Re: Higer-order plot abstractions

[Peter Weyhrauch <peter@zoesis.com>]

Hi, all,

I think this is my first post too, so let me introduce myself to those
who don't know me.  I'm Peter Weyhrauch.  I've been working in the
interactive story area for several years.  I was part of the Oz
Project at CMU working on both believable agents and interactive
drama.  I now work at Zoesis Studios in Newton, MA (outside of
Boston.)

I enjoyed reading your post.  There are definitely some interesting
ideas in there.

I like your idea of a "dramatic simulation".  It seems like a way to
think about potentially useful story material, by filtering in some of
the interesting world state and adding to it some abstract state.

Higher-order plot elements seem like a plausible way to extend the
number of concepts in this simulation.  They seem like a nice way to
get a larger number of user options, especially since the author
doesn't need to create by hand all these options.

The dramatic simulation state is defined by a set of "connection
types," relationships being one example, with possible weights
associated with those connections.  These connections, like
higher-order plot elements, are higher-ordered.  That is, they can
refer to other connections.

> To be sure, the author of course has to specify every single action
> (as a template) that a connection allows a character to perform:
> this is part of specifying a type of connection.

I am confused by this for two reasons.

One, this seems to say that the author must now understand and take
action on every connection.  Before, the combinatoric explosion was
"free" in that the author specified a small number of components and a
small number of rules.  In this case, there seems to be a problem of
too much authorial work.  Can you unconfuse me?

I might suggest we could get around this by specifying a condition for
each action that specified when this action was allowed.  I am not
sure how well that would work.  It may be that such a rule would have
to mention all connections, and thus the work is not avoided.

Two, are such actions only simple actions, or complex actions that can
refer to other actions ("X asks Y to do Z for them.").  If you mean
complex action, I cannot understand how you don't have a double
combinatoric explosion that the author must deal with.  That is, there
are an exponential number of connections and for each the author must
specify the allowability of an exponential number of actions.

This leads to another point of my confusion.  If the characters can
take any of these complex actions, how can we devise a weighting
equations that can make sense of the combinatoric explosion of
options?

As for your catch about character growth, it seems you may have your
solution in the set of connections.  Why can't you create a set of
connections that measure attitudes or coping ability, for example?  As
you say, these are as important as character to character connections.
So, as a methodology, build as many connections on those topics as you
do on character to character topics.

Peter Weyhrauch