Re: the Atmosphere Machine

["Todd Gemmell"]

Hmmm The point I can think to make on atmoshpere and moods. is that
character moods are part of the atmosphere being generated at that time. The
character could have something as simple 3 states (Positive, Neutral,
Negative) or something as complex as N-state fuzzy fields of relativety but
these would be modifiers to the chracter actions and also be rendered as
feed back to the player (i.e. When the character Joe is depressed he slumps
his shoulders)...........



>> 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?"
>
>