pursuit of those needs and are engaged in the activities of the scene then they have to be displaying their "high dimensionality." That may not be obvious.

The art of truly excellent writing is the ability to give depth to many elements simultaneously, the various components of the world, its history, each character, their pasts, etc, then bring them in concert together. Writing side-characters to contrast your main character is one thing. Writing rich side-characters is something else. The latter is just more difficult.


So you're saying it can't be done? Go watch the Godfather. Dimensions of every present character are explored in every scene. We see more of one character over another each scene but we learn a great deal about everyone. In fact, behaviour in the small parts is critical to the painting of a character's depth.


No shit.
 
This stuff is being done in linear media. Have you never read a piece of literary criticism.... Rich stories have rich sequences. When single events expose many layers of meaning that is the mark of good writing. If the story manages to do that consistently and link everything into one whole that story is a classic (nearly).


It is hard.


You're splitting hairs.

I'm tackling these at once, since my reply is similar. In the Godfather only Michael is not a flat character. We are suggested about the depth in other characters because we can see the effects of their pursuits in Michael. For example, the part with Kay and the abortion, if you remove Michael from that scene Kay would still be flat, but in Michael we see an aesthetic emotion that we reflect on, and as a result we create our own image of how Kay must be and what has driven her decision for the abortion. Interview several people about Kay, and you will find that each will give her different strengths and weaknesses, interview them about Michael and everyone gives the exact same answer. All the characters are believable in their setting, and Michael is an amazing deep character. This combined with good storytelling, allows the audience to fill in the blanks of all the flat characters.

Its not creating rich side characters that is complicated, thats just going through a workflow and keeping all your data structured. Its good storytelling that is the hard part.

When I started working on my system I did. But I found out it is all rubbish. The result of using that knowledge in my system created boring, 13 in a dozen stories. You can compare it too food. Imagine reading a review of a Michelin star restaurant. It goes into detail about the ingredients used, the recipe, and the balance of the taste, etc. That still does not mean that you can create the dish as good as the chef did. So I threw the literary criticism and narratology books aside and started reading interviews with storytellers, and emailing them questions. The funny thing is that both Propp and Campbell warn for this in their books, their structures should not be used for creating.

If you follow the literary criticism path you are always one step behind. Like I said earlier, use the algoritms you have made so far, and create stories with them (by hand) and test the stories on audiences. Your system needs to empower players, not pass a checklist of a critic or scholar.

If you are working on a system like this, one can expect you to be up to date on the research that is available and the methodologies used in the field. Again, look up Henry Jenkins and his work on storyworlds and storytelling

You're focusing an awful lot on semantics. Be careful of that. The internet spurs that sort of miscommunication.

"Dimensionality" is subjective. This already should shadow any argument about the bounds of dimensionality in any given piece of media, whether a scene or an entire story or whatever. A single moment can communicate a world if constructed correctly. There are tools to deconstructs stories, certainly, and you are using them, but you have to remember that they are only tools. Stories themselves have no rules. All there is is the listener, and he is an incredibly complex thing to understand.

People will most certainly disagree over Micheal. Why did he volunteer to commit the assassination? Out of duty? Certainly. He also wants to contribute. Maybe there is a little brother mentality. Maybe he wants to prove himself. Maybe he has a special connection to his father. Maybe he wants to run away from the question of whether he'll be consumed by the gangster life or not, by doing something that forces his hand forever more.

Have a conversation with anyone who appreciates the movie and you will quickly see opinions diverge. None of those questions have clear answers. I bet even the actors in the movie didn't have clear answers. They say actors read their lines differently each time, at least great ones, including Al Pacino, and then it all gets put together in the editing room. That's where the movie is made.

Maybe on the surface people agree, because Micheal's qualities are under the microscope, but to find the divergence in opinion you just have to dig deeper. Good art is always left open to interpretation. That is almost the definition of art (as opposed to science).

If I have to explain how this argument applies to Kay then you don't understand it. But you can ask a question and I'll reply. Welcome to an adult conversation.
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I meant creating rich side characters that served the story. When you have side characters they serve a function. They contrast with the main character, or set up a plot device, or whatever. But they also have personalities.

Creating rich personalities but still allowing for their characters to serve their functions is what is hard. It is the combination of rich character design and story telling that is challenging. When you separate them you push yourself into the "all my side characters have minimal depth" box.


That's because your system sucked. You can't reveal random qualities of a character. You have to reveal the ones that make them interesting. That was implied.

No one said anything about just using narrative deconstructions. Your generators have to take into account all the nuance of the story teller's craft. Hence the discussion, and why bullshit like Chris Crawford's system fails.



You didn't understand my point. ;)

I'm gonna drag in some economic theory.  Now, you may or may not agree with this as economics, but hear me out.

A couple of summers ago I read Mises' "Human Action."  If you want the book in one sentence, it would be "Since the scarcity of time makes all choices economic, the proper domain of economic study is all human behavior."

Now, it's the first clause that's important.  He talks in the book about how humans have a ranked list of demands (read:  priorities / motivations) that need to be satisfied.  Once the most pressing demand is satiated, others can be paid attention.

This probably seems obvious.  But what if you gave NPC's a good list of demands?

On a strictly mercantile level, this would make dealing with vendors more realistic.  Let's say a player has been dragging around five greatswords.  The vendor wants greatswords, but after acquiring two, his demand is met.  He will pay less for each successive greatsword.

Now, the vendor wants to stay in business.  So when a thief breaks in and ransacks the till, this demand is intensified.  After earning his trust, he gives the player a quest.

What's more interesting is what motivated the thief.  Maybe his gf left him, leading him to meet the "alleviate sadness" demand with drink.  He loses his job, becomes desperate... Maybe he gives the player a "win back my gf" quest.

So anyway, ranked demands to emergent behavior to generated quests.  Thoughts?

I would like to state that pretty much every game has some sort of story. This is not a revelation, of course, as it has been stated many times before, but it's worth repeating just so that the rest of what I'm going to say does not come off as way too strange. Basically, any kind of activity creates, as a byproduct, events which in turn form a story, and since games are activities, they too create stories. The biggest acitivity ever is life itself (which creates the biggest story ever called history) and, in a way, games are mini-lives, small lives within one big life.

But when we live a life we are not, you see, creating stories. The story of our life is a byproduct of our life, not its goal. When I live, my aim is not to generate a series of events that have an "arc" or some other dramatic shit lol; my aim is to exercise power (oh hello there, Nietzsche!). This is why stories created by lives (more precisely: stories that signify real events) are on average far worse than stories made up by people (more precisely: stories that do not signify any real events).

All of this applies equally well to games since, remember, games are lives too. And as such all games create stories: Tetris does, Super Mario Bros. does, Civilization does etc. But what they don't do is create interesting stories. And they shouldn't! As I said, on average, life creates bad stories, and we're talking about life here which is far more meaningful than some random game about weirdly-shaped blocks falling. But life, at least, has potential to create interesting, meaningful stories, whereas games like Tetris have none, or very little. And this, why is this? Is it simply because we're dealing with systems that generate meaningless events? not because we don't have a "drama manager" or, I don't know, cutscenes?

If so, in order to make a game that will have at least some potential to create interesting stories, you simply have to simulate systems that generate meaningful events, and if you think a little bit further, you will realize that.. that simply means simulating people lol. The more complex their behavior is, the more meaningful the events will be, the more interesting stories the game will generate. Is there really anything other than that to it? Is the secret to "stories in games" pretty much psychological simulation?

So what's the point of "drama managers" and "artificial gamemasters"?

I used to flirt with drama managers before, you see, but I can't remember what was so cool about them anymore lol. What I know is that they are boring! Why do I find them boring!? Is it because they will never work? Is it because they require human-level artificial intelligence to work properly? Is it because they fuck up the challenge in order to chain a series of interesting events? I can't really tell. I just know that my instincts are screaming "FUCK THESE DRAMA MORONS!".

Drama manager is a fancy name for good game rules ... i mean every game create an engaging experience by reacting to player action through events ...

Therefore the probleme was never stories as procedurally generated, just coherant narratives.

... and one easy solution is stakes!

Imagine, you have a girl unknowingly follwed at a distance by a serial killer (that the audiance know) ... SUDDENLY any meaningless action takes meaning! That the girl stop to chit chat mean that the killer get closer, that the killer slip on a banana and then distance is increase between him and his target ... distance is the measure of dramatic tension ... will the girl escape or the killer will satisfy is sadistic tendency? Any single events participate because stakes give context.

This is a simple example of stakes on a physical level, but you can have it on a morale level (will he finally cheat his wife with after so many temptations) or psychological (will he have enough faith to follow is father's path?) whatever "space" you can define them in.

What about procedurally generated stakes through procedurally generated theme?

Yeah, so, all AIs should work this way. Often, the first fix you should make to any AI design - assuming it is poor, and it probably is - is to redefine its behaviour as a series of desires, abilities and perception.

So instead of having a shooter combatant (an AI-controlled one) who sees the whole world and tries to pick a play pattern that is deemed "interesting," he should have a desire to kill, one to kill efficiently (etc), the ability to see in front of him and remember the basics of where he has been in the past, a set of details about what the human player did last, and so on. It is far, far easier to build an AI as a set of demands and abilities - and let it produce its own behvaiour - than to build one as a machine of perfect knowledge that "generates" a personality.

Anyone who would try to make me make an AI the second way would receive a funny stare, laughter and so on. If he then tried to touch the code without changing his ways I would literally give one warning, then never, ever work with him again (unless he changed his ways). That is how fucking terrible AI design done like that is. That's how most game AIs are built. Stunning.

@ Charlie

I don't think the stories generated in Tetris are boring. The events that a player goes through when playing a game he enjoys are by definition interesting, because I just said the player enjoyed them. Life can create wonderful stories. In fact, the most powerful stories in our lives are the ones we participated in, not the ones we were told. What we are told just plays a significant role, but it is when we are the starring character that we are most likely to remember them.

Those stories may not be as interesting to other people but they are interesting to us.

In a sense, the rules that balance difficulty in Super Mario Bros 3 are a "drama manager," as Gimmy says. They are carefully crafted so that the spontaneously created stories by players have arcs. They build tension, and climax, and have releases. Often, a good way to hone mechanics is to consider the likely stories to be created when interacting with them (as a player), then tweaking them so that those stories follow models of good stories.

Here is a simple drama manager. There is a level in which the player must learn a critical skill, develop it largely on his own, explore its applications, then uncover the correct way to use it to overcome some challenge. The player's journey is roughly accentuated by likely events in the level.

There is a general sense of challenge increasing and a climax at the 3/4 mark. There are 3 small spikes of difficulty. There are 2 walls that when up against the player will likely have no idea what to do next for at least a few minutes. There are 2 false positives: seemingly good pathways to a goal that turn out to be illusions. Just the placement of the things that create these experiences, whether static or not, are part of some kind of "drama managing" strategy.

Now we add one single dynamic rule. If the player gets stuck in one of the several - let's say 4 - places he might stuck a little bunny pops out of his hat and rudely offers advice. We justify this behaviour by saying that the bunny is a travelling companion who has limited patience and doesn't want to travel with a "loser." The player is not berated for taking too long, but when the bunny helps him out his relationship with it changes in someway; he loses respect as a competent explorer.

We have created a decent drama manger. In fact, many games already do both of these things, though they normally do the second thing - the bunny - poorly. Navi is the bunny. The free pass through a level after many failed attempts in recent Mario games is the bunny. Those player-aiding constructions are primitive but exist to control the player's drama. Even the amount of health a player gets is part of some drama-managing construction.

You don't need human level intelligence to make smart drama managing decisions. You don't even need dynamic rules. Chess, at least played by competent players, has drama built all over it. Tension, and the kinds of problems players solve, are distributed in a nice way by the emerging properties of the game. That's elegant drama design.

Essentially, to build a good drama manager, you want an intelligence that does the most with the least. You want to control the key points in a generated story and let the player fill in many of the blanks.

Most failed drama managers fail because their creators miss these points. Their creators try to do too much. They try to get their system to understand every element of their game. But that isn't necessary. Is there proper pacing of action? Is there proper balance of challenge? Is there enough confusion? Is there a proper ratio of exploration to puzzle solving? Is there enough rest? etc etc. These are the questions managers should focus on answering. Then they should solve related problems by fucking with the rules of the game as little as possible.

Here is a good example. Let's say you have a town in an RPG. The town has some information the player needs. Some of the info is hard to get. Some isn't. Some is necessary. Some isn't. What the designer wants is for the player to:
  . not waste too much time in the town
  . to get at least some of the optional information
  . to not do all the town things in one burst (i.e. take breaks and fight etc)
  . to only do all the things in the town if it isn't boring
So he creates 2 rules - drama-constructing rules.

1. There is a companion to the player's character, in his party. The companion has an itch to fight. Bad things happen in increasing amounts if the companion's needs aren't tended to. Effectively the player is punished by not maintaining his fighting quota.

The designer can further control the player by changing the companion character based on setting. Maybe in one particular town the companion character is more subdued, because that town has "a girl he likes," effectively allowing the player more town-time per visit.

2. There is a natural "pull" in the player's character to investigate certain issues. He has an intuition that "develops" based on what happens in the game. As he uncovers things he develops a desire to investigate whatever he has an intuition about. If he doesn't investigate he gets "tired," or "bored," or "distracted," etc. These states can affect how other characters perceive him, or how he behaves in battle.

There are signals that alert the player to what his character wishes to investigate, like inner monologues that read like, "I need some closure on this shit with Rita soon," or a "mental arousal" meter that goes up in situations that have potentially compelling outcomes, driving the player in the right direction.

Neither of these rules have complex understandings of the player's state. In fact, they are enforced in a very trivial way. It is not hard to predict their impact, they are easy to implement, and they blend with the world. In fact, they enhance it. That's good drama management.

So what are you saying? That good games lead to good stories? Aren't you debasing the concept of "story in games" this way? Wouldn't that mean that the best way to create stories in games is by creating a challenging game?

And what about this situation: you start playing SMB and you die from Goomba. Would you call that a good story? Are you going to say "well, he enjoyed it, so yeah, it's a good story!"?

As for the rest of the post: I can't really understand it.

Hunh?

No, there is a distinction between "story" in games, like the plot in FF7, and the "user story" in games, like a sequence of events in my head when playing Tetris.

The difference between the two is largely semantic. I think the point was that you can manage a regular story the same way you can manage a user story.

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The best way to create stories in games is make an engaging game. Challenge and engagement are not interchangeable. Though I know Kierkegaard likes to pretend they are. I know you're a fan of his so I'm mentioning it.

--

What part don't you understand, if you're curious?

Okay. Can someone please explain to me what is "drama manager"? I have my own understanding of what it means (mostly comes from Facade) but I'm not sure what it means anymore.

So far people have said "drama manager = game" or "drama manager = rules of the game".

Yeah, this is a common confusion.

"Drama manager" means any intelligence that changes the rules of the game - say by introducing/changing some element - to control dramatic structure. So it:
  . comprehends a given game state
  . "analyzes" the current dramatic structure
  . changes the game somehow to change the dramatic structure to better represent some ideal model

So in Left 4 Dead the "drama manager" balances periods of tension and rest by throwing zombies at players at the right times, so that the players aren't pressed too hard, aren't given a free pass, and see some variation in their patterns of tension. The manager's job is also to maintain an interesting experience given arbitrary rules - like not attacking the players in one area where it might normally do so - so that consistently good "drama" is produced across varying play-throughs.

So the L4D drama manager controls the timing and size and composition of zombie attacks. I don't know what else it does but I think there is more.

The confusion often comes when people think that drama managers need to have some deep understanding of the player's experience, but this is not true. The number of lives you have is a kind of drama manager in Super Mario Bros 3. They determine how difficult a world is, how often a player has to replay a level, how likely he is to quit at any point, how short the try/fail/repeat/succeed loop is.

In Facade the drama manager is obviously more intelligent, trying to maintain a coherent narrative that is also well paced. It does so behind the scenes, making decisions about what characters should say so that the developing scene still has a lot of potential, interesting, futures.

The difference between these two managers - in Mario/Facade - is on a gradient. You can have a drama manager be as simple or complex as you want. What Gimmy pointed out was that all games have drama management embedded in their rules. The point at which we start to say "drama manager" is just some arbitrary one that we pick because we like to pretend we're writing AIs.

Really all games have drama managers of varying complexity, but complexity is not what makes a drama manager good. Good design is what makes it good. You can take any game and add drama managing components of any scale, deciding how complex you would like them to be and what elements of the drama you'd like them to enforce, independently from the game you are building.

Designers just want to make drama management a "thing." So they talk this big game about drama managers vs. normal stuff and really it's a lot of fluff, and everyone gets confused.

The problem of drama management is where the focus is. Mario kart as plenty drama in its gameplay, not so much on a narrative level. The rubber banding rules is drama management, it ensure that everybodies as fun by keeping tension relative to your position in the race, hence you have defensive/offensive or catch up/slow down opponents items depending of wether you are trailing or leading.

While this is not fundamentally new, "drama management" as a terms is political in promoting the idea about controlling narratives in dynamics ways.

It is a politics about expending game from challenge based experience to a fuller experience, that is all.

Yeah, it's like wearing your father's suit when you're a teenager to make yourself look older.

And here was me sitting and thinking that we made it clear that there is no useful distinction to be made between "gameplay" and narrative, since, as Graham said, good game implies good story.


So drama manager is pretty much just an adatable difficulty curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_game_difficulty_balancing)?


Or simply a difficulty curve?

Difficulty is a subset of drama.

From a purely abstract point of view, interesting gameplay is an interesting stories, such that any series of events than you can relate to is good narrative.

By narrative I had refer to a more "high brow" definition, "the interesting emotional journey of psychologically deep characters and complex ambiguous situations". That is game drama focus on a narrow subset of drama, physical drama and threat drama. Manipulating other psychological and morals level with game is litteraly underachieved. Drama management refer to this aspect in general as a politically charged term. Look at deus ex, compare the freedom of physical navigation and engagement (systemic) vs the emotional and psychological engagement (still at heart a CYAO, scripted and branched). Notice that the latter is not a system and only bring flavor, not gameplay or deep interaction.

Therefore the main idea of drama management as politics is to create good games on another level than purely psychological challenge in gates based navigation. It's about creating new type of gameplay, it's about emotional navigation, interaction and freedom!

Think about it like the shift from animated cartoon based on joke (even as political and deep statement) to character driven stories initiate by disney and perfected by manga. Right now we have the equivalent of game of pre snow white, we still hasn't ghost in the shell.

In a literal sense, not a conventional one.



No. Difficulty is only a part. Let's say I give you 3 minutes easy, 3 minutes hard, repeat. Are you repeating the same level, or playing new ones? You can't tell yet.

Lives balance much more than difficulty. They balance distribution of content. They balance tension independent of difficulty. Level 3 might be just as difficult on your last life than your first, however on your last you care more, because you're one level away from a save.

There are a million ways to control dramatic structure. Consider any element that you find engaging about a novel. A drama manager can control all of these.


---

On Gimmy's stuff.

I think my toss comes from the idea that "high brow" drama needs "drama management" using tools not already available to games. Designers turn to tech to solve design problems.

In Mario the chief engagement is challenge, but as the series progressed they became, and always were, about freedom and whimsical expression. These elements of the games are well handled. There is no reason games can't deliver more "complex" emotions with the same tools.

can't wait to see citizen kane based on collision detection ;)
BTW i'm talking about design concept, not pure tech, see my "True roleplay" thread, same tools lead to different concept by changing focus

No, I know you're not talking about tech. I meant in general: the guys pushing the "drama manager" term like it buys them credibility, and confuse the issue.


It's possible. If movement in a space can represent complex expression of opinion, and that opinion is somehow reacted-to by the game, then collision detection can be it.

You can express a lot with bouncing fingers on a keyboard.

If it's still "3 minutes easy, 3 minutes hard" then I'm not playing the same level. If, however, it turns out to be "3 minutes easy, 3 minutes easy" then as far as I'm concerned I'm playing the same level -- and that would be true even if layout, art, story etc are different.


"distribution of content"?
"tension independent of difficulty"?


The fact that if you die you lose all of your progress MAKES THE GAME MORE DIFFICULT.

No, you're bending the word challenge to suit every context, again.

3 min easy, 3 min hard could mean anything. It doesn't indicate what content is giving you that challenge. The 3 hard minutes could be you repeating the same challenge 3 times, or playing through a single challenge.

"Distribution of content" : master basic jumping before handling donut lifts? or alternate between the two until both are mastered? or alternate until competence, then master something else?

"Tension independent of difficulty" : You might be right on this one. If I threaten punishment to a player for failure, they will apply themselves more, increasing the tension. This is however different than making a challenge more difficult. If I tell you to pick up 5 sticks in 5 seconds, that's easy, If I tell you to pick them up in 5 seconds or I'll punch you in the face, that's a little harder, maybe (because of the fear), but is different largely because you care more about the outcome. This is still different than me telling you to solve a hard chess problem with minimal consequences for failure.

Difficulty is one ingredient for creating tension. I can also change the environment. Pick up 5 sticks in your underwear, in front of the girl you like, or your parents. In a sense I am changing the definition of the task, implicitly adjusting your goals - like not being embarrassed. In a sense the type of challenge is being changed. The difficulty isn't just going up and down, it's changing its type and tension is being created in different ways.

Is a movie more tense when the hero is about to be foiled because that experience is more challenging to you? What about the relaxing, character-building, parts that demand as much attention? The difficulty of a task and the tension you feel have a relationship, but they are not joined at the hip.

i think this discussion has done some serious damage to my brain. and that which i used to know, i dont know anymore lol.

my mistake was to assume (and even fucking CONVINCE myself!) that "drama manager" means something. it means bollocks. it's stupid word and so, from now on, it will be banned from my vocabulary. i mean, i dont need it, and in fact i never needed it, it was merely forced upon me and i simply submitted to it (forced upon me, you see, by MY CONSCIENCE lol), but no more!

and here's how to make a good game with "procedural storytelling" and whatever: you think of a WORLD and you think of a ROLE within that world (a role to be filled by a player) and you also have to make sure this role isn't underpowered (as in weak, as in flower petal lol) and make sure it isn't overpowered (as in way too strong, as in being almighty god who can do anything). but wait a sec! that actually comes at the end of the development process, right? so before you do that, you have to contemplate about the role a bit, you have to think of all the actions you want to assign to that role, and make sure they all make sense within the context of the world, and then you have to come up with rules for these actions i.e. how the world changes in response to actions, then as you do this you also have to think about what constitutes "the world around you" all the while making sure these things fit the context as well. now when you do all of that you have to make sure the role is "balanced" i.e. not overpowered/underpowered (actually, these boil to the same thing, they only differ thematically). you do this by making shit-ton of tweaks to the ruleset till everything plays satisfyingly difficult and till all the actions are of use in the game. AND THEN YOU'RE DONE. game design 101.

now, the way you do this "procedural storytelling" shit is by including actions that are found in FUCKING FILMS. get it? that's all there is to it. what do people do in films? talk? lie? fuck? cheat? promise? whatever man, you just fucking copy these actions (and also the type of agents found in films i.e. people) and there you go -- fucking "procedural storytelling".

its so simple. YOU JUST GOTTA SIGN OFF AND START WORKING. otherwise, you gonna end up inventing all sorts of bullshit like "drama manager" and "procedurally generated stories" and start seeing distinctions between letters and whatnot. i remember back when i was like 15 and used to contemplate about my "procedurally generated story" i had no internet, and so i perfectly grapsed all this shit on my own. but then soon, maybe within a year, someone invented the internet and holy shit was i stunned by the huge disagreement between me and the so-called "grown-ups"! and it's not like i didn't attack. i did! and if it was fun for me to do this now, id dig these posts and show them to you. but the problem is i eventually submitted to what these grown-ups had to say and so, you see, all these stupid ideas still haunt me..

yeah right, "drama manager". if i simply remained loyal to WHAT I KNEW WAS RIGHT i would have finished my game by now and would have become a game designer wunderkind! too bad the opposite was the case: in an attempt to "target the audience" i nearly convinced myself i never had passion for game design lol. of course i would, since NOBODY has passion for TARGETING AUDIENCE i.e. nobody has passion for submission.

Well the merits of "drama manager" is telling you that if you gonna makes your rules for your roles you must pay attention to their narrative resonance. It's a DESIGN PATTERN, pretty much like playing a racing game with a friends where all mistake mean you lost the race and you say: they should have put more "rubber banding" ...

Combo, option locks, qte, all are design patterns to express a particular problem and pointing a solution. They are all just "rules".

my instincts tell me that rubber bending is stupid. dont know why and cant bother figuring out why. or, wait a minute, is it because it feels like a "supernatural power"? maybe so!

a supernatural rule, a rule that makes no sense whatsoever within the context of the game world (even if we describe it as "supernatural", since it makes no sense for existence of supernatural powers in fucking car racing games for fucks sake, especially not the random shitty kind of supernatural powers), but one which tries to deceive the player. and insofar as one is not aware of such rules one can tolerate the game, but knowing that a game is based on such rules ruins the immersion for me. and this is why i hate them.

and look at this:


lol. isnt that the point of fucking game design for christ's sake? to make the opponents DIFFICULT? and you're calling these rules GOOD RULES! LOL! these shitty cheap little rules based on nothing but deception and incompetence on the side of its designers, these rules you are calling good! and not the rules that not only make the game more difficult but also make sense within the context of the game world.

There is a reason we play game ... to have fun ... Rubber band ensure we keep the player in the flow band, incompetent design happen if you suck the fun.

HOWEVER there is so many way to do rubber banding, the cheapest is to increase speed of lagging car, if it's an AI outright teleporting it (fzero snes). Another way is simply to increase obstacle so the leading car has more challenge ... it happen it is not supernatural! So there is two main variable you can use to rubber band, handicap the leader by slowing him OR throwing challenge at him, support the trailer by boosting him OR removing obstacle.

The concept is not the implementation! YOU are the designer!

the goal of "adaptable challenge" is to measure the skill of the player and then suggest/provide a challenge based on such a measurement, all with the aim to maintain, as you say, a state of flow (e.g. not to be too hard on the poor little players). i haven't thought much about this yet, but intuitively i can tell it's stupid (it's a form of hand-holding, isn't it?)

and honestly, if we have an awesome world to uncover then id put up with any sort of challenge anyways. and in any case, we're talking about non-linear words here, not linear worlds (linear worlds are shit). and if the game is too hard, just include "easy mode" and be done with it.

edit: i say "put up" but i mean it in a different way. basically, if a world is an aesthetically interesting one then chances are i'll like its level of difficulty too (provided its not low lol).

Now it's down to aesthetics (not visual), your goal is to make game fun or it is to make it "competitive"? However by that logic, almost all rules that aren't "pure physics" are hand holding, let's not have map, health gauge and the kind :P. Linear does not mean shit (racing game are linear), with improvisational quality (ninja gaiden 3D) it became the purest form of competitive gameplay. However we are drifting from the topic into derails.

So as a designer pick up a design aesthetics, stick with it to develop it, it does not make other approach shit.

yes, racing games are awesome. but we're talking about linear "procedurally generated stories" here, and these -- these are shit.

these games are supposed to be so-called "RPG's" (as if every game didn't feature some sort of role-playing anyways lol), so they are supposed to be non-linear games featuring wide range of roles and actions.

but you're failing to admit one thing: that rubber bending and the like are ideas that come from without not from within. it's about pleasing whiny little kids, not about making better games, and that's probably what annoys me the most -- people having far more interest in figuring out (or submitting to) what OTHERS enjoy rather than figuring out what THEY would enjoy. and im sure you wouldnt give a fuck about "flow" in games, especially not in non-linear games.

Rubber banding isn't inherently bad. In Mario Kart - the easiest example - the banding keeps tensions high. I'm sure a more fair race would be interesting but would have made the game less successful. Why? Because Mario Kart is more about yelling at your friends, trying to shoot them, screwing up, and so on, than it is a test of "who is the better racer."

There's a similar element in the new Super Mario Bros Wii, which lets players play co-op and screw up each other's platforming - by getting in the way and such. Some players, and reviewers, hate this because it isn't "proper Mario." But what they fail to realize is that the goal of the new game isn't to platform in a traditional way with friends, it is to platform in a new "with friends" way, that is difficult in its own way. If you perceive one like the other - new Mario platforming vs old - then the interactive elements in the new seem like they interfere with the pure platforming experience. If you perceive them the way they are then you see something else.

Rubber banding in Mario Kart is partially bad because it's partially deceptive. The devs should have made it clear that it is there, and then made whatever design changes wisdom dictated to still make the game fun. "Hiding" it is where my issue comes in, because it makes the game into something that is pretending to be something it is not, and we get into conversations like this one.

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"Adaptable" challenge is a critical element of good game design. All great games have it. The question is whether the game includes it honestly or not.

Take Super Mario Bros 3 for example. In it you can control how fast you tackle a level, whether you use warp whistles. Each play through a level gives you a little more knowledge about it, making it easier during your next try. These elements of the game are elegant "adaptable challenge" controls.

Players must control how challenged they are. The game can help them do this or not.

---

Level progression - succeeding and earning harder challenges - is the most prominent kind of challenge control. Why not let the player just play any level of their choice? Why control them at all? That's what you are arguing Charlie, without realizing it. A typical game puts boundaries on how quickly a player can challenge themselves, so that the player will increase his skills slowly, will consume the game at a good pace.

Take it further. Why even design a level? Why not just have a Mario level that has 1000 different challenges chosen from a hub location? Why decide to put this challenge in front of that one, and group these 5 together into one world, and make this one optional next to that one? Why not let the player just decide? Aren't these controls coming from without? Shouldn't the _player_ know what's best?

Why even program a game at all? Let's just give the player emacs and a compiler.

The second you restrict the order in which players consume content, or create rules they must obey in order to do so, you are creating logic that determines how challenge is given out. The very nature of a level's design controls how different players will play through it differently, how each will experience its potential challenge. What you have control over, as a designer, is whether these challenges are given out in a way that produces a good experience.

Flow is good. Note that flow is not achieved if players aren't always engaged. Players can't engage in stagnation. So they have to be learning to keep flow. Adaptable challenge that creates flow includes, by definition, a challenge structure the pushes players forward. In fact, the design that creates the deepest flow teaches the most.

Like "drama management," "adaptable challenge" is a word that means something real, but gets inflated, and then people think it has to mean something bad or artificial. It does not.

alright, im gonna break your post down line by line because i cant be bothered to respond otherwise lol.


nothing is inherently anything.


it is GOOD GAME DESIGN that keeps tensions high. and rubber banding certainly isnt good game design in my book.


i dont care what makes it successful.


i already do that all the time.

but seriously lol. if you wanna yell at your friends why do you have to do it in videogames? in fact, what the fuck is good about yelling at your friends? aren't they your friends after all lol?


what you fail to realize is that NSMB is a boring game. and the reason for this is because you are obsessed with what OTHERS think of the game. its like you dont like games at all, its like they are all the same to you with the only difference being what others think of them lol.


its called good LEVEL DESIGN dude.


because that would be stupid thing to do in linear games. like, i mean, you will be able to see all the levels in advance so there would be nothing to look forward to, no journey whatsoever, and you also wont have to bother with lower-difficulty levels at all.


the point of the so-called "difficulty curve" isn't, as you'd like to think, to make the game go from "easy" to "hard". in fact, there are no such things as "easy" and "hard". nobody likes "easy" games and nobody likes "hard" games and which one you use depends on whether you're a strong person (in which case you'd use "easy") or a weak person (in which case you'd use "hard").

so yeah, games should go from hard to hard dude. the first level SHOULD be hard. there is no point in making it "easy", that's fucking stupid!

so what's the point of "difficulty curve" then?

well, you see, the point is that we want to make a JOURNEY, and for that we have to move beyond single-room games. for that we have to divide the game into sections -- into levels -- where each section is inaccessible until you beat the preceding one. but when you beat a section -- when you master it -- what happens is that you build a tiny little scientific model inside your head (though, you may have already built it if you played older games in the same genre..) that not only lets you toy with THAT section next time you play it, but also with all other sections of THE SAME LEVEL OF COMPLEXITY. so if the NEXT section is of the same level of complexity it will be "easy" i.e. boring. so in order to make it good you will have to increase its level of complexity. there you go. difficulty curve 101.


because they are fantasists who keep coming up with all these amazing ideas they cannot help themselves but sit down and program them all. that's why dude.

@charlie
Obviously I enjoy rubber banding, I don't like racing game and competitive shit. But there is still a way to counter balance rubber banding ... scoring system, basically you enjoy the journey but then the game tell you you didn't do really well and where that you and can do better which compel you to try harder!

However minecraft (and similar random procedural simulationist game like DF) would be a game for you, there is no difficulty curve it's all up to you how hard the game is without artificial system (hide in shelter or brave the unknown).

However the only way difficulty curve make sense is when you make game, not when you play them because it's all hidden.

Yeah, that's my point. "Adaptable challenge" _is_ level design. You've spun it around to mean something different. You're okay when I control a challenge through a level design, but once I control it through some kind of "logic" you have a problem. The difference between the two is arbitrary. What matters isn't whether challenge is manipulated or not. What matters is how it is done, what the challenge curve looks like afterward, and so on.

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Rubber banding is excellent game design. You just said nothing is inherently anything, then immediately imply that banding is inherently bad, literally two sentences later.

Mario Kart is about fighting the pack, your pack of friends. In the game you are either in the pack, a little ahead of the pack, or a little behind. That is the 3 ideal scenarios.

I've played a lot of Mario Kart. I played the SNES, 64, and Gamecube versions a good deal, with a wide range of people: people much older, younger, guys from school, from my personal life, family members and so on. That is a wide range of skill of competition. I know how banding affects the experience.

When a player dominates the competition in Mario Kart the resulting experience isn't that interesting for anybody. It isn't interesting for the leader, or the followers, because neither is challenged. If a challenge is too easy consistently it becomes boring. It it is too hard consistently it becomes boring. In both cases it is boring because the challenge is beyond what the player can apply themselves to. Senior university classes in Comp-Sci may be challenging but to an average high school student they may as well be meaningless, because the student would understand so little of it. Similarly, a kindergarten class in arithmetic would be equally boring, hopefully.

The ideal challenge curve fluctuates between a little too challenging - as-in insurmountable - and a little too easy - as-in barely requiring effort - in interesting patterns. Sometimes it stays closer to the top. Sometimes it stays closer to the bottom. Aside from your persistence, lack of challenge is sometimes valuable in life. Consider sleep; rest; sun bathing; getting a massage; sitting with family around a fire late at night, staring into the flames, lightly chatting. This is why Flower sells, and not just to sub-humans, but with real people who have challenging jobs and need down time to recuperate. A person who never needs down time has an entire life of downtime.

Banding takes competitive multiplayer and tries to insert an ideal challenge curve. It brings the challenge up for the strongest players, and brings the challenge down for the weakest. Bitching because you lose a few times because of a blue shell is for players who are barely better than their competition and can't tolerate the loss. If you are really that good at the game then you'll win the long run. Man up and accept a few losses. You should enjoy the pressure. Similarly, the weaker players who are given a boost are given more opportunities to improve.

If you want to improve your straight racing skills play Forza. Mario Kart is for interacting with your friends on the track, not for comparing lap times; and even if you do want to do that there's a mode for it. The game is about narrowly dodging shells, zooming past one another, seeing each other screw up and living inside your interactions. It is a game about what happens when two buddies are near each in a game where fun shit happens. "Yelling" is a good thing. I mean yelling in a positive way, when you're having fun.

NSMB is a fine game. Games sell because they provide. I don't sit around and judge the masses. I don't believe in a "sub-human." That's bullshit for people who can't interact with everyone so they blame someone else. That doesn't take courage. Judgment is for the weak. Acceptance is for the strong, because it puts the burden of responsibility on yourself, not everyone else.

I also like NSMB. I played it with my step-siblings, who are much younger than me, by 10 years. There are 3 of them. We played all the way through the game. It was pretty good. I had to stay aware of their behaviour to succeed, and they just tried not to die. It was challenging in a new way. It challenged my platforming skills because I had to be so reactive to their stupid bullshit, and it challenged my abilities to predict their behaviour.

Whenever I see someone slam it, and listen to their description of their experience playing it, there is always this pattern: "I tried to play it like a typical platformer, and everyone else got in my way, therefore I died, therefore I perceived the game as random, therefore it is bad." It is not bad. It is different. It takes more communication with your partners, and a deeper understanding of their habits, and even on top of that, avoiding them is still quite challenging.

Games go from "easy to hard." To the player they fluctuate between easy and hard, but that's because the player is increasing his skills as he progresses. The challenges in the game themselves are easy then hard. The only difference between this structure and rubber banding is the implementation. Both adjust challenge based on player skill. Banding just does it with multiple people simultaneously. That is a harder thing to do right.

By the way nintendo game are notorious for their absence of skill ceiling, I mean look at time trial in mario kart to see there is plenty skill just for driving alone, items only pills up on the skill needed (there is way to avoid blue shell, it's different in every game). I have watch someone talking about driving strategy for mario kart snes for 4 hours, 2 of them just for driving. Try doing arrow circling with pit in brawl and actually do improvisational combo with them.

The problem is that so called hardcore really want a kind of "feel good" cheap difficulty and challenge, the kind of challenge that is ego stroking.

It's all about the ego.

imagine a mod of Super Mario Bros where the next level you're going to play is determined based on how many times you die in the current level. so if you dont die at all the next level will be hard, whereas if you die like 10 times the next level will be easy. now of course, someone who's playing the game for the first time won't notice any of these rules and as a result will be immersed as much as possible. the best he will notice is that the levels are randomly generated. but sooner or later he will notice that these levels are not exactly random but tied to what HE does, and as soon this happens the immersion will be gone since these rules make aboslutely no sense whatsoever within the context of the world. i mean, for fucks sake, what does falling in the pit have to do with what's the next level? it's downright idiotic.

are you getting what im saying here? you see, there ARE good games which let you adjust the difficulty within the game. take, for example, Dark Souls where you can choose to go to Catacombs and play a very challenging game or go to Undead Burg where you can play an easier game that will let you improve your physical strength and in turn make the Catacombs easier. same shit BUT DONE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAMEWORLD. now look back at that SMB example and tell me: what sense does it make to think "oh, I won't be able to tackle the next level if it's way too hard so I'm just gonna change it by falling 10 times in the pit"?


scores are as bad. they too make no sense whatsoever within the context of the gameworld.


yeah, except that minecraft is void and DF is too ugly to look at (minecraft is ugly too but the first issue overshadows it).


only apparently so. in reality, there is no contradiction whatsoever. kinda lazy to explain this tho lol.


so that's why we have democracy, right? the strong people got bored of being so strong and the weak got bored of being so weak, so we decided to pretend that everyone is equal so we can at least pretend we're having fun. not sure what i just said, but sounds deep man.

anyways, good players should seek out good/better players not resort to self-deception lol. that's for weaklings.


i dont do any of these lol. sleeping is so boring which is why i never want to go to sleep. sun bathing lol. getting a massage wtf. i can barely get myself to sit with my family tbh. waste of my time. and starring into the flames i only do if my mind is busy thinking about things (which is also what happens when i sit down with my family lol). lightly chatting? dont know whats that.

so why should i play flower? makes no sense!

--

okay, i wanted to reply to all of your points but i got bored too early. maybe another time.

Fabulous posts Mr Sheen!

Don't play game, play simulation, game are abstract arbitrary rules to create an emotional journey, game are just not for you : P

It's not democracy it's "fun", nobody want to be bored, if they are bored, nobody play, if nobody play the game is pointless. Game are for player not game designer.

the problem with you guys is that your language is cancerous. and it's not just you; it's a pandemic.

see for example:


but all videogames are simulations! there is not a single videogame that's not a simulation. tetris, for example, is as much simulation as gran turismo is. they are just different shades of the same.


lol. all rules are abstract ffs! what you mean is something else and that something else has absolutely nothing to do with abstraction but with theme. tetris, for example, isn't "abstract" (actually it is, just as much as other games are), it's just a little weird considering it's about blocks falling down.

i dont know what "arbitrary" means here, so im parsing your statement as "games are rules" lol.


all journeys are emotional, at least all the good ones (but so are the boring ones too, but just a different shade of emotional you see).

consider, for example, that the very point of videogames -- that the very point of simulations -- is to fool you into thinking you are taken to another place, a kind of place that is better than real life. if real life can give you "emotional journeys" then so can videogames. am i being clear?

My language is cancerous WTF!

A simulation mean you should simulate something that exist in the real world into a world a representation, tetris is own reference therefore is not a simulation. As tetris is a world without any reference that itself it is abstract, that's pure logic here.

All arbitrary (which mean made up without any reference) rules are not emotional journey, you just made a syllogism.

hahaha. but dont worry! scientists are working on the cure. in the mean time, you should check radiotherapy which is to say you should stop talking lol.

but really, dude, if you can say something funny like this:

"random procedural simulationist game"

that's a sure sign of cancer! four words! "procedural" -> all videogames are procedural, "simulationist" -> all videogames are simulationist, and "random".. is just random. and what are we left with? nothing but a game.

and then you go on arguing that simulations simulate things that exist in real life.. yeah dude, minecraft totally exists in real life! i mean, i saw a creeper the other day and ive just finished building my house made out of lego blocks.

and then you go on to say that tetris does not refer to anything but itself lol. but how did alexey create it in the first place for fuck's sake? did such question ever occur to you? how did alexey come up with the idea if tetris referred to itself? he just pulled it out of thin air? makes no sense whatsoever.

Minecraft simulate much more than tetris and imitate aspect of life, at least creeper are predator or monster, those does not exist solely in minecraft. There is bit of abstraction, but yeah it's mostly a simulation aka A REPRESENTATION.

Tetris takes cues from constructivism wich is a russian movement toward abstraction but does not attempt at being a simulation of this. Whatever you can't be more abstract since it takes inspiration in abstraction.

Procedural is short for procedural generation in case you are really stupid.

But there is no point to discuss any further if you are curbing the meaning of the world to your own view AND view them as absolute when these are not.

End of discussion

translated:
"But there is no point to discuss any further if you are speaking your mind AND speaking your mind."

now that at least shows that the author is confused.

and the full translation would be:
"But there is no point to discuss any further if you are going to try to change my mind."



but how hard is it to understand that tetris simulates BRICKS and GRAVITY? are you going to tell me that tetris invented gravity? no, you're going to tell me that BRICKS and GRAVITY are not enough! and you're going to tell me where exactly you draw the line! if only you could! what's more likely however is a massive spam of randomly cooked up ideas as to where the line should be drawn -- basically a test of my patience, a cheap trick used by people who don't want to sit down and think for themselves first.

but, let me cut that shit right away: all videogames are simulations and no line could be drawn between the one that is not and the one that is. instead, we can say that some videogames are SMALLER and some BIGGER simulations and that's it.

so what's exactly that the guy told me in his earlier post? basically to play complex simulation games. but not the ones which simulate such "abstract" things as bricks!

gravity is 9.8 m/s : P not in tetris
And what make you think it's vertical movement?
Or abstract thing like rubber banding : D

Christ, Charlie is pretty much dominating this thread, and probably better than I could have done (too busy last few months to spend large chunks of time in topics like this). Great read.

As for the current topic, can we at least all agree that games that aestheticize a larger subset of reality (i.e. advanced gun physics and robots in a 3D recreation of New York City) are better than games that aestheticize a smaller one (i.e. gravity and brick arrangements in a void), and the larger this subset grows the closer you get to the spirit of so-called "procedurally generated stories" simply by the size and scope of the world's possibility space increasing? I'm using that word because saying "simulate" seems to confuse some people in this topic because, hey wait, robots with advanced guns don't actually really exist in New York City, huh what, how can you possibly simulate something that "doesn't exist".

Obviously with an HP bar or a skill tree, that's simulation for you! Not counting the CYOA social dynamics.

Posting in a thread.

but how do you know that? how do you measure things like that in a simulation? there does not seem to be a way! at least not in tetris.

i think you're confusing yourself here because programmers like to think of speeds in terms of pixels per second. and that, just like everything else, is a fiction, a fiction that is useful during programming. but once you complete the game and give it to a player THERE ARE NO PIXELS ANYMORE. players do not see pixels, thank goodness! for if they did it would mean the game is bad.


what makes me think im somewhere else? simulation of course.


sure, HP bars simulate health, what's so strange about it? or would you prefer visual cues instead? or would you prefer our avatar yelling "I AM DYING! I AM DYING!"?

Ok this game is for you then :/

http://kotaku.com/5962631/this-digital-boyfriend-game-is-like-dating-cleverbot-except-even-more-hilariouscreepy
 (http://kotaku.com/5962631/this-digital-boyfriend-game-is-like-dating-cleverbot-except-even-more-hilariouscreepy)

More on topic and less nagging ;)

http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=804

You should.


Ok, so you're talking about narrative consistency here. I agree that consistency takes the cake most of the time. It is important to have a game be consistent. When we throw in achievements and what have you and they make the player de-immerse(?) then they are destructive. No question.

Banding does not inherently force a narrative to be inconsistent. Banding is just very easy to implement poorly. Any kind of rich adaptable challenge logic is. Consider the free-pass the newer Mario games gives to players who die 8 times in one level (maybe what you were referencing).  

Any kind of logic, difficulty balance, whatever, requires the skill of the designer to integrate with the "game world." Even rising challenges in RPGs, stronger and stronger monsters, requires the justification: you are going to more dangerous areas etc. Sometimes RPGs don't do this - often they don't in several places - and it hurts the game.

Scoring, banding, it's all the same. Angry Birds kicks ass with its 3 stars.


Italics mine. Lightly chatting is socializing. You know, when you're hanging out while going for a walk? Maybe you're in line somewhere? Maybe you're visiting your Mom and you're in the kitchen cooking something and she's messing around over there?

The italics: you've stumbled onto the very reason games don't have to be challenging. When you are busy facing the challenges given to you by the rest of your life you want activities to complement that. It's the same with Flower, with RPGs, with anything that lets you relax. Even driving counts. If I am busy talking to a friend, and focused on them, I don't want to do a Sudoku. That would distract me. Though maybe I could have a beer, or drive, or ... play a game: something that would complement my core focus.

I have a friend who doesn't like people very much. He is an excellent programmer, very logical, low tolerance for annoyances and people who are wrong, or don't get to the point. He programs and programs. He socializes just fine, he just can't tolerate bullshit. He is a lot like Icy. His opinions on games are a lot like Icy's. When I first read Icy I saw him in it. He doesn't understand why anyone would want to play an RPG. He wants his games to challenge him directly. He views RPGs as filled with arbitrary diversions.

I _love_ RPGs - my first serious genre. I love people. Even if they don't like me I usually find myself in the middle of some kind of social conflict. When I play games I want to stretch my mind, because sometimes the people around me are slow, but I also want to unwind. I want to let all of my mixed feelings unroll and sort themselves out. I want to reflect and grow as a result of the unresolved shit hanging around in my head. Games that mix story and challenge do exactly that. That's why I love RPGs.


You're right.

I agree that it's a good idea to build larger worlds. Larger simulations provide more opportunity than smaller ones. Games will slowly trend in that direction.

I disagree with an implication - that may be unintentional - that the most important step towards proc-gen is larger simulations. What we need are better simulations. Take Fable or Mass Effect. They only have one gradient of player choice (more-or-less): good/evil. How realistically do their worlds react to these player decisions?

We don't even have simple simulations working properly. What we really need are stories/characters built in a way so that they can be responsive to player input. They need to be defined differently. We don't program every possible outcome for each possible input in a Mario game. We don't say, "when he jumps in this context have him land in this way," "but when we jumps in this slightly different context have him land in this slightly different way, except in these 3 cases (etc)." We just program general rules for jumping, and rules for interacting with enemies, that very per enemy, and vary per type of jump and so on. We don't write/program characters this way. We still see them as static things.

How does a character change _in general_ in-response to a player input (i.e. good/evil). What is the function there?

That implies you don't understand much about games.

I think he means if the quality of the simulation (density?) is comparable.

Charlie Sheen is a little late. He begs for your pardon.


I really only care about what's good. Now, of course, good and successful aren't mutually exclusive but you get my point.


Of course.


That's right.


That *might* be true. In which case, I'd say it's a good technique for making money.


But a human being cannot live without a challenge. You are merely saying that games are less challenging than real life, which is true, but that does not justify Flower and games of that kind. In fact, nothing justifies Flower because I don't like that game.


But I understand why people want to play Flower. It's not that I don't lol.

Wait. Dwarf Fortress is a simulation and what makes it JUST a simulation and not a game is that it leaves it to chance for those 'organic wholes' of narrative to EMERGE.

That's why I think we need the playwright, which is not cheating.

Flower is justified because no one knows another person.

Let's say I go out and meet the "girl of my dreams." She rejects me, but I'll probably see her again. What am I going to think about? Do I want to play Chess? Do homework? ... I probably want to do something that compliments my raging feelings. The challenge in my life is brought by the momentum of my experiences with said woman.

Tea might compliment my mental state, or listening to music, or watching trash tv... or maybe Flower, maybe. I'll be thinking about the girl. I'll be thinking about work. I'll be thinking about the insignificance of my social status. Flower just helps me along. It adds the one ingredient I need.

If I am already calm and need challenge then challenge is what I seek. Games fill a minor role in our lives. What makes them valuable or not have general principles, but is also based on what other elements our lives already have, at the time we play them.

---


Is true. Stories are flexible things.

--

Good convo.

--

vids, you mean the playwright to write narrative i.e. man-written?

No, I meant playwright in machina, like an AI Director.

It's funny because the player can be thought of as both the producer and the consumer of the narrative.

The player participates in an experience that is also being orchestrated. A perfect simulation should be thought of as something else, a perfect holodeck should not be our ultimate goal.

Yeah, that's what I meant.

Note, the holodeck - i.e Star Trek - actually had running narrative in it: interactive Sherlock Holmes etc.

General note. The interaction of player and story should be thought of like this:
  . good simulation within the confines of what would be a good story
  . good story around all possible simulations

If all the player can do is be terse or forgiving, on a scale, and the rest is static, then the world must "simulate" all possibilities given the input of the PC acting terse or forgiving (on a scale).

Basically you restrict the simulation enough so you can tell the story you want, simulate well where the player has a choice, then write the surrounding story well.

These statements are kind of obvious.

example: Mario.
  . simulate running and jumping based on simple inputs, incl jumping-on, bumping into, enemies.
  . create (static) levels that suit all possible simulations
i.e. No matter how the player conquers the first Goomba, he will for sure have "passed" it. Make further challenges under the assumption the player has passed one simple jumping challenge.

Graham, we indeed choose what we're going to do based on our mental state but isn't that beside the point? I, for example, have no need to watch trash TV. There exists no mood which trash TV trumps. For every possible mental state my mind goes through, trash TV is ranked very low. You'd have to lock me in a room with nothing but a TV and keep me there for life in order to make me watch it.

Doubtful. You just need the right trash. Sometimes we want to tune out.

The point is that no matter how much you want to judge the interests of another, you can't _really_ do so by judging how much you appreciate the thing that they like. You have to ask what state are they in, and whether or not they are really engaged.

Buddhist monks sit around and stare at colored stone discs. How simpler can you get than that? What can we say about an activity from the source of media alone? Not much. You have to understand the person too. If trash tv relaxes a person, because she is stressed, and you can verify that, then it is a good thing.

There is a symbiosis between entertainment product and person. You must understand how the two work, by understanding both. Humans are so diverse that it is difficult to blanket types of games as being good or bad.

I think the error in that remark might have been the notion that the game in question is being made for an audience of all people.  Different people have different tastes, and as independents we generally do best when we cater to a subset of those tastes which match our own.  Thus we make the trash for ourselves, and rely on the fact that there are a great many individuals out there who are similar enough that they'll like it as much as we do.

Which remark?

This one.

Ok, I wasn't sure.

Since Frank Mir represents the "Insomnia" crowd, I'll fill in some backing for context.

Insomnia has this general position that games should push you. If they can't push you as well as a book can, in the same way, then they must push you through their mechanics. Therefore their mechanics must push you.

Sometimes this idea gets turned into a blanket statement, to simplify the answer to the question, "what makes a game great?" So their standard counter to what you are saying is that the gamers in question are "lesser" for liking "lesser" media, whether that media was intended for them or not.

And my counter is... prove it.

I get an objectivist vibe from icycalm and the insomnia crowd.  Rationalism, a strong belief in a verifiable objective truth, and a fixation on "greatness" of individuals and works, where all which does not qualify is valueless.

Yes, they are single-minded. I find them insightful and strange. They say poorly thought out things and over hype them, but most of the time they say useful stuff, I find.

Really they like to attack aggressively. I like listening to them though.

hello gents. lets get this done.


trash is by definition something you dont need. if i need it then it isn't trash.


yup, its a good thing for them just like a shitty coat is a good thing for a homeless man. so what does that mean?


it doesnt matter whether THEY are engaged or not. if they spend time with these games then they are indeed engaged. and following that logic it's easy to conclude that for every game , there is at least one person who enjoys it. if we go further with that logic we can then conclude that it's impossible to rank art (or anything for that matter).


how do you mean "push you"?


you can't be more wrong.


and you are multi-minded?

can you proceduraly generate a icy fanfic

Probably.

Trash is a common term. It's a genre type.

Everyone is single-minded sometimes. We all have flaws.

The quality of art is measured by how much engagement it (potentially) produces. Or you could say "valuable engagement." Just because you respect something that reaches out to someone doesn't mean everything is equal.

Art is art. If it helps 3 people that's good. If it helps 6 that's better. If it helps no one but has the capacity to help - i.e. contains truth - then that's good too. You have to question the intent of the author. If something accidentally engages us, does that make the work good? I don't know. You don't have to marginalize someone to have a ranking system.

"push you" = challenge you directly.

the shitty coat analogy is poor.

yup and to me it's all trash i.e. i dont need it.


what does it mean to be single-minded? quick! some examples please. also, what is opposite of single-minded? multi-minded?


potentially? how do you mean POTENTIALLY produces? the rest is true though.


what is "valuable" engagement? can you give some examples of "valuable" and "invaluable" engagement?


and charlie sheen is charlie sheen.


oh right, so even if it doesn't help anyone it still could be good? that's what you're saying right? kinda like those artists who weren't famous during their lifetime, right? is that what you're getting at?


so you could have art intentionally engage you and unintentionally lol. what about life? how does life engage people? intentionally or unintentionally? does god exist?


there must be someone at the bottom of the ranking system. otherwise, it's no ranking system.


what does it mean to "challenge me directly"?


why is it poor analogy?

I'll answer some now and some later. Let that be a habit (for me).

"Trash" tv is like "junk" food. It means to satisfy short-term desires, as a priority. It's not inherently bad. The word "trash" is meant to help identify it.

Single-minded means to be less accepting of certain kinds of opposition. Unjustified dismissal of disagreement. Insomnia isn't single-minded to an extreme. It is quite varied in many ways. At times, on certain subjects, it is the most "multi-minded," but when I gauge it as a whole, one of its most self-destructive traits is its single-mindedness. I don't mean that it is always that way or somehow "less" than other game writing because of it.

Art "potentially" produces engagement. For example, if I paint a brilliant painting and it is destroyed in a fire, is it any less brilliant? What if I paint it and no one in my co-existent society appreciates it, but people in a later one do? ... What I paint it and no one gets it (yet) because of poor distribution - i.e. it shows up in front of the wrong people? Your analogy about the artist who sees fame after death is on the money.

The thing about "intention" confuses me too. I don't know how it applies, but I feel like it matters somehow. ... I think I just wanted to express the general complexity of rating art.

There's a difference between marginalizing and ranking low.

So this no longer about procedurally ganerated stories?

Icys is only about the semantics, it's all virtual with no actualization, potential get spoken but never realized (none do games, they only play them), it's not about truth, rationalism or objectivity, it's only about social status through self validation, heavy rationalization to bend communication in their favor, a kind of self delusion.

By forcing their axiom they cheat on arguments because they trap you in their own advantageous frame of reference, which is used to discard any other frame so you can't claim favorable position. There is no communication it's an invasion cleverly disguise as deep thoughts, they claim some universal value, bend them to their view, then proceed to manipulate you by taking down any other value.

ON TOPIC
However I started with naive implementation I'll show snippet soon, nothing very fancy for the moment, it's about exploring hi level structure symbol and slowly deconstruct it to lexeme ... then works on procedural purpose to fill structure with actual hi level semantic (opposed to low level random semantics that would constitute typical procedural generation). In short working on grammar and syntax then working on discourse to fill the structure. that won't achieve the graal (at least yet) but might be good enough ala "minecraft blocky realism", ie an approximation whose coarseness is its very own aesthetics. I also narrowed the domain to only some facet of story. It's just time to do enough talk!

I'll be interested to see it.

--

It's still about proc-gen, as much as it can be.

http://emshort.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/introducing-versu/
EMshort strike back

for the test I made i need some time I catch up some misc things before

http://emshort.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/versu-content-structure/
follow up

http://emshort.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/versu-conversation-implementation/
implementation details (similar to their gdc)

http://philpapers.org/archive/EVARPT.1.pdf
some more doc

Looks pretty interesting :) I laughed out loud when I saw "completed achievemnt" haha. Now I'm fully expecting to see these in novels, films and even music! And too bad it's only for iPad.

Coming on all platform with creation tools

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/flash%20build/GameIdea.html

First test for structure, generated based on placeholder data, just to be sure the structure make sense. Starting with the simplest way. The game part is not the focus, I'll try to evolve world and story first down to actual usuable atom (understand feedable into a art generator).

I lost a computer and had to retrieve data, that's for the delay.

I checked it out.

right now the prototype structure is:
gameType(player number + view + genre) +
worldDesign(size + tone + worldGenre) +
Gameplay(world + quest(action + objective + motivation) + failure + mean)

Some category are too ambiguous for my liking, I will break them down further until I reach satisfying atomical unit. It's also constrain free so composition is mostly nonsensical beyond syntactic correctness (like the famous: colorless green sleep furiously, but tighter due to more semantic fitness in my syntax).

One thing I want to address before solid complexity for story is good conflict/crisis/turning point generation, which mean give a good reason for a problem to appear that fit a generated theme. When I think about a story that's almost transparent in the process, however I found that existing generator are a bit weak about it. We tend to rely on backstory to expose an incoming problem, I need to explore this notion a bit more and try to find the domain of all problem generation.

Edit:
Basically a "pression" generator, pression generate problems that resolve themselves with crisi, creating a story (as a story being a state transition). Pression arise from needs which arise from property of agents.

Edit2:
What I want to achieve first is a good "why" generator in short before moving on complex things.

You have to define conflict for any given character.

Yep but I'm working on generic descriptor now, both structure that ties things semantically and atomic descriptor that can describe any lexicon (exception that describe human experience you can't generate). The idea is that under most exception that need to be input into the generator dictionaries, there is atom and structure to describe them (just like syntax and alphabet manipulate words to expend on their meaning). Because of that, it mean that any new lexicon from reality potentially exist, a pure random generator can stumble on any of them simply by countless permutation, dictionaries (made of lexicon and template) are essentially both a shortcut and curated meaning to fit human experience closer. My goal is then to construct mechanical aspect, from which emotional and meaningful element will be express by a "discourse generator". Of course it's an ideal, the range of expression just has to be broad enough, real language too has limitation and fail to convey the true spectrum of human expression.

However looking at my note it was already there in the generic theme generator (not implemented yet). Basically I use a simplified maslow as a mean to describe thematic pressure: survival, relationship and satisfaction.

Basically they are gauge where movement, position or potential is meaningful. For example a survival gauge can be express by a hp bar, low position mean weak/injured/sick, high position can mean healthy, a negative movement signify an hit, is strength signify the severity of the hit, a positive movement is recovering from injury, depending on where the position is the movement has different signification, on a low position a big hit look critical, on a hi position it's a warning, if no movement is happening there is still a potential for negative movement which mean a threat (can hit) or an opportunity (can heal), if you had time it accumulate with movement trend (potentially or not), hit that goes smaller and smaller (deceleration) indicate fatigue. Now add more modifier, who is attacking a friend or a foe, what is the general context, what is the history, and then you can see past the number of the gauge that there is a very expressive tool, and we have yet to combine it with other gauge. Look at relationship (can be expressed by lovemeter) apply the same type of modifier and then look at how the meaning change when you change or mix type of relationship (love, brotherhood), etc... It does not give you the right expression, it just contain it all, bad, good or genius, it's all about the author/generator finding it.

Okay I outline 3 type of pressure, but I just remember that the great dramatica theory already laid out the origin of pressure, in a number of 4:
- Situation
- Attitude
- Behavior
- Activity

Actually it is generated by internal-external axis and state-process axis, it's a space. Internal mean that aspects of problem are internal to agent, vice versa external mean they are in the environment of agent. Process and state are pretty self explanatory I think.
Situation for example is external-state, attitude is internal state and behavior is internal process, pollution is an activity but polluted is a state. They are relevant because they define the source of problem and the type of solution needed. So for generated crisis (say threat) and link them meaningfully to a story problem we can create a cause (a threat because of a situation/attitude/behavior/activity for self/other which is desired/feared) that depend on that class: the sun is dying is an external process (activity), the never ending winter (external state), the forbidden love between opposing faction member (internal state), the foolishness of consumption (internal process). You solve the problem by ending the source of the crisis, how is inform by its class.

okay: now I need to translate that in abstract code term and be sure it mesh with target generation goal.

I'm a little worried that you're going too broad.

I'm not saying that you are. I'm not even sure you might be, but for clarity I'll bring it up. What is your plan?

Do you want to create a tool that is stand-alone, maybe share it with others, get them to use it, play around with it, then think about games you can create with it?

Or do you want to make a specific game with what you have?

Is this related to your sonic game?

I want to create the abundant music of stories

The sonic game was there to learn about unity3D and have a goal of good complex 3D control for a simple platformer. I also have a racing game (architecture training) to learn to finish complete game according to a certain checklist. I'm stuck in both, the sonic game don't match my criteria of good, the racing game has minor architecture problem that has been solve and something with sounds not initializing at instantiation time for vehicle, i'm investigating.

So it's a tool? That wasn't clear.

Do you have a project in mind to build with it right away?

right now I would like to evolve it for quests, archstory and backstory generation for spatially procedurally generated world. Not necessarily complex story, but at least filling the 5Ws.

So no game? This is just a play-thing.

I mean do you want to monetize?

I'll monetize Caribbean game ;) but to make such a game I need to learn first, hopefully I can translate what I have learn into something with money value. Actually the sonic/racing games, if done, will be adapted to Caribbean tropes, the racing game is halfway through that. The story generator will translate is tool to help manage scope, just like level generator, it has to be good enough for little diversion while I focus on hi quality hand made content.

So yes it has indirect money value.

I haven't really been following this thread, but I'd like to post this series of papers if it hasn't been mentioned before:

 Interactive Story Generation
 (http://books.google.com/books?id=8_QKE9bSUYQC&pg=PA245&lpg=PA245&dq=interactive+story+generation+pddl&source=bl&ots=gJNU6TbCAq&sig=M4kvKAIw6VYA_E8-eahe88uOvQ8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JpU_UfebM_SI0QGF4ICIDQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=interactive%20story%20generation%20pddl&f=false")

There's like, a whole academic conference on the subject. Most of the work I've seen involves using STRIPS-like planners with a set of "agents" that have "objectives." The agents satisfy their objectives according to the rules laid out about the agents.

One example I found was one where they had the agents in 1001 nights: Aladdin, Jafar, Jasmine, and the Genie. The agents have properties (Jasime is beautiful, Jafar is a bad guy, the genie is in a bottle and does what it is commanded, etc.) then they give Jafar a goal of "marry Jasmine", and the STRIPS-like planner finds a sequence of actions that each character can take to resolve the situation.


I think the major problem with this approach is that you've sort of implicitly thought about what kinds of stories it generates when you set up the characters and rules. (There's no reason those can't be procedurally generated too, however. For instance, the player themselves could be an agent in the story.)

The major strength of the approach is that you can still get to the desired endpoint even if the player fucks something up along the way (you just have to replan).

proc-gen is cool

Okay I had outline something something about pression and problem description, now how do you generate that? When I pose the activity/behavior/situation/attitude I had no real idea until I got to sleep, then I had to wake up to note instant insight ??? they always happen the exact same moment your head hit the pillow ... annoying!

First I shift the naming to something more readable:
Character action/state (behavior/attitude)
World action/state (activity/situation)

There is two way to generate from them:
1. Implicitly
Generate a world and a bunch of agent with some more or less random parameters and let them pressure agents' needs, from need generate story. If you have wolf pack near a village it's a threat (potential lowering of hp) you can use a solver to select an appropriate goals to release tension. Once that goal is generate you can further add complication alog the goal resolution quite easily.

2. Explicitly
Select a specific need, then generate a world using a solver that purposefully provide pressure and tool to relieve that pressure. It's simply asking what is the story is about, fortunately for me my theme generation take care of that.

But how do you code the semantics? Let's say you go explicit and you want a simple story about behavior and lack of satisfaction. The world can generate a mother, set it to abusive and define the target need of abusive (survival, relationship, satisfaction), it's lack of satisfaction so we choose behavior that prevent the protagonist satisfaction, create a solution and create the path to that solution. Basically in a nutshell, it's much easier to define now actual implementation now we have a direction, adjective (parameter) of agent define the general dynamics, we are able to generate stake. Right now i'm not considering mixing story atom together at all, most human story are usually complex layering of simple atomic story, even the simplest one (for example tracking all the simple relationship between agent are mini arc onto themselves).

So what's the question? I don't understand it.

I don't get what you mean

I mean was your question hypothetical so you could just answer it yourself or is it an actual question?

I mean I can't separate what you're solving from what you have solved, or if you're currently solving anything - as opposed to building.

It was a rhetorical question, I'm answering it, it need an answer before moving on implementation. Basically it's about linking property of object to story function, property provide pressure and type of needs, you link the right property to another to generate the basic set up for the simplified story generation I'm chasing right now to implement. For example abusive is behavior property, if i link it to one need of another character it became the pressure on this character's need. If there is a pressure on a need you can link it to the tool that would relieve the pressure. Since I have an abstract (almost normalized) way to represent need and pressure (gauges) I can solve them. I didn't look at it yet, but it seems a simple utility tree might be just enough to do that as a solver. But I'm not looking into solver now, I'm looking at structure.

ok

I have been working on hilevel value for story generation:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/flash%20build/GameIdeaStory.html

The word are specific and relate to many concept I might need to explain. It generate strange phrasing now and some wording might be totally off!

I also consider using various free lexical database like the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mind_Common_Sense
https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet5/wiki/Relations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou6SB8dWKjw
1h talk