I still owe y'all a writeup of that talk I attended a couple weeks back.
Sigh. Will try and do that soon. In the meantime, couple quick comments
on Par's note:
> then again this is a "MMORPG"-crazed crowd.
What's the "MMO" stand for? "Multi-Msomething Online"?
> (I assume everybody on this list agrees that high-level control of
> virtual creature movement is pretty bloody important for telling
> good 3D stories).
Absolutely. This is why I'm a little less interested in VRML-level 3D
languages at this point than I used to be; I want the implementation
details to be hidden behind high-level language/good UI.
> cheating on such a grand scale that one can simulate a country with
> 100,000 unique citizens.
! Way cool.
> let there be a
> central server that somehow maintains (he did not venture anywhere
> near implementation details; I suppose we may imagine a neural net
> for illustrative purposes) knowledge of successful plotlines; in a
> love triangle situation, introduce soap opera style complications;
> if the user seems to be setting up a horror scenario, let terrible
> things happen, etc.
This is fascinating, and it reminds me of a couple of conversations I've
had recently. A friend of mine, Rob, is one of the best Game Masters I
know (I'm talking "tabletop" roleplaying games here, like D&D when played
well); his brother Jamie is also a good GM, but Jamie has no interest in
plot. To Jamie, the plot is whatever happens when you set characters free
in your world. Me, I'm a story-structure/narrative junkie; I want things
to be (in Neil Gaiman's phrase) story-shaped, which generally means stuff
like the old beginning/middle/end thing, with conflicting character goals
leading to a satisfying resolution and so on. So I find Jamie's games
frustrating, and I think he finds my highly structured ones frustrating.
Rob strikes a happy medium, and we figured out why the other day: it's
because Rob has watched so many movies that he has a deep intuitive
understanding of story structure (as another friend of mine said, "I paid
my eight dollars, I want my Hollywood ending!"). So even though Rob
doesn't start out with a complete plot in his head (and thus the characters
are not as constrained as they sometimes are in my games), he's always
searching for the plot, always nudging things in the direction of the goal
state (which for him is for everyone to get married (or local equivalent)
and live happily ever after). He doesn't know in advance how he'll get
there, or even the details (like who'll marry whom), but structure is
always subconsciously in the back of his mind, informing everything that
happens in his world.
I would've said this is way too intuitive an approach to use in a
computer game, but I think Par's description here of Wright's story-server
sounds very similar in a lot of ways. I think it's a very cool idea, and
potentially very promising -- though the devil is in the implementation
details. But I would never have believed that The Sims would be possible,
so I'll be very interested to see what happens with this, if anything.
--jed
