Re: Film Noir Simulation

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

WFreitag@aol.com writes:
> Your variation, if I understand it right, would be to let the player
> play in a simulated world in typical fashion (with the usual
> get-to-be-top-dog objectives and game play), but include in that
> world a detective non-player character who follows the player's
> career.

Actually, I was thinking that the NPC detective and the player exist
in the same universe, but as much as possible their stories _don't_
intersect.

What we do is take the information we can glean from how the player
plays the simulation portion and take that to exchange icons within
the detective's story to make the detective's story more compelling.

Say I'm playing a simulation of mid-level drug dealing, and the
computer consistently notices that I'll do deals with marijuana, but
stay away from potentiall more profitable deals involving meth.

Say then that at some point the NPC detective has to bring down a sort
of character that I'd find distasteful. Being your average northern
California Marin dweller I'm likely to feel sympathy for the busted if
the NPC takes down a pot dealer, but take the same story to the
midwest where there's a meth lab in every other barn and it's "those
damned pot-smoking California hippies who are corrupting our
chillldruuun" and it'd go the other way.

Without changing the underlying story of the NPC detective we can
change the critical elements of how that story is told to tailor it to
the audience, and by making the simulation separate from the story we
don't have to restrain game play to the subset that fits within the
story.

My problem thus far has been how to keep people interested in playing
the game if they have no effect on the story, only in how it's
told. Todd Gemmell refers to this as the "laser pointer at Casablanca"
effect after an experiment he did with his wife on the topic. If we
can make the playing an activity with its own rewards, separate from
the story, then we have a reason to keep garnering information on how
to tell the story more effectively from the player without ignoring
their attempts to actually change the story.

I don't think anybody really wants to be Rick and choose to betray
Victor to the Nazis and head off to the states with Ilsa, but if you
could find a way to make Ilsa *that much more* reminiscent of an old
girlfriend of the player, and tweak Victor to be a stronger amalgam of
the player's most admired traits and the guy the old girlfriend dumped
him for...

Dan