Good point. You wouldn't. Not even if you did the VR version one
time all the way through. I've never thought of Hamlet as a murder
mystery, but that's what it would be.
You'd probably end up doing a lot of "investigating" over several runs
of the program, in order to get more of the story. This sort of
challenge might obviate the need for any of the traditional adventure
game goals to be coded into the program. (Like finding the Easter
Eggs, destroying The One Ring, saving the universe, etc.) People tend
to do this in adventure games anyways - once they have solved it, they
try to get "the most out of it" by finding out every single game state
that the simulation is capable of producing.
I interpret just about everything having to do with people's motives
and aspirations according to 4 basic personality types, nowadays.
Here are the game goals that I think would appeal to different types
of people.
Popular Sanguine wants to revel in the beauty, pomp, circumstance,
and pageantry of the historical period.
Powerful Choleric wants to interfere with the political order of the
universe and run the show, possibly become King or
Queen himself.
Perfect Melancholy wants to find out every single possible permutation
of the simulation. Wants to exhaustively do
all that can be done.
Peaceful Phlegmatic wants to passively view the story as it unfolds and
simply ride along with it. A guided tour would be fine.
Note that satisfying a Powerful Choleric is really the only difficult
narrative task out of all of these. Getting AI's to oppose a human's
political will in a sufficiently engaging and sneaky way is a
potentially tough narrative problem. But a Popular will be happy as
long as there's a lot of multimedia bells and whistles to the whole
affair. A Perfect will be satisfied as long as the simulation is
sufficiently complicated and exhausting, even if the actual
implementation techniques are trivial. Pleasing a Peaceful comes
almost for free: all you need is a "Tourguide" button.
Cheers,
Brandon