Re:

[Morbus Iff]

I apologize for the long delay. I'm been both sick, busy, and in charge of
an ISP this past week.

>And animation & still life mixed with some photorealism as well. Some of
>Dave McKean's art mixed drawing and photorealistic stuff and it is
>incredibly strong imagery. As well something along the lines of the anime
>flick Ghost in the Shell. Some of the backgrounds to the animation are
>just stunning. And these can be rendered "web friendly" now with proggies
>like ImageReady.

Yup - it's easy to take a large panaroma and splice out the animated parts
we'd like... like the eyes or anything like that. I use ImageReady myself
for compressing any image (whether it be for the web or not) and have
easily saved about 3 gigs of traffic transfer because of it ;)

>I think that idea would work really well. People would be inclinded to
>answer scenario questions rather than "have you ever..." type of
>intrusions. These scenario type of questions could also be built upon as
>the person advances through the world. After getting to a certain pivitol
>point there could another questionairre to which the answers would build
>upon the initial "avatar" which would aid in more realistic character
>development.

I definitely agree with that. I was getting into a discussion of this with
my boss (!!), and he said that people would never answer the questions if
it even SEEMED like we were prying into their life. It would have to be
ingeniously disguised as part of the game - perhaps in one scene, we could
have the channel of a TV turned to a news story about rape - depending on
if the player changed the channel or not could answer on their interest in
the topic, and what we would need to stay away from for that player...

>I think you should have the raped male as well.

Works for me. Just that little bit of equality could dramatically alter the
state of the story - the woman is typically believed, whereas the man is
not.

>Is there a set beginning, middle, end type of theme to your original idea
>or could it be an open ended thing that would obviously have some
>predefined ending for certain characters, or ongoing story lines that
>didn't end at any predictable point? (seems like a coding nightmare)

Heh - it would have been a coding nightmare - but that would have been all
right. We had initially devised it as a closed open ended system. And
that's not an oxymoron just for the sake of being an oxymoron.

In essence, this was our plan - and likewise, this would only be able to
work within the initial Internet game that we were thinking of:

a) Design a core part of the world that people can sit around in. There's a
major plotline going on that player can partake in or not. Walking around
the world gets them into minor scuffles (saving cat from tree, saving kid
from bully, etc), and entwine them within the plot (through radio, the
kid's repeat of what his mom said, walking by a TV display).

b) Depending on what we saw our players do, we would develop from there. In
essence, there was never a finished product. Just chapter one. Sure, a big
chapter one, but it saves us from making chapter two if we find the players
want to jump right to chapter three.

>How tailored to the scenario questions would the individal's perception
>within the game world be? i.e. really depressed/dark/introspective
>characters' world could actually be darker (backgrounds and whatnot could
>all be the same with difference lighting/contrast settings?) than someone
>who registered as a self confident/positive person.

That's a WONDERFUL idea, actually. I can see the world changing now, based
upon certain actions within the game, and not noticably. Perhaps one day,
it turns into night, and just never really gets back into daytime. People
on the street no longer smile, the TV always seems to be on a dismal
channel, and people always seem to move away from you.

What a great idea...
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