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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: dynamic plot/narrative
Message-ID: <GM52oE.JoG@world.std.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 20:38:32 GMT
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Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:94221

emshort@mindspring.com <emshort@mindspring.com> wrote:
>I also find it somewhat humbling.  A lot of the plot and conversation
>management libraries that I have been building myself work with a
>similar principle at their heart

I wouldn't feel too humbled if I were you. Barely anybody
in the commercial game industry knows about this; barely
any of them even care about this model. And the pinnacle
of NPC conversation systems these days is just a menu maze
(i.e. a CYOA, i.e. a purely branching structure).

[Some of the Ultimas were keyword based, and Ultima 7 struck
a compromise by adding new menu-maze choices based on other
choices. But most games--from Ultima Underworld to Planescape
Tormet--are just pure almost-context-free menu selections.]

>I'm not sure whether I'd care to attempt a piece of IF in which that was
>not the case, but it bears thinking about.

I think I'd like to *play* one: a series of one-room "adventurers"
strung together in a semi-random order based on player actions.
But I might hate it.

By the way, I played King of Chicago a couple of times on an
emulator, and the experience is rather odd. Clearly you get
different experiences--you get different scenarios, and when
you see the same ones they come in different orders and hence
slightly different contexts--and yet it basically doesn't seem
all that interesting. Let me qualify that: if you only play it
once, it's not obvious that the game is changing directions
based on your actions--we've all played far too many games which
only have one possible action to really believe in this. The
one thing that is suggestive is that there is a lack of narrative
coherence. However, what you can see in practice from multiple
plays is that there is *much* more narrative coherence than
there would be if they were just strung together randomly;
in other words, if it were more clear to the player that her
actions were really having an effect on the world, I think it's
a fair demonstration of the way narrative will end up being
only semi-authored, and not having quite as much oomph. (Because
King of Chicago does have a couple of places where the story
converges consistently, it manages to keep some feeling of
being authored.)

SeanB
