[UA] CRPG

[Epoch]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2001 holycrow at mindspring.com wrote:

> Actually, what I was thinking about was something like this.  Onscreen,
> there's a sort of control panel -- I picture it as a circle with red at
> the top, shading to blue at the bottom.  You use this to pick the
> emotional inflection of what you're saying.  For instance, if you're at
> the very top, you're very passionate -- angry or desperate or
> whatever.  At the bottom, you're very dispassionate -- maybe coldly
> logical or just blase.  I'd want there to be some meaning on the right
> -left axis as well -- maybe the right indicates that you're friendly
> while the left is unfriendly.  (That being the case, a square might work
> better as a controller.  Upper right hand expresses a passionate urge to
> help the person you're talking to.  Upper left hand expresses anger,
> rage and hatred.  Lower right is casual conversation.  Lower left is
> chilly disinterest.  That sort of thing.)  
> 
> You'd use the mouse to control the emotional element of the
> conversation.  With the keyboard, you'd pick topics out of a
> list.  Whenever you learn something relevant in a conversation, you get
> a brief summary of the information ("Alex Abel hired the Freak to get a
> Hand of Glory away from Selena." "Dirk Allen has been having bowel
> troubles.")  Before you enter a conversation with someone, you can
> hotkey topics.  If I'm going to go talk to Jeeter, I can hotkey Dirk
> Allen and Alex Abel and medical problems.  While talking to him, it's
> quicker for me to bring up those topics, but with a little extra time, I
> can scroll through all the topics I've already 'acquired.'
> 
> Computer types?  How feasible is this?  It would still be tree based,
> but it would seem (on the surface) much more genuine because the
> emotional content of a statement or question strongly influences the
> response.  It doesn't require anything like a Turing interface because
> the player has no way to put in unexpected stuff.

It's quite feasible, but, like any tree system, it really hinges on how
complex the designers are willing to make the tree.  Whether it appears to
give reasonable results, after the initial coolness factor of the
interface, will depend mostly on whether someone took the time to think
about possible stances and responses.

Really, it's, on the back end, identical to a Fallout-like response
system.  The computer would translate your emotional status and topic
choice into a response, which, in turn, generates some other responses
from the NPC's.  The interface would potentially let the user generate far
more responses than would a simple list system, but that additional
flexibility is only relevent if someone is willing to think through how
the NPC would respond to each potential combination of emotional status
and topic choice.

> Ideally, this would all be synchronized with hundreds (hell, probably
> thousands) of sound files, so you actually hear Jeeter going "Heh, yeah,
> ol' Dirk can't seem to keep a cool stool."  Then when you say something,
> you might time it at a natural conversation pause, or you can interrupt
> -- timing (as in real life conversation) would be important.

And, again, quite feasible (though storing the voice files and finding
them with minimal lag might be a minor challenge), but it has the same
basic downfall -- a human has to go through and determine how the computer
finds timing significant in such-and-such a situation.

What it comes down to is this:  if a computer only has four possible
responses to such-and-such a topic, and cycling through the emotional
states and/or timing issues just makes the computer figure out which
response it'll use, then all the fancy interface does is provide an
initial "cool" factor and then frustrate the user who's trying to get
response number 4.

If someone puts in the time and effort necessary to come up with a
believable response to 32 possible emotional state and timing combinations
for a particular topic, then yeah, it'll seem more realistic.

Mike

--
iykwim(aityd), tyvm
	- ep


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua