Re: the Atmosphere Machine

[Dan Lyke]

> So, probably the very first thing we would want to worry about would
> be a Mood Chart. On the left, a wide range of emotions. On the right,
> different colors, objects, and sound (perhaps the only things you can
> control in a game environment, any more suggestions) that can cause
> that emotion.  Perhaps Cause and Uncause?

Depending on the model of human behavior used, I was originally
thinking that the interface to the game was something on the order of
the first three or four circuits of Leary's 7 circuits of
consciousness model. Each an axis in N-space, and current emotional
status was a position within that space, each action a vector applied
to that emotional state, and attractors within that space to create a
non-linear behavior system.

I still think that that's a valid model for an underlying behavioral
system, but I don't think that we can ask for the user to tweak the
model at that level. We have to mask the questions, find out how to
ask them in different ways.

And here's where I'm totally lost.

We talked one night about indicating objects of interest and trying to
back-parse how characters should behave from that. So Todd went home
and watched Casablanca with a laser pointer. He said that went nowhere
real fast. Without some sort of feeling of direct control on the world
the user will be bored.

But I don't necessarily want to provide "walk here. pick up that
object." type control over the protagonist because people aren't used
to role-playing, and while the audience has to empathize with the
protagonist the protagonist can't be the audience.

Otherwise the audience would be out living their own lives.

One of the examples one woman at SIGGRAPH presented last year was a
Macromedia example of people in a doctor's office, you could view the
office through various character's eyes, looking at the different
objects and getting different responses depending on how long you
lingered. Wave the mouse over the "parenting" magazine from the eyes
of the teenage girl and you got a baby's "coo". Linger a little longer
and there were some motherhood sounds, a cry, comforting, that sort of
thing. Click, and you got "You stupid slut. How could you?"