Consistency is the one reason why randomness is not good enough when it comes to making decisons. The spectator needs to be able to construct an imaginary story in his head. Radical shifts in emotions expressed don’t seem logical most of the time. But sometimes they do. And some characters would be more prone to having mood swings (children and madmen e.g.).
Since we don’t really care how our characters “feel”, as long as they display believable behaviour, we could arrange all possible actions in categories. And then a character would pick a random action from the category that it previously picked one from most of the time. Every time it picks an action from the same category, its attention span decreases a bit. For some characters this “bit” is larger than for others, i.e. some characters have a short attention span.
Shocking events could reset the attention span of all characters present to force them to change their behaviours.
This solves the problem of consistency when characters are given complete freedom (randomness).
Some of the times, however, we will want the characters to behave in a certain way, i.e. to choose actions from certain categories only. Like the “shocking events”, this is also something that could be enforced from above. Certain areas or situations would be defined as having a certain mood. As long as this mood lasts, only certain categories of actions are appropriate.
This leaves one problem: depending on their personality, characters would respond differently to the same mood. If the mood is a threatening, violent one, the Wolf would be very comfortable and dominant while Red Ridinghood might be afraid and nervous.
How do characters respond to an objective mood in a subjective way?
Posted on May 19, 2006 at 10:11 am
[…] We do have to add some rules to avoid absurdity. For instance, if our NPC is very tired when he starts to fight, we don’t want him to fall asleep during the battle. So we simply make a rule that the NPC cannot go to his sleeping state when he is in his fighting state. The player, who might be aware of the NPC’s tiredness, would attach meaning to it by thinking of adrenaline rushes, etc. But we do not need to program adrenaline. We can reduce the build workload and increase the flexibility of these rules by generalising them. E.g. by grouping behaviours according to compatibility, something we have to do anyway to ensure consistent behaviour. […]
Posted on May 25, 2006 at 8:17 pm
[…] Consistent behaviour It’s easy to make an insane or hysteric character. Pure randomness will get you very close to this. But we do not want to limit our narrative potential. Sane characters display a certain consistency in their behaviour. We have already suggested a simple solution for consistency. […]
Posted on May 31, 2006 at 1:22 pm
[…] Also, continuously rewarding a character for doing the same thing, will end up having it do the same thing even more. So the system would culminate in a “monoculture” Perhaps randomness can come to the rescue here. Perhaps it can even replace the rules mentioned above. We could, periodically change the punish or reward response to actions. This may coincide with the attention span idea, mentioned elswehere. That way we would also reduce the workload for the author since desired ending values become irrelevant. […]