There’s two things that our Drama Princess actors can’t do yet. They can’t be faithfull to a single person and they can’t quarrel for a moment and make up.
They are programmed to love (or hate) everyone with equal passion and loving one person very much wouldn’t stop them from loving another very much. Perhaps it should. This only really applies to romantic relationships that imply monogamy in most narratives. Other types of love don’t necessarily require faithfullness. At least not for the sake of believabilty. Seeing someone betray their best friend can be interesting to witness. But betraying your romantic interest is not something that should be done lightly. Unless the actor is just that kind of person.
So the highest level of intimacy of a relationship should be treated with care. It would make sense if it wouldn’t be easy for actors to achieve such a relationship with each other. So the chance of doing such interactions should be smaller than doing the others. And when you have reached that point with one character, it should become even harder to reach it with another.
For characters with extreme faithfulness, reaching the highest intimacy with one character, may imply a reduction of that intimacy with another, should it exist. Also, if one actor catches another in the act of betrayal, their relationship should drop instantly if it was very high (this would cause a “Shock”).
Another thing that is problematic is quarreling. Drama Princess actors can like or dislike each other. And they can build up relationships of both love and hate. But they can’t temporarily have a falling out and then get back together. When they start arguing, their relationship is shot and they can only get it back slowly and with luck.
Quarelling is a very interesting interaction, though. It’s kind of like rolling the dice on a relationship. If characters start quarreling, the outcome can be one of two things: either they make up and their relationship becomes a lot stronger. Or they don’t and their relationship becomes a lot weaker.
So perhaps “quarrel with me” should be an opportunity offered by a character with a reasonably high level of intimacy. And rather than simply improving the relationship if the Attitude was positive, the system would randomly decide whether the relationship improves or worsens. After which, the characters should express the result by hugging or showing anger.
Posted on July 31, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Keeping track of whether a character is in love is somewhat at odds with the basic concepts behind Drama Princess. Drama Princess actors do not have emotions. They just express them for the viewer to interpret. Consistency in their behaviour is guided by developing relationships with everything and everybody. There’s a difference between the maximum height of relationship that they can reach with an inanimate item and with a character. But all characters are treated in the same way. And it’s impossible to predict which characters a Drama Princess will start liking and which it will end up disliking.
They also don’t have a sexual orientation. Though the Opportunities that they offer may imply one: they might not allow men to kiss them, e.g. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t choose the “kiss me” Opportunity offered by a man. There is no visual difference between a character accepting an offer or having an offer accepted by the other. So to the viewer, all characters are bisexual. This may not be appropriate for every story.
So a certain definition of the sex life of a Drama Princess may be required. They should have values for how much they are attracted to women and how much to men. And some Opportunities should be marked as “romantic” (this could be simply all Opportunities with an Intimacy level of more than 0.8 on a scale of -1 to 1). Only when a romantic Opportunity is considered, should the “Filter of Sexual Orientation” by applied.
Defining “romantic” as a relationship of more than 0.8 could be used to implement faithfulness. So when an actor is considering a romantic interaction with a character, it will check if it already has a relationship of more than 0.8 with another character. If it does, then the “Filter of Faithfulness” will be applied by using the Author-defined Faithfulness value.
A similar thing should happen when characters are broadcasting Opportunities to others. If a character is in love (relationship of more than 0.8), the chance of him broadcasting romantic Opportunities to others will depend on his Faithfulness. If he is very faithfull, that chance will be very small. This could be defined as a rule in romantic behaviours àla “if I am not in love with somebody else or if a chance of 1 in [some value relative to my Faithfulness value] occurs, then, please kiss me“. This rule would be processed by the Filter of Condition, very early in the decision making process.
We may also want to add to this rule a chance for filtering out men or women relative to the amount of attraction the character feels for both.
Interestingly, defining the sexual orientation as an amount for each gender, also allows for the creation of characters that are not interested in sex at all with either gender or, on the other hand, characters that are extremely horny.
Posted on August 10, 2006 at 1:02 pm
The sex life of a Drama Princess, hell, sounds good to me. Its the afterwards thats unpleasant.
Seriously though, I’m glad you’re taking the enlightened Kinsey scale approach to sexuality. You Europeans are much more liberated in that sense, not to make broad generalizations or anything.
My characters have pre-programmed sexual preferences because thats how our engine works, its all about unique character code. There will be some homosexuality in there though, you can be sure of that, but it’ll be female homosexuality since its easier to get away with that, and it happens to fit in the background material.
It sounds like your social verbs are nested without much abstraction, how will static text assets fit in your archetechture, or will they? If so in what capacity?
Posted on August 10, 2006 at 1:54 pm
We don’t use text in our games. Ever. It’s all body language. 🙂
Posted on August 11, 2006 at 3:06 am
I might be able to use some minimal text, MAYBE, but I use a similar approach by and large.
Posted on August 11, 2006 at 7:55 am
Not using text started as a response to the cultural implications of text that we didn’t want to deal with. Text is always in a certain language. As a direct result your game becomes either friendly or hostile depending on whether the chosen language is your mother tongue or a foreign language. Then there is the association of that lanuage with a culture. I remember that during the Aghanistan invasion by the USA, I couldn’t stand hearing English. It made me puke. And then there’s the dialect with which text is delivered: it always implies a certain social group. I’ve seen too many games with exotic characters sounding like surfer dudes. Text also requires specialized talents and skills to get right: writing and acting. It’s very easy to mess those up. Especially when you aspire to a high artistic level as we do.
And in practice text leads to problems too, of course. Localization, e.g. And in the case of Drama Princess, parsing and generating text, a non-trivial problem.
The major advantage of not using text, however, is that it supports the ambiguity that I feel the interactive medium is so good at dealing with. As a direct result, it immediately stimulates the user’s imagination, which helps empathy and immersion.
Posted on August 16, 2006 at 4:56 am
I’m going to post on using text to pad a symbolic language, probably tommarow. You should stop by.
Heh, I’ve read Barthes and so on, so I see what you’re saying about cultural implications, but you can streamline localization easily enough, provided the initial commercial pull gets you enough clout for it to seem profitable. Of course you all aren’t operating under those terms, and THAT is the difference between game design in America and Europe.
Posted on August 16, 2006 at 9:52 am
I think localisation is an artistic problem.
I am Flemish but most translations I hear are Dutch. Dutch and Flemish are the same language but 1) Dutch is pronounced differently and 2) the Dutch use different words for things. As a result, your Dutch translation fails to do me any good. I often switch to English anyway (but other people don’t know English well enough to be able to do this; this way children are being raised feeling like they live in an occupied country, or at least like some discriminated against minority).
When I played Beyond Good and Evil in Dutch, I was put off by how childish the game sounded. All games are probably like that but in English, probably because I don’t understand it perfectly, this is acceptable. I also always use the English version of computer applications. The Dutch translation seems plain silly and often confuses me.
Also, different groups of people use different sets of words. What sounds like hip language to you here and now, will sound awkward to other people, elsewhere or in the future.
And it’s not just about language. It’s also about things and events. How do you think it makes a Belgian feel to have to celebrate the 4th of July in a Japanese game like Animal Crossing?
I think is impossible to deny the local-temporal origin of any work of art. So I think it is better to embrace it. I much more appreciate a work of art that seems alien than one that pretends to be local and fails.
As you see, our choice to not use language in most of our games isn’t motivated by localisation problems. We don’t even believe in localisation. We think removing language also removes some of the cultural barriers and allows people to interact more freely and interpret the game much more personally. This is especially important in multiplayer games like The Endless Forest.
Posted on August 18, 2006 at 12:49 am
What your saying is certainly true, especially in light of the Sapir-Worph hypothesis. I’m actually quite cautious about the principle you cite, because my game is set in Ireland, six of the seven playable characters are Irish, and the conflict is between local rebels and english theocrat imperialists. I’m of Irish ancestry but am very much an American, though I’ve been recieving input from two game-literate commentators who are themselves Irish, and the setting is far enough removed from current or a rigorously historical Ireland to be acceptable. Still, it makes me nervous.
“How do you think it makes a Belgian feel to have to celebrate the 4th of July in a Japanese game like Animal Crossing?”
Um, waffle-y? That was a joke. 😉
Those japanese really do have it on for American culture, don’t they?
I appreciate what you’re doing aesthetically, its distinct from all the other drama-related computer game projects going on. I know I have to be very careful about setting, culture and language, and you have very eloquently described how integral those all are to each other.
Posted on August 18, 2006 at 1:41 am
I personally think that if you want to play with times and places that are not your own, it’s best to not try and be accurate at all (you’ll always fail) but to go for a mix between the foreign culture and your own. That’s what we tried to do in “8”, for instance, by setting a Western fairy tale in a Middle Eastern-like context and inventing an architecture that was a mix of renaissance, Islamic and modernist styles (three styles that, of course, do have quite a bit of aesthetic connections; which was our point: that Islam culture was not as far removed from Christian culture as the politicians and media are trying to make us believe).
Posted on August 18, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Yeah, a bit of a pastiche. Thanks!