Because of the topic of this research, I’m trying to observe people more purposefully than I normally do. To see what they do, how they behave, how they interact with each other, etc.
It occurs to me that most of the time, people are in between things. You find them moving from one place to another, or doing something with a certain goal in mind. Most of the time, this behaviour is tremendously boring to observe. These people, these real people, are quite different from the characters you meet in movies or novels. The latter are far more interesting. It’s much nicer to go sit in a crowd and read a book than to look at the passers-by!
So this confirms my belief that we should not try to make synthetic humans. Because humans are boring! The only way that you can compensate for the general tediousness of human life is, I guess, to compress time (as is done in The Sims). So that the 90% of their lifetimes that humans spend on being in between things at least doesn’t last too long.
The real solution -in my opinion- is to simply ignore this in-between time and design a system that only deals with the 10% of human life that is interesting to look at. The question that remains is whether this is compatible with the real-time medium. Will a character that does “interesting things” all of the time still seem real? Or do we need a structure that implies all the other things that the character does without showing them (by skipping forward in time e.g.)?