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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: NPC Design/Best of Three
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Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 00:14:11 GMT
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emshort@mindspring.com <emshort@mindspring.com> wrote:
>but one would prefer not to have to
>type >WAIT on every occasion when it is all right for the NPC to take
>the lead.

This, in fact, is how most of the conversation in The Weapon
worked, and a lot of people (well, a lot of betatesters)
complained about the experience. Of course, The Weapon isn't
a game about conversation at all, and it was intended to
tempt you into playing with stuff while listening, *exactly
as the PC would have*, but sadly it didn't really work.

>I've occasionally thought about an experiment in realtime
>conversation, where you'd have options, but if you didn't select them
>immediately, the NPC would react to your silence and move on.

This is almost how Doug Sharp's King of Chicago worked. There
were only small snippets of text to read, and there were
generally only two choices, and if you didn't pick one fast
enough, one was chosen for you.

But KoC was intended to feel like a participatory movie,
and, at least in non-multimedia IF, I suspect it's simply
the wrong direction to go--in much the same way that all
the subtle improvisation and planning in turn-based
hack-n-slash "RPG" Nethack turned into frantic button-mashing
in the obiously-derivative real-time "RPG" Diablo. (Which
is not to say that Diablo isn't fun, at least for some
people, but it appeals on a different level and to a
rather different set of skills.)

In other words, the indirect experience of text seems to go
hand-in-hand with non-real-time interaction, IMO.

>Simple as that.  I passionately dislike the idea of giving
>the player a complete list of topics to which the NPC will respond,
>because that reduces the character, again, to a box whose dimensions
>are known, or a machine with a really large number of buttons that can
>be pressed in any order.  And the IF world has plenty of those
>already.

I think arguably if you nest menus deep enough you can
regain that level of complexity; providing a list of topics
to choose from the size of a dictionary doesn't really
make the game any more trivial. But this requires having
an awful lot of topics available. Far better is when
the set of choices are synthesized in a combinatorial
fashion, as in traditional IF "verb noun" pairs, but I
don't see any reasonable way to apply that model to
conversation topics.

One of the Lotech comp games, the archaeologist one
whose name escapes me now, demonstrated reasonably well
how you can still get a relatively open-ended feeling
while restricted entirely to small menus--both by
keeping an underlying state that wasn't tied to the
menus, and by using sub-menus to expand out the details
of options.

To a certain extent I'm devil's-advocating here, though.

SeanB
