The ultimate test of concepts expressed on these pages, is of course the answer to the question “How will all of this look once it is up an running?” How will the characters act when they are equiped with the Drama Princess system? What can we expect to see happen?
It would be good to develop a fictional test situation where we can do thought experiments with several ideas. The same situation every time, so that different systems can be compared.
Since the first application of the Drama Princess system -if successful- will be 144, a horror game based on the folk tale of Little Red Ridinghood, let’s take an example from that. A good situation seems to be when Red meets the Wolf. This is an interesting situation because many emotions can come up. Red can be an innocent child, or she can be a girl growing into a woman. In the case of the latter she could be afraid of growing up or eager to. And if eager, she might be a seductress. She might be extraverted as a seductress or coy. And the Wolf is ambiguous as well. He is hungry so he wants to eat Red. But he is also greedy and the promise of a second meal interests him. So he pretends to be nice to get information from Red. An interesting challenge for the AI will be how to make the Wolf respond to any seductive activity coming from Red. If the wolf is just hungry, he won’t be able to read the signs. But if we interpret “eating” as a metaphor for “having sex”, we could generate some interesting responses. Also, the Wolf might start the communication with hunger on his mind, but noticing the sexual attractiveness of Red, he might change his mind about what he thinks is more important.
If we need a third character to make the scene more complex, we can use the Little Deaf Mute Girl. She is Red’s friend and she knows the Wolf is up to no good. So she wants to discourage the communication and take Red away from the Wolf. But she is afraid of the Wolf and she doesn’t want to endanger her friendship with Red.
And to include authorship more strongly into the picture, we could say the the scene needs to have a certain mood. It should probably feel dangerous or scary.
The most important thing to keep in mind when running this test is that we need to generate a story in the head of the player. It doesn’t matter what the characters really think. We should also keep in mind that we don’t have any expectations as to the outcome of the confrontation. Any result that the test generates could/should be interesting. But only in the imagination of the player (keeping in mind that it is not unrealistic to not understand human behaviour sometimes).
Posted on November 19, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Hello!
I recently played The Path and it was a fascinating experience. I’m an up-and-coming game developer and I’ve grown a bit tired of the modern games.
I would like to make something that has a deep impact on the player, just like The Path did on me.
It’s really insightful to read these past entries and see how your ideas shaped the current behavior of the characters in the game. Congratulation on such a great achievement!