Challenge for Thinkers, Designers and creative individuals.

[pgrmdave]

One way I've seen that seems to be effective for getting a message across in a game is to give the players a choice of either following the message or not, with both having some benefits and drawbacks, but with the drawbacks greater if the message is not followed. Baldur's Gate is one example of this - you can be "good" or "evil", and complete the game as either, but the benefits of being good far outweigh the benefits of being evil. In addition to which, the game is made to be more interesting for a good character through different quests and NPCs availible for your party.

[Jay-qu]

I dont like the good or evil.. I loved both Fable and Star wars knights of the old republic, while it did give you twice the choices of most games, it felt limited. Games like The Elder Scrolls are insanly open and how it should be :hihi: you have a quest to complete but you can do it in any manner of ways.

[IDMclean]

Well I have an answer for both of your particular takes and on the subjective nature of things.

 

Alright there has been allot of talk around hypography regarding the nature of belief, trust, truth, conception, and perception. These are core issues to the human condition. Every person, from the youngest to the oldest wonder "why" at some point.

 

We all have our ways to go about it. Now here's the interesting thing, is that we all share common traits and we all talk and argue and allot of the time we are talking about the same thing, but we don't even know it.

 

Let's high light that, and show case the concepts being used. Attempt to make the player aware of the stance they are taking in interacting with the world.

 

Here's my solution to the problem poised by Jay-qu and pgrmdave. Let's have the player research, through exploration of the game world, doctrines. Ways of looking at the world, and codes by which to live by. Then let's get them to hold to one (or more perhaps?) of them.

 

That is lets have them establish a path for their character and attempt to traverse their appointed task. If they pick "good and evil" and want to walk the path of good, then they need to adhere to certain "virtues" to remain on that path. They must not only talk the talk but must walk the walk.

 

Let's make their goal, and statement of purpose a fundamental part of their character and re-enforced by the system itself. Let's use what they want to believe to teach them about believing that.

 

Make it something like a Meme Exploration Device. A teaching tool, with the expressed purpose of exploring, virtually, different paths of enlightenment. We can reward them for following their tenets, living up to their virtues, and discourage by hindering them for breaking their tenets.

 

Action-Reaction. Cause-Effect. Karma-Dharma.

 

We could make their level of enlightenment, along their path their power. So that as they become more enlightened, they gain more power, allowing them greater ability to change the world they live in. Allowing them to greater influence the NPCs and the social agenda by being paragons of what they believe.

 

What do you think?

[pgrmdave]

That does sound similar (although more comprehensive) to the faction system in Planescape: Torment. I think that is a good idea, but could be difficult to implement. How many different codes/doctrines would you want?

[IDMclean]

Hmm that is a good question. We could help to cut down on things by excluding things which are inheriently opposed to one another, or are self-falsifying.

 

Obviously we need to worry about people playing a true nihilist. Such a character would not exists, I would think.

 

Well lets see. How many major belief systems would you think are in the world?

 

Also, yes this would be similar to Planescape's factions. Planescape is perhaps the best example of what I hope to design. The game is hugely conprehensive. I played till the Pregnant Alley, and that took me days. Not because it was hard, but because there was so much to say and do. So many choices. That is my favorite RPG of all time interms of dialog, choice and self exploration.

 

The premise and purpose of the game is beautifully articulated. I am holding my analysis of that game back, as the last one I will go indepth in. There is allot to examine for Planescape: Torment.

 

I figure we could define a system for generating belief systems. The ones I would want to put focus on are those which lead to the player being a constructive influence in the game world.

 

I would defer to religious, philosophical, social, and political Doctrines. I would need to research the subject of belief more indepth before I could give a hard system. As for implementation? Not a problem. The problem is cross referencing and finding the main synthesis elements. That is elements which lead to the common point, and rooting out inconsistencies. Till we can define objectively the different doctrines. Once we have the written down on paper or in wiki, programming it is just a matter of transcription and slight translation from essentially pseudo-code to hard-code.

 

I would think Set Theory, Matrices, and Logic would weigh heavily in on this one.

 

A better question than "How many different doctrines would you want?" would be "How many do we need to achieve diversity, conflict (Non-violent and otherwise) and verisimilitude in character interactions and social agendas?"

[pgrmdave]

I'm a huge fan of Torment (beaten it at least seven times, and seen almost all the different endings). I'm not quite sure what you mean by defining a system for generating belief systems - do you mean that you want the game itself to dynamically generate different belief systems? Or do you mean that you want to generate belief systems during design and then use them in the game?

[CraigD]

I figure we could define a system for generating belief systems.

Like pgrmdave, I don’t understand precisely what this means, and have the same, and more, questions. I think a basic “how it works” summary is in order.

… As for implementation? Not a problem

…

Till we can define objectively the different doctrines. Once we have the written down on paper or in wiki, programming it is just a matter of transcription and slight translation from essentially pseudo-code to hard-code.

I’m having a very hard time concretely visualizing the pseudo-code that KAC proposes could be simply transcribed/translated into implementable code. It strikes me that such data would likely not be procedural code at all, but something more like a weights table used to configure an implementation of a particular theory of mind. I would not characterize the development of a theory of mind, or its implementation, as a trivial problem. There doesn’t exist, to the best of my very limited knowledge of the field, a theory of mind capable of producing gameplay that would be rated by a reputable marketing research test team as near the quality of the typical “tracked” game outcomes of existing computer RPGs.

 

Alternately, the game could continue to be based on predetermined outcome tracks, but either have many more of them than present games (which tend to have fewer than 12, often as few as 3) or a much more elaborate system for selecting the track based on player input. To torturously paraphrase Clarke’s 3rd law, “Any sufficiently difficult to understand simple algorithm is indistinguishable from a more complicated algorithm”.

 

So I call “feasibility”. Before making further reference to the proposed game’s “belief system system”, can a specification be produced, and a simple prototype implementation demonstrated?

[IDMclean]

Craig to givey ou an idea of what i have in mind, we create what I'll call memes. Little mostly independent classes which contain the data and information on the meme. We call these elements. They can be cross purpose, can cancel other instructions from other memes, and otherwise change the wieghts of our AIs. They are communicable and can be combined, split (to a limited level) and sythesized into new memes. I didn't call it trivial, just simple once the model is written out.

 

It goes from creating the model to implementing. Implementation is just figuring out what tool will be best to do the job. It's the modelling it that will be difficult, though definantly not impossible.

 

Also Update. I have a wiki up. Anyone interested in contributing or having access to it PM me.

 

Also an untalked about portion that needs some concideration. As this is a Document, and is intented to be sold and/or leased for profit eventually (unless I am mistaken, I suppose we could do this for nonprofit.), we need to talk about copyright.

 

Legal stuff, and things like that. A subject I am not terribly versed in. Anyone have any info on the matter?

[pgrmdave]

For copyright information, C1ay seems to know a bit about it, and can at the very least direct you to where you could find the laws about it.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Sounds like someone beat you to the game of complete awesome.

 

And it was Will Wright

 

 

So no shame there.

 

TFS

[IDMclean]

I am quite aware of Will Wright's work. I am also VERY much aware of Spore. If you check some of my older posts this year you would find references to Spore.

 

It is that game which inspired me and gave me the assurance that what I have in mind is not impossible, and is not insanely hard even.

 

In fact in the model of AI that I am devising, and the Meme system that I am working on, that will be presented here in brief and at my wiki in greater depth, will be based off a number of concepts introduced by Will in his amazing game.

 

The difference between my concept and Will's is that his is based on societies, are more concearned with exploring what the medium can do (focus is on Form). Mine is interested in exploring what the player can take away from it, with rewarding and educating the player (the Focus is on Idea/Purpose). I am thinking mine will be non-fiction as I am intent on as Scott says "delievering the message".

 

I am going for singular character exploration in an approximate human lifetime, he goes across ages.

 

Our ideas are similar but our focuses, forms, idioms and most likely structure will differ greatly.

[pgrmdave]

not insanely hard even

 

Ummm...It depends on what you think is insanely hard. Remember, this game has been in development for over 6 years, it's being headed by Will Wright (which means it has a huge budget, and some of the best people in the business), and it's a very advanced game, not a typical game. Now, perhaps I'm a naysayer, but it seems to me that if it's taking Will Wright and his team over six years to create this game, then it will take you (and your team) at least as long. Remember too that this is a full time job for them - if you plan on being in school/working during that time, then it will take even longer. A game on that level is, to say the least, incredibly difficult to create.

[pgrmdave]

KAC - just so that I have a better idea, how much programming experiance do you have? While designing games may be an art, it is limited by the possibilities of programming.

[IDMclean]

Once again Programming is the implementation of a conceptual design and exists in the solution space.

 

Design is the plan of action and exists in the problem space.

 

I have enough programming experience to know what is and is not possible. I admit that my knowledge of syntax and translation of common language mathematic algorithms to computer language functions and classes is not up to snuff, but my short comings don't matter for this.

 

I have studied Programming on and off for the past 6 years. I haven't particularly programmed anything that would qualify as an end user application. So My programming experience is limited.

 

I will not be implementing this personally, at the most I will watch and direct software engineers and/or programmers implement what it is that we design. If something turns out to be to hard to implement we can swap it out for an off the shelf design.

 

Also I am devoting myself to this full time. No school, no work.

[alexander]

TFS, Spore is going to be soo good, i cant wait, and then i probably wont get it, because it will take soo long to play it...

[IDMclean]

Alright People, in addition to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, I have another MUST read for game designers.

 

This comes from a Game Designer named Chris Crawford. It is somewhat old, but it's content is eternal. It is called The Art of Computer Game Design

 

Check out the page on Games from Wikipedia, it and it's external links can be very informative, if you take the time to read.

[skuzie]

I personally would like to see some more 'original' games out there. I love tetris :Guns: .. its fun, addictive, original, and it has a simple and solid game model .. but lets move to something more complex as its model.

 

The upcoming spore game seems like it has good new elements, like the idea of evolution. I would love to see a simulation game out there that deals more with evolution and heavy math under its hood, spore seems too constrained in that matter, what if i want to take over the universe as a simple bacteria rather than some goofy looking creature that has x amount of legs and y amount of arms, the game just seems like sims and some rts ripoff combined.

 

A true game of evolution would give you a new look on life and what is possible out there, it might even affect you the way you look at life itself, imagine that! I realize that would be very cpu intensive, but suppose that every player would contribute theyre cpu time towards the environment of the game much like seti@home does. So as you control your species your decisions would affect the model of the environment and the outcome of all other species that other players control. To develop something like this you would start with creating a simulation, a realistic environment, than once you have all the math right then you think of ways you can convert it into a game, try to add competition and 'fun' into it. And again like tetris the way you interact with it would have to be simple not some crazy complex micro-managing system. You could for example act as the 'force' behind the evolving organisms actions and goals, so you dont control them but you point them towards a path, how they get there and what they do to get there is up to them, you can sit back and enjoy the show.

 

Anyways thats just one example of some new light into the world of gaming, I think future games will be more exotic under the hood, what i mean by that is they will be created with more brains in its engine - math/physics/sciences/biology/history/etc .. much like the atomic test simulators used by the government rather than some cheezy movie script.

 

Games are another form of entertainment, like movies, or books .. they can spread a powerful message or teach you a thing or two, and can even make you smarter while you have fun! :hihi: