I think these are all great comments. Emily and Victor make some excellent points, and I agree that it probably has less to do with things like artificial intelligence and more to do with defining the interaction scope. With respect to Corvus, I would say that your expertise and precision with regard to this material is clearly greater than mine, so I certainly respect that distinction. Still, I would not necessarily say that I completely contradicted that, since when I refer to stories being about characters, I am interpreting characters as “their emotions, their struggles, and their relationships,” which to me is essentially (I think) what you were saying.

It’s a little difficult to synthesize and discuss all of the different things covered in the comments here, but I’d say to a large extent what I’m trying to do is to distinguish between two aspects of characters in games that I think would contribute most to the design of the Totally Unbelievable Character: interaction and simulation.

Interaction is probably more appropriately discussed as part of the game system itself rather than the characters, but since it relates closely to the design, manipulation, and portrayal of characters, I considered it as part of this discussion. For the most part, the end of my original post was referring more to this concept of character interaction, and that the mechanism of interaction in most games, including IF, can often be unsatisfying. In that respect, it perhaps would have been better to ask a separate question, such as: what would Totally Unbelievable Character Interaction be like?

Instead, the discussion more appropriately centered around character design, or what I like to think of as simulation. It’s kind of a parallel to the discussion of game structure in general — the spectrum from linear games at one end to sandbox games at the other, which can also apply at the level of character implementation within games: highly scripted vs. fully simulated characters. The latter is something that, like the parser that is able to interpret any kind of player input, is neither reasonable nor particularly desired. But I suppose the question becomes how much simulation is desired?

I’m guessing the answer that most people would give is, “it depends.” Depends on the game, what the author is trying to accomplish or convey in the game, and so on. Which I think is very valid.

Emily and Victor both talk about being able to hurt NPCs, or, as Emily stated more generically, being able to have “the freedom and agency to do things that I know will provoke a strong emotional reaction,” and to see that reaction play out. But to do so requires a certain level of simulation in the NPCs. If you have the freedom to provoke that reaction, the author also has to implement the counterfactual: the events and reactions that occur in the absence of the player taking that provocative action. And if that provocation has far-reaching implications, isn’t it necessary to account for both possibilities throughout the narrative? How much hard coding is required to create NPCs that are able to account for the freedom we want to provide players with respect to interaction?

I also think this highlights the interconnectedness of the two aspects of interaction and simulation with characters. A certain level of simulation is required to handle a certain degree of interactiveness, and possibly vice-versa.

as if’s comment is a good example of this, where the tracking and communication of NPC states (health, respect, and mood) is one particular level of simulation they chose to implement, but which was also closely tied to the system of interaction. It’s actually quite similar to a system I had been pondering, and which I am hoping to blog about here soon.

Oh, and a big “thanks” to gnome for the props, not to mention everybody else for participating and making this blog a whole lot of fun.

Still, it is possible to bridge the gap with a *fairly* simple system. When designing “Ocean Voyager” for Times-Mirror (back in 94 or so) I wanted a more complex heuristic than ended up being accepted (RAM being a consideration after all). Still, I was in agreement with the brilliant producer Judson Rosebush that the basic system was an orthogonal relationship matrix.

Of the stats I had brainstormed, we selected the three we felt were most important to track and communicate NPC states in this particular game. (the “important” stats will differ from game to game and maybe even from NPC class to NPC class). But anyway, we chose Health, Respect and Mood. This in effect turned every NPC into a 3-dimensional emotional matrix with 27 possible states.

Note that we didn’t ever have to really create 27 different responses for each situation or problem type: we built heuristic routines instead, operating on ranges rather than integers to determine which response would be handed up.

Since OV was an object-oriented system (another prerequisite but fairly obvious these days), it was not only possible to have interactions with the PC alter the stats of the NPCs (i.e. “hurting them”), but we also had events change the NPCs stats “offstage”. Sometimes the reasons behind these shifts were obvious (-mood if the ship was in peril, -health if they ingested a toxin, etc) but at other times they were not, from the player’s perspective it sometimes seemed that an NPC was “just being testy right now.”

On top of that I would love to add a system like emshort suggested, a second tier so to speak, in which specific responses or response types could be “triggered” by other events, states or even a combination of unpredictable elements (like a psychotic timebomb NPC just waiting for the moment when all of his archetypal “triggers” appear simultaneously within his sight).

The basic orthogonal structure could handle most responses most of the time, including shifts in mood for reasons both obvious and mysterious, while on top of that, these little independent “trigger” routines would be capable of firing off specific responses which override the main loop.

Story – I think the sooner that game designers stop using the term “story”, the sooner they’ll actually produce a game with a story… Or rather, “elements of story” such as characters, relationships, foreshadowing, etc. can be translated to games. “Story” as a whole, especially the bit about lack-of-choice, is problematical.

In order for them to be significant, of course, I also need to have developed some investment in the character.

I like Emily’s proposal; it works fantastically in a certain very promising kind of game. I toyed a bit with this, especially in Fate (where you can hurt almost everybody); but Fate‘s character are far from Unbelievably Great, in part because they are little more than your ability to hurt them. You didn’t get to care for them before you got to hurt them.

On the other hand, not all good stories are about people hurting each other, and I would as much like to see a story in which I can reconcile myself with an NPC, or in which I can come to understand an NPC, as one in which I can hurt them. I think the common factor in all of this is that in fiction, we like to explore the kind of meaningful relationships we have or could have with our fellow human beings. Having to hurt someone you like is a particularly strong experience; but so is reconciliation, or falling in love, or realising that you have totally failed to understand someone whom you thought you knew.

(I’m coming up with these examples because although I think that we really need to explore the direction Emily points to in her post, we shouldn’t explore that direction exclusively. That has more or less happened in “narrativistic” roleplaying games, a trend which I have discussed here)

I also agree with Emily that our current tools are enough, at least to a first approximation, to achieve this kind of thing.

Stories are about relationships.

Not to put words in her mouth, but if I were to judge Em’s philosophy by her comment above I would say she probably agrees.

Now, before anyone says, “Well yes obviously, that’s the same thing,” and waves away my argument as semantic niggling, let me stress that this is no small distinction. It’s not a small distinction from a writing standpoint, a programming standpoint, or a design standpoint.

You can design an endless string of remarkable characters and focus on their ability to do cool things in the environment (which, as I’ve argued actually is one type of relationship), but if you don’t provide a believable means of establishing a relationship between the avatar and the character, well… who cares? But create an ‘ordinary’ character and allow me to explore my relationship to that person and you’ve got pure story gold.

I want there to be moments in the game where, as a character, I have the freedom and agency to do things that I know will provoke a strong emotional reaction, and I want to see that reaction play out. This could be a positive reaction too, of course, but inasmuch as stories are about conflict, I bet the painful moments are going to be frequent and powerful.

The more I work on this, the less I think it has to do with artificial intelligence, repetition of responses, NPC ability to notice and respond to the player’s behavior, or even the quality of prose writing that the author brings to the dialogue; and the more I think it has to do with plotting and defining the interaction scope so that the player gets to make important choices that affect other characters.

Making that work requires setup (so that everyone is given adequate motivations to make a conflict interesting, and so that as a character I know in advance that my actions are going to matter to the other character).

This may all seem pretty vague, so here’s what I mean. Imagine a story in which gradually the player character has come to like and respect an NPC, but aware of a vulnerability, a weakness, a traumatic moment in the NPC’s past. And then, at some critical moment, it becomes necessary to use that knowledge against the character, fully aware that it’s going to feel like a crushing betrayal.

That’s the kind of interaction I think would be effective and persuasive. To support that kind of development, I think we could use slightly better conversation writing tools than are currently available — not so much to change the interaction style as because it’s currently just a huge pain in the butt to produce large quantities of apparently fluid prose, and way too much of the author’s time is spent on coding interdependencies and looking after details. So if writing conversation were a smoother and easier process, we could perhaps produce more, more fluidly.

But the majority of the development we want to see I think is actually going to be well within our current technological and coding abilities, and it’s going instead to be about how we think about plotting and interaction design, and how we signal things to the player.