It’s our philosophy to only design for the rule, and not for the exception. So this post is sort of tangential since there’s not so much opportunity for it most of the time.
One of my mental tests for Drama Princess is to imagine what would happen if I, as a player, just “magically” dropped an object in the virtual world, not too far away from the actor. How would they respond?
In the current system, the actor would probably look at it. And then, depending on their relationship with this object and the other objects in the scene, they might go and interact with the new object.
This is not really what one would expect. If an object magically appears, the actor would be extremely curious. There’s a good chance that they would drop everything to go and investigate the new object. This investigation can take several forms, depending on whether the object seems to form a threat or whether it seems attractive.
To provoke this kind of response, the Drama Princess system would generate a Shock. A Shock adds a number of Opportunities to the list that the actor can choose from, and it gives those Opportunities a high Urgency value. The Shock could add an Opportunity for every desired reaction: fear, indifference, attraction. Because of the high Urgency, there’s a very good chance that the actor would “choose” one of these (the one that matches his or her relationship with the object best).
To generate a Shock as the result of user input is easy enough. But could we design a way in which Shocks can be generated by the system itself? (Do we need this?) A system like this would look at what’s going on in the world and generate a Shock when something surprising happens. To do this you need to define “surprising”.
This definition could be a list of equations, containing, amongst others,
- actors performing interactions that don’t match their relationship
- something bad happening to another actor (the lower the relationship, the worse it needs to be)
For each of these equations, the Shock Manager would need to have a few Opportunities that can be offered to the actors who are affected by the Shock.
If there’s several actors around, or if a similar response is required multiple times in the game, it would be good to have several ways to respond to the event with the same emotion. Otherwise all actors will perform the same animation and that will look unnatural. This can be partially guided with Conditions that need to be met by parameters in the actor’s definition (Enthusiasm, Faithfulness, Sexual Orientation, Gender, Age). But perhaps one of the Conditions needs to be “if no other actor in the area has chosen this opportunity”.