Romanticism vs comfort and the joy of hanging out

Posted by Michael on July 30th, 2006, in Development

This is another stream of consciousness, an account of a thought process that actually arrives at a solution. I’m just using this blog to think “out loud”. As you can tell, it really helps.

I love it when a plan comes together.

In the first model of Drama Princess, Consumerism, our actors are very selfish. They choose to do the things that give them the most pleasure. In the second model, Romanticism, they prefer to do things with objects that they like and they would choose to do things with these objects that feel comfortable (i.e. that match the relationship that they have with them the best).

The inevitability of having a relatively small set of animations leads to a problem with this, however. When an actor meets a character that he really likes, he will choose to perform the interaction offered by this character that matches their relationship best. The number of interactions offered by this actor will be limited (by the number of animations that we have made and behaviours that we have programmed).

Suppose the character only offers three interactions:

1. one for when you hate him,
2. one for when you’re indifferent, and
3. one for when you like him.

If you like the character, you will choose the third opportunity. But after you’re done, your Fascination with this opportunity will drop to prevent you from repeating yourself. If forced to do another interaction, the next best match would be the opportunity that matches a neutral relationship. And in a third step, you would end up doing the thing that is appropriate when you hate the character. Even though you like him!

This problem can be solved by allowing the characters to do nothing if there is no opportunity that sufficiently matches their relationship.

But what if there is a second object nearby? Say another character that you are fairly indifferent towards. This character also offers three similar opportunities. So you first choose the interaction with the character that you like that feels comfortable. When this opportunity disappears, due to a temporary decline in Fascination, the best match in the area would become the indifferent interaction with the other character. Ergo: rather than hanging around with a character that you like and doing nothing in particular, you would walk over to a character that you don’t care about, to do something with him that is neither here nor there!
If you’re a child you might get away with that kind of behaviour. But for an adult it would look odd.

So it seems like one of Auriea’s and my private one-liners, “It’s not about comfort, baby”, may apply to Drama Princess! 😯

When you like somebody, you want to be around them. Even when there’s nothing in particular that you want to do with them. Just “hanging out” is quite sufficient. Only after some amount of time, you would be inclined to move away to interact with an object that you like a lot less. After which you would return. The latter would already happen in Drama Princess, thanks to Fascination. The only thing we need to add is a way to lock an actor to an object even when they are not interacting with each other.

We already have a value for Attitude. Attitude declines as boredom sets in: each time you interact with the same object, attitude decreases. This allows you to switch to another object when you get bored. Currently, Attitude is maximized, each time you start interacting with a new object. And the inclination to switch to another object -which is what we’re trying to prevent here- increases as you continue to interact with the same object.

Note that as per a later post, the term "attitude" should be replaced by "attention span".

Making the size and speed of the decline of Attitude relative to how good the relationship is, would allow us to differentiate between objects that you like and objects that you don’t: the more you like an object, the longer it would take to get bored with it. Now we need to add a way to actively prevent the actor from switching objects, based on the size of the Attitude, perhaps.

This reminds me of the Urgency attributed to Opportunities offered by objects that are very closeby. If an object is closeby, the urgency of its Opportunities forces them to appear in the final selection of appropriate Opportunities, even if they don’t seem very comfortable. We could expand the Urgency attribute to also take the level of relationship into account, next to distance. And in a similar way: only very close relationships will cause Urgency.

Interesting to see how closeness is used by the same function in both literal and figurative sense. 🙂

This relies on the existence of opportunities. And the limitation in the number of opportunities is exactly what caused our problem. This limitation is caused by the limited amount of animations and behaviours. But if we create opportunities that do not rely on additional animations or behaviours, then the problem is solved!! 😀

So, rather than offering three Opportunities to choose from based on which one matches your relationship best,

1. one of those Opportunities would only be chosen if they match your relationship well enough
2. a fourth Opportunity “hang out with me” would be added. “Hang out with me” feels comfortable for all relationships that are sort of good. So even if “kiss me” is a bit too much for your relationship, or if “kiss me” has been done already and you’ve lost your Fascination with it, you would still be able to choose “hang out with me” rather than be forced by the system to go and interact with another object.

And hanging out is nothing more than actors acting out their idle behaviours in each other’s vicinity. Life is good.
Since they are still interacting with each other, the actors’ Attitude will decline. Ultimately boredom will drive them away from each other.

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