Deals and obligations

[WFreitag@aol.com]

I see dealing between characters as a specific case involving a more general 
and even more important element: obligations. Once the system handles how the 
characters decide what deals to offer and which deals to accept, it has to 
handle the carrying out of the terms of the deal, and the potential 
consequences of (especially) not doing so. This is the vast literary realm of 
obligations.

Obligation can exist without deals, arising through birth, marriage, or 
innumerable other circmstances. Cultural rules come into play. There's a 
blurry line between acting by inclination (doing someone a favor because you 
like him) and acting by obligation (doing a favor because you owe the 
recipient a favor). In fact this distinction is itself a theme of a wide 
range of stories; it's the bedrock of the enemies-thrown-together survival 
story and has also been explored in every genre from Mob epics to Seinfeld 
episodes. ("I'm not driving him to the airport!")

Also worth exploring is the way events turn a general obligation (a kinship 
obligation toward one's brother, or loyalty to one's state) into a specific 
obligation to perform a specific action (avenge one's brother's death, or 
report for military service). The obligated action can be explicit (the 
brother's ghost appears and demands revenge; the citizen gets drafted) 
requiring the obligated character only to react appropriately, or implicit 
(honor demands revenge; patriotism motivates wartime enlistment) in the 
situation, requiring the character to take action motivated by the obligation 
itself.

Rarely do these situations involve any sort of mutual conscious deal making. 
And even when they do, the actual making of the deal is may not be the most 
interesting part. A marriage can be regarded and analyzed as a complex "deal" 
but should a storytelling system really treat it as one? A single deal, like 
a marriage, can motivate a great number of individual actions. It makes sense 
to treat these actions as resulting from a sustained state of mutual 
obligation created by the deal, rather than being tied directly to the deal 
itself. The "deal" between an orchestra conductor and a violinist that says 
"you wave your baton, and I'll play the music" should be made once, when the 
violinist joins the orchestra, not repeatedly at every performance or every 
piece or every note played.

I'd be perfectly happy with a mechanism for "deals" that is limited to 
conscious mutual agreements (or even limited to those involving a caclulation 
of expected benefit). But that mechanism should then feed into a more general 
mechanism for handling obligations, which can arise in other ways too.

In Erasmatron the emerging "scenes" mechanism may be capable of handling 
obligations that persist over time and require unilateral action. 
(Obligations that require only appropriate _reactions_ could simply be 
relationship variables, except when they need additional variables. Money 
owed could be a relationship variable, but three camels and two goats owed 
couldn't unless the total number of different possible commodities were very 
limited.) My previous "borrowed lawn mower" example is a pretty 
straightforward case.

- Walt