First on the gender issue. Read a book called Left Hand of Darkness. I forget
the name of the Author, (Think it was Ursal K La Gwin or something). She was the
daughter of the Oakland Museum director who was Ishi's (Famous indian who
wondered out of California Hills at the turn of the century) host.
Anyway, why write variations of a plot?
Why not just present a problem? Let the interactor proceed to solve or not solve
the problem. Add some very simple AI to the characters in your interactive
story. Allow the interactor free rein to explore your world and interact with
any of the characters he wishes. Each interaction has only two outcomes positive
or negative. As you created the AI for your characters create duality in their
personalities.
Characters can have simple personalities. They can respond negatively to varying
levels of negative stimuli.
For example:
Interactor enters a bar. The time in the world is roughly 10:30 pm on a Friday
night. All the AIs have been paid, and depending on the AIs personality they are
varied stages of intoxication.
If the AI has a high degree of tolerance to alcohol and negative stimuli, he
will not be easily provoked by the interactor, if he has low levels of both, he
will be provoked the minute the interactor enters the room.
However, if the interactor enters the room after the AI has reached his
tolerance level for alcohol, the AI will not be a threat.
I think all situations in a game can follow this pattern, and each AI's negative
and positive characteristics could be shared to some degree by each of the Other
AI's that area part of his socio economic group.
PROTO blue-collar[
exposedField SFInt32 education [number equal to grade completed]
exposedField SFInt32 temperament [number equal to degree of negative stimuli
tolerated]
exposedField SFInt32 physic [0 to 10 with 10 being extremely powerful]
exposedField SFBool disposition [false for negative true for positive]
exposedField MFString alliances [a list of characters aligned to this
individual]
exposedField SFInt32 compassion [zero to 10]
exposedField SFInt32 curiosity [zero to 10]
exposedField MFString special knowledge [a list of pertinent facts,,,, can be
null]
]
It's an idea I have been playing with for about 4 years now, and is about to
come to fruition,,, if I can get some free time from work and family. The
interactor is on a mission to solve a puzzle, or a mystery. The situations is,
that they are in an environment independent of the interactor. Time changes,
certain characters and objects go about their routine and are exposed by chance
to the interactor. If the interactor has contact with the AI he changes it's
pattern in either a positive, or a negative way. The AIs alliances are altered
to their own degrees by the AI who comes into contact with the interactor, and
the whole environment is slowly changed. Either characters become a little more
stressed and reactive, or their routine is thrown off a little and they miss an
appointment or a predefined event.
So, instead of writing a bunch of scripts, we make the AIs and the interactor
interact and their behaviors become the varied story options. To go a little
further.
Let's say for example we have a doctor AI. And the time is morning, and the
Doctor is on his way to an emergency call at the children's hospital, but our
interactor comes along and detains him by standing in front of the doctors car
and not allowing him to pass, or by block his exit from the car. A certain
amount of time elapses and the child who the doctor was rushing to see dies.
That effects the parent AIs of the child. There behavior from that point on is
negatively effected in varying degrees that depend on their character variables.
If a particularly hot headed AI is present when the Doctor is detained by the
interactor, he might be provoked to attack or harm the interactor. He may even
succeed in freeing the doctor and allowing him to safe the Girl. The whole
incident may set a cascade of events in the world. It could be covered in the
news paper and the interactor would immediately become an undesirable. Avoid by
most and the recipient of violent reactions from others.
Jed Hartman wrote:
> Miriam wrote:
> >I am on another list for women in VR, and Teresa Rivera posted this link to
> >an amazing site:
> > http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/
>
> I haven't read much of this site yet, but I do want to add a note about
> it. A friend of mine who's working on a thesis about online identity gave
> this guy(Dr. John Suler)'s article on gender-switching as a major example
> of a wrongheaded approach to the topic. The article focuses on "detecting"
> gender-switching, by providing a list of questions to ask a supposedly
> female person online; supposedly women will give the correct answers to
> these questions and men will not. The questions are things like "What is
> the difference between 'junior' and 'misses' sizes?" There are fundamental
> problems with this approach, such as:
>
> o Many women surveyed don't give Suler's "correct" answers to the listed
> questions.
>
> o Any man who's read Suler's article *does* know the "correct" answers,
> since Suler gives his answers in the article. (Note that Suler is himself
> a man, if his name is any indication.)
>
> o Presenting someone with a questionnaire and demanding that they prove
> they are who they say they are is unlikely to provide the sort of trusting
> relationship that Suler is supposedly trying to promote.
>
> o Gender, particularly as presented online, is often way more complicated
> than a simple binary male/female. (In particular, donning an online
> persona that differs from your everyday persona in some way is not
> necessarily "deceptive.")
>
> Anyway, I didn't mean to go off on an off-topic rant. I guess what I'm
> really getting at is that if he takes this kind of approach to one of his
> topics, it makes me less willing to trust him to know what he's talking
> about with his other topics. (Yes, he does briefly bring up most of the
> above issues in the article, but he seems to dismiss them in favor of using
> his list to truly determine someone's "real" gender.) (If any of you are
> interested in online gender and identity issues, btw, you might check out
> Julian Dibbell's book _my tinylife_ -- I'm only a little way into it, but
> so far it's totally fascinating.)
>
> Just to make this posting *vaguely* relevant to our list's topic, I'll
> note that any good roleplayer can play either gender convincingly for story
> purposes. Characters in any story-setting that remotely resembles the real
> world are likely to have genders of some sort; what's a good approach to
> setting the gender of an interactor's character? Possibilities include:
>
> o Give the character no gender. This is the tack taken by puzzle-solving
> games from old text adventures to _Myst_ and _Riven_; theoretically it lets
> the interactors "play themselves," but really it helps give the
> interactor's in-game persona a *lack* of character. The character being
> played becomes a genderless automaton mindlessly seeking out clues to solve
> puzzles. Can certainly be fun to play such games, but they generally have
> little to do with storytelling. (It is, however, possible to create a
> viable character, in a real story, who is neuter or hermaphroditic.)
>
> o Assign a predetermined gender to the character. This may make
> interactors uncomfortable if they're not used to roleplaying and the
> character is not of their gender. (And yet, male computer gamers seem to
> have no trouble with the idea of taking the part of Lara Croft in the Tomb
> Raider games -- yes, there's a physical attraction there for many players,
> but she really is acting as the player's avatar in the world of the game.
> Still, I would expect female players to be, by and large, less happy about
> being forced into male personas, because it would seem like yet another
> instance of computer stuff being designed by and for men with no thought to
> women's perspectives. Several female friends of mine, when they were
> growing up, read science fiction with male protagonists and enjoyed it, and
> even identified with the male characters; but they also wished there were
> more sf with female protagonists.)
>
> o Allow the interactor to choose the character's gender. This is the most
> flexible approach, and the one used in VR chat rooms as well as in
> textual-interaction environment like MUDs. Seems like the best approach to
> me, except that it could require substantial duplication of effort on the
> part of the writers and artists creating the story, to handle multiple
> kinds of viewpoint characters. (Especially because gender isn't the only
> issue here. Race, body shape, disabilities -- lots of variations. And
> that doesn't even touch on the question of psychological differences
> between characters' personalities.) And once again we come back to the
> questions of how to handle multiple possible viewpoint characters --
> writing a different version of the story for every possible character is
> obviously impossible, so you either have to make the story smart enough to
> adapt to any given character, or you have to limit the interactor's choices
> of character. But we've discussed this point before and I don't have
> anything new to add, so I'll stop here.
>
> --jed
--
Richard Kapuaala
Project Coordinator
Web Division
Red Shift Internet Services
http://corp.redshift.com
