This follows the individualistic model of describing personality and character growth discussed here. The idea was to lead evolution of a character’s personality by punishing and rewarding it for doing certain things. Whether an action would be rewarded or punished would be switched randomly once in a while, to avoid singlemindedness.
How about actions that involve relationships with other characters? Surely you can’t just randomly switch the approval on or off. Think of a pet dog, for instance: once a character grows fond of it, in reality, there would be no way to undo that!
Relationships should be excluded from this individualistic model all together, really. A relationship should be something that characters develop together.
But couldn’t you consider all interactions, even those with inanimate objects, to be forms of relationships?
Only to some extent because if one of the partners in the relationship is inanimate, it will not be able to perform any actions so the system can ignore it. On the other hand, even though an object is inanimate, the character might still treat it as if it were a character. People are fond of their stuff. If a character liked playing with a ball, it will hang on to the ball more than if the ball was thrown in its face.
You could think of solitary behaviour as expressing a character’s relationship with the world (or at least its current environment).
True. Perhaps the focus should be exclusively on relationships, then. And it is a character’s relationships that grow and not its personality. Starting values for actions would be replaced by neutral values for all things that the character hasn’t met yet.
But characters should not be blank slates like that! It’s not because Little Red Ridinghood has never met the wolf that she wouldn’t be afraid of it when she does!
Right. In fact, most objects would be like that. Only completely alien things would be met neutrally.
It would not be very practical to pre-define initial values of all relationships in the world. It would be an immense task and it would make it difficult to add new things.
We could solve this be defining a fixed number of classes or categories. And then giving an initial relationship value to each class.
This would mean that Little Red Ridinghood’s response to each different Wolf would be the same, even though some might look cute to her and others frightening.
Such important characters should just form a class on their own. And the initial relationship should be defined individually.
At least towards other avatars. Towards a bird in the forest, all wolves can be defined by one class.
But then you need at least two sets of classes.
We do, anyway. In the sense that we have the classes and we have the individuals. Even though a character may start the game with a preconditioned relationship with all animals (=class), when it meets and interacts with a particular animal (=individual), it will develop a unique relationship with this animal. Henceforth, this particular animal will be excluded from the class and treated as an individual.
So every character in the game walks around with an ordered list of values for relationships with individuals first, followed by a list of values for relationships with classes?
Yep.
Posted on June 2, 2006 at 3:56 am
A lot of what you’re talking about is implemented in the Storytron engine. Whether or not it will be succesful is another question, but its there and allows for some potentially interesting dynamics.
The personality model has five variables, each of which have a second and third dimension. The third dimension is actually quite vital, as the ability to cognitively model external relationships is a building block of society, and thus of storytelling.
Posted on June 2, 2006 at 9:36 am
I find Storytron and Chris Crawford’s ideas on storytelling very inspiring. But what we are looking for is a simple solution. And I think it can be found in trying to model only the appearance of autonomous behaviour.
Imitating a human mind is very complex to begin with and it will never suffice. I think, for art, this is a bad model. Because, for me, art is about making things seem bigger and more meaningful than they might appear, not simpler and shallower.
For artistic purposes, I think we need to approach the problem from the outside. So I wouldn’t cut every sentence into pieces to then put everything back together as a story. I want to model whole chunks of story at once: events or situations as a unit not as a sum of different parts.
This means letting go of a lot of the control that a writer is used to. And that’s fine for us. We’re not writers. We believe the authorship in interactive applications lies elsewhere, not in the story (in the narrow sense).
Posted on June 2, 2006 at 11:24 pm
Yeah, I see the distinction your making. Its about social constraints versus cognitive constraints, am I correct? Storytron’s model is cognitive in the sense that it tracks perceptions, social in the sense that these perceptions are about relationships. I’m currently wondering about three dimension personality variables for my own project’s model, but I bet theres a way to get that effect without having a “knob” oriented personality model, instead characterizing by verbs, the way Facade does it.
We should consider ourselves lucky that we’re researching with prior work as a foundation.
Posted on June 2, 2006 at 11:34 pm
I’m not sure yet where the constraints of Drama Princess will end up. But social does indeed sound more appropriate than cognitive. The thing is that we don’t care about what our characters think. We only care about about what the user thinks when looking at them.
Being able to look through prior work is indeed very inspiring. It’s a bit sad, though, that a lot of material has disappeared already (from the internet anyway). It seems that around the turn of the millenium, autonomous characters were a very hot topic (with intelligent agents in academia and Black & White and The Sims in the games industry) but now the glamour seems to have faded.
Is there any text available about this project of yours that your are referring to?
Posted on June 3, 2006 at 9:41 pm
I’ll compile what I’ve written into a section of my blog. Its sort of open source design in progress.
Posted on June 5, 2006 at 1:43 pm
I read an article on relationships between characters, and players, a while ago. It details reputation tables, basically two-dimensional tables that define relationships between all beings in a game. It (shortly) discusses asociated issues too, like group attitudes and fading reputations.
This is the book:
Massively Multiplayer Game Development
2003 Charles River Media, Inc.
ISBN: 1-58450-243-6
Editor: Thor Alexander
Chapter 6.5: ‘Building a Reputation System: Hatred, Forgiveness, and Surrender in Neverwinter Nights’.
One of the references in its list of literature is the Ultimate Online site. I just searched for ‘reputation’, and could only find this:
http://guide.uo.com/combat_5.html
Not completely what you were talking about, but might spark another line of thought.