[MUD-Dev] believable NPCs (was Natural Language Generation)

[Amanda Walker]

On May 29, 2004, at 3:41 AM, Brian 'Psychochild' Green wrote:

> However, I suspect that less than 10% of the people playing
> Meridian 59 really interact with the NPCs on any level deeper than
> their vending-machine capabilities.  Most of these people don't
> have a good grasp on the mood behavior, either.  People simply
> don't care, and trying to force them to care is not a good use of
> your time and effort as a developer.

Now here's an interesting tangent (just what we needed, eh?)...

I have a friend whose son has pretty severe Asperger's Syndrome.  He
has difficulty in basic, everyday social situations, but he's highly
intelligent with a wonderful memory for trivia--one summer he
decided to memorize the major train schedules for all of Europe, and
after a couple weeks could tell you which trains to take to get most
efficiently between any two major European cities with a minimum of
wasted time.

He is amazingly good at games like Civilization, Age of Empires, and
similar strategy games.  For him, NPCs are hugely more comforting
than real people, because NPCs never take things the wrong way, or
react in mysterious, unexplainable ways.

How many gamers enjoy games because they *don't* have to interact
with anyone?  "Antisocializers," if you will: players who are
seeking out an playing games precisely because they have simple,
predictable rules without the emotional and social factors that can
really mess things up in real life?

Amanda Walker
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