[MUD-Dev] TECH DGN: Story detection

[cruise]

Boyle, Paul spake thusly...

> I've seen some limited plot generation stuff in MUDs and the
> broader gaming world.  Most of it has fallen along the lines of
> mad-lib like quests with a few bolder story generation attempts in
> the AI research field.

> However, I haven't really seen any attempt to detect the story a
> player is trying to tell within a game.  Façade does it a little,
> trying to fit your plot contributions into the overall plot of the
> one act play they tell.  And there are plenty of demonstrations of
> machinma in operation where the player can tell their story
> without the game really being aware of it.  However, what I'm
> looking for is work on detecting that a recognizable story is
> being told by the player, so that the game can then interact with
> the player on that level.  Something capable of correlating more
> than a single event or state, not just embedded branch points or
> plot triggers.

It's something I've been pondering myself for a while - I want to
include this capability in several of my games. The simplest would
be to track certain indentifiable and repeatable actions as
belonging to a certain genre, and simply track which ones the player
does more often (do they attack people, talk to people, interact
with the environment, visit many locations, etc.)

Taking it further, track which objects or characters those actions
are performed upon; someone they are regularly aggressive to would
start working against them; those they often treat well would become
allies. Frequent visits to a location could perhaps elicit comments
to that effect from NPC's ("I hear you were round Lisa's flat
again. Thinking of moving in?").

I had a very basic system in a Half-Life mod - where the preferences
of the various factions within game would shift depending on who
shot whom (including the player, who was a seperate "faction" by
themself). Who you attacked, therefore, would determine who attacked
you, and therefore the missions and story you experienced. In
addition, the initial setup was for a covert-ops style game. But if
the player was discovered and defeated, then they could join with
thier captors in more straight-forward FPS shooting missions. The
rationale being that if they failed at sneaking around on the first
mission, they might be better suited for more direct gameplay. While
this is not quite what you had in mind, the underlying coding
principles are much the same.

The best implementations would require dialog and detailed character
interaction to tell a story with any kind of depth. That's where
much of the difficulty would lie - analysing or producing believable
language.

Broad genres of play are easy enough to indentify, and possibly even
the central characters and locations - but more detailed stories
would require increasingly better language processing.

--
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / transference.org ]
   "quantam sufficit"
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