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

[Douglas Goodall]

Amanda Walker wrote:
>On May 27, 2004, at 11:34 AM, Freeman, Jeff wrote:

>> Yeah, it's a human actor in the suit.  Wait in line for an hour
>> or so, see an actor for 2 minutes and then it's NEXT! and you're
>> back out on the lawn.

>> Sorry, what is it we're supposed to learn from that?

> Among other things, that Disney makes metric buttloads of money
> doing so.  Bad actors still trump good animatronics.

I am ignorant of the theme park industry. I know that teens and
young adults prefer rides, families prefer indoor attractions (both
rides and shows), etc. But I don't have any numbers, nor could I
find any with google. Does anyone know more about theme parks?

Where do Disney's profits come from? What percent of the average
customer's time is spent on "artificial" entertainment such as rides
and animatronics versus live actors? How much money do the owners
spend on rides vs. animatronics vs. live shows vs. landscaping
vs. movie/tv themes vs. animal shows vs. advertising vs. vendors,
etc? Where should the owners invest their profits to attract the
most customers? Is "It's a Small World" more or less profitable
than... than... I can't think of any live shows at Disney World,
which is basically my point.

I won't accept the premise that live actors "beat" animatronics in
the theme park industry without evidence. Live actors seem like
fluff, not the Main Attraction.

The Event ARKs in Anarchy Online are marginal fluff. While the ARKs
do an excellent job, I doubt subscriptions would suffer if the Event
Team was cancelled. Funcom probably supports it because it's such
low cost (mostly volunteers), not because they're getting thousands
of new customers each month who want the unique experience of being
a member of a large crowd "interacting" with a "live" GM.
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