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[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

Wow.

I want to see this working

[Hideous]

This is going to be so much win.

[Daniel Benmergui]

Wow...this is something that I find really interesting

I got more or less to the point you are, tough my approach was a little more symbolic (I wanted to avoid making the game too text-heavy)...

Good luck with it!

[Mr. Yes]

Whoa, awesome. Like, REALLY awesome. Didn't see this thread before.

[increpare]

I got more or less to the point you are, tough my approach was a little more symbolic (I wanted to avoid making the game too text-heavy)...

It's pretty much impossible to avoid making it text-heavy when it comes to Lacanian approaches, alas.  I was originally planning on implementing a lot of semantic structure in the background, but there's no way I'll be able to fit that in in time.

And yeah, the 'level design' was a big pain.  But I more or less got it out of the way (at least enough material has been included to get a prototype up and working).  I've had BIG troubles motivating myself to get on to the 'implementing speech' part of things.  Because it's not particularly interesting for me to do :/   I took two weeks off, and am going to have to cram the final two stages into this last remaining week 

I take it that you haven't gotten the prototype of Shrink up and running yet?

I'd certainly be very interested in seeing how your game progresses (given that we're using very different models:  I should be able to get by for the time being without any explicit emotional content -there might be some psychosomatic symptoms included if I have time, but that will be about it).

[Daniel Benmergui]

And yeah, the 'level design' was a big pain.  But I more or less got it out of the way (at least enough material has been included to get a prototype up and working).  I've had BIG troubles motivating myself to get on to the 'implementing speech' part of things.  Because it's not particularly interesting for me to do :/   I took two weeks off, and am going to have to cram the final two stages into this last remaining week

mmm...how about using a wordcloud? I was thinking of using "Free association" as the source of information (though without text)...perhaps the slips can be seen as an unfitting word in a group of semantically-related words. I know it's almost as hard as doing the speech itself...maybe you can have a "social" biography, and a "real" biography...you would pull out words from the social one, and slip some from the real one every now an then, as slippages.

I take it that you haven't gotten the prototype of Shrink up and running yet?

Not really...I have a dumb proto, which is winnable but stupidly simple and experimental:

http://ludomancy.com/games/shrink/shrink.html

(I won't go over the mechanics here, but if you confront the fear of darkness with her cousin, you will get the true reason for the trauma).

[increpare]

mmm...how about using a wordcloud? I was thinking of using "Free association" as the source of information (though without text)...perhaps the slips can be seen as an unfitting word in a group of semantically-related words.

Heh; sounds like apples and oranges

Not really...I have a dumb proto, which is winnable but stupidly simple and experimental:

Ah; it works.  But yeah: pretty majorly prototypish!

[increpare]

Okay.  This isn't going to be done for the competition, possibly ever.  I got some extra stuff done, but I'm still a zillion miles away from a working prototype.  I'm pretty much happy to abandon it now, but if ever I think in the future of a way of getting a prototype to work that won't cost me my sanity and two solid week's work, I will.  Not too late for a joke entry, but I don't feel terribly motivated to do anything like that quite at the moment.

[Terry]

 

[Noyb]

I haven't played a procedural psychology game since Dr. Sbaitso all the way back on DOS. And that just rephrased whatever I typed as questions along with snide insinuations about my upbringing. Don't give up any post-competition plans!

[Josh R]

I was looking forward to this... .

[Daniel Benmergui]

It´s a very tough concept...

Where did you get stuck?

[increpare]

It´s a very tough concept...

Where did you get stuck?

The language engine.  Having firstly to code in the various possible sentence structures would be a pain.  Then having to code in a way to naturally navigate from one possible sentence to another would be a pain.  Giving the character some sort of memory so that they wouldn't say the same thing twice wouldn't be too hard, but would be difficult.  Then giving some control to the player to guide the person to talk about certain topics would be a pain.  In short: pain pain pain.  Also, despite not-inconsiderable efforts on my part, all the information about the characters past was stored in a messy way.

I was thinking while walking home there that, if I were to go back to it, I'd structure everything a lot more modularly, and code the speech in at the same time as I was coding in the data for a particular event (wedding, death, job, &c.), so as to 1: make adding more content easier, and 2: to get a working prototype up quickly.  I might do it as well, but I think I'll need to mull it over to get things absolutely straight in my head before I even think about coding it.

[Daniel Benmergui]

I might do it as well, but I think I'll need to mull it over to get things absolutely straight in my head before I even think about coding it.

Sounds familiar...

Even though you disregarded it, maybe the trick is to avoid the speech. When you read summaries of real psychological therapies that lasted years, you realize there are only some key moments of intervention during the treatment, and the actually important information from the patient can be explained in a short text (of course, you're leaving out many factors, but making a human simulator is out of our reach right now, I think ). That means most of the speech is actually not interesting...

Of course, I have no applicable ideas on how to solve that problem either.

[increpare]

the actually important information from the patient can be explained in a short text (of course, you're leaving out many factors, but making a human simulator is out of our reach right now, I think ). That means most of the speech is actually not interesting...

True, but the problem in terms of procedurally generating stuff, for a computer to automatically generate interesting scenarios, you (I think) need the possibility that the key episodes in therapy could occur at any moment, when they were talking about anything.  So, in some sense, it seems to me necessary that they have the ability to blab on and on about a wide range of things, because ideally I want the possibility that any one of those could present a clue.  One might reverse-engineer one, I guess (starting from two words that are closely related, associating one with a traumatic incident, another with some relatively harmless activity some years later), but I'm not sure how well that would work. But also: without giving your person a large range of things they *might* say, the possibilities for interesting slips will be tiny.

Hmm: okay, I'm thinking about it again.  To construct the trauma, and the possible slips I could do in an hour or two's programming (on top of what I already have): it requires no coding effort whatsoever.  That would come out with something like "man raped by father.  father wore blue jeans. he keeps on slipping the word 'blue' into his sentences by accident".  But what could I do with that?  It's very much a single event.

I guess I could just have the computer output a gigantic file of all information about the patient's life (in tree form), but with the traumatic event left out, and with all the substitutions put in.  But that doesn't exactly have the same dynamism to me   :D

(on a not unrelated topic, I started working on the planning of a basic Freudian dream simulator today, which I might be able to do without too much effort).

[Melly]

(on a not unrelated topic, I started working on the planning of a basic Freudian dream simulator today, which I might be able to do without too much effort).

The answer is simple: You want to bang your mother.

[Daniel Benmergui]

The answer is simple: You want to bang your mother.

That's right.

Psychology works on how you deal with the fact that you can't.

And before you wonder, if you actually do, it's even worse.