RE: Deals

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>]

> I am worrying about deals just now for two reasons: first, problems with
> deals have arisen in every serious storyworld project I have
> attempted (and
> in Laura's Shattertown as well); second, my latest effort,
> Balance of Power 21st Century (BOP21C) is loaded with dealmaking.

Huh!  Interesting to hear about the latter, since with the original BOP you
wrote the book on realistic geopolitics in strategic wargaming.  Earlier I
was going to make a comment like "Excessive dealmaking is more appropriate
to Turn Based Strategy than works of storytelling," but I forbore because it
doesn't seem to be the usual dramatic concern around here.  If you're doing
a TBS then certainly there are a lot of things to make deals about.  But a
TBS game also embeds many specifics of content and meaning, like territory,
money, quantities of arms, etc.  How to reason about these things to one's
advantage is more a matter of AI than of dealmaking protocols.  I will still
say that recursion is not your problem, figuring out what you want out of a
deal is your problem.  Granted, many AI algorithms have recursion in them
somewhere because there's so much to evaluate... but clearly, you can see
that it's not really an Erasmatron-style problem.  Not unless your
Erasmatron is going to take AI plugins to attach to other kinds of works,
such as games.

I've conjured a new .sig for this forum, because I think my sermon bears
repeating.  You really are getting what you pay for when you consider
everything in terms of empty black boxes.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

Authoring is the sale of specific values to the audience,
*not* a general traversal of abstract categories.