See this post from 2004 about why I think non-interactive storytellers (e.g. novelists) have a lot in common with engineers of interactive storyworlds.

– John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1968

Sounds like an argument against transparency and in favor of emergence… in NON-interactive storytelling!

Definitely — both the character’s shyness and compulsion to answer the door need to be expressed.

we don’t yet have the animation tech to express both at once

I think we do… Approaching this with a director hat on — why not have the character’s locomotion towards the door interrupted by occasional hesitancies, such as stopping and looking concerned, looking away… He could even verbally express his fear with anxious sighs (not inner mumblings…)

You’re going to need a more difficult mental state to express than that one, to prove your point… ;-)

(Admittedly, the above action doesn’t explain why he’s conflicted, just that he is conflicted for some reason. If the why is really important, he’d have to mutter something out loud to himself, like “I don’t want to see anyone right now…”)

Here’s where layering plays more of a role, directing the reluctant performance to objects in the world, giving the player some feedback as to what he’s reluctant about (and another place where some vagueness is inevitably added – did you notice he heard the doorbell? What if you didn’t hear it yourself? etc.)

But that’s a different technical approach than say he’s going to play a performance emoting his desire to answer the door, layered with a performance emoting his shyness (each of which in turn have to layer what their source or object is). That seems much more, unnecessarily, difficult from an authoring perspective. (And that in turn means it’s easier to express scenarios like that one if the conflict state is an explicit part of the agent’s mental model.)

Mark, the problem with having the player have a different model of what’s going on in the NPC is that you will have to do a lot of work and create a lot of assets to communicate this other model as opposed to the actual model the NPC is using. The key is to communicate only certain aspects of the data. Unlike Richard, I don’t think there’s as much of a problem of cherry picking data (so as to not allow the player opportunity to parse the world themselves), the key is really streamlining what data is used in the game’s mechanics of interaction – what information does the player truly need? We do this in designing a game’s HUD, I think the same design skills can be applyed without limiting the player here. The state info about the agent to be high level enough that the player can reason about the processes (which what goes on in all games with respect to game state->game dynamics), but no more, no less. The characters can still have depth & believability, as long as you have a large enough abstract distance between the high level data you reveal & the lower level data used in actual decision making processes.

I think it’s certainly possible to convey that type of state information naturalistically through dialog & performance, but it requires techniques involving consistent use of visual language & writing designed to do just that – which is what makes it fascinating endeavor, to construct animations & dialog that seem natural while at the same time conveying at least some of the bits the AI using going to use to color its action or interpretation of the world. While there are certainly techniques in other media that can serve as inspiration, we’re pretty much making it up as we go along here.

And as Richard points out, that information is going to get conveyed over a period of time for a variety of reasons. At the very least it’ll take a line of dialog, but that in turn may get delayed because the character has to express something else, and some things won’t get expressed simply because there are more important things be doing (and then the appropriate window of time passes). All those things introduces fuzziness for the player’s reception of what data is being conveyed.

So if you’re trying to express the data in as naturalistic a means as possible, that adds so much (desirable) noise to the signal that you’re better off if don’t obfuscate the data any other way – it’s always easy to add more complexity to the communication at that point, much much harder to make it clearer and more explicit. So I think it helps to start from that end.

I disagree that human actors express many aspects of complex mental state at once – it certainly seems like they do, but when you actually try to pinpoint instances, it’s much more elusive. I think human actors are just much more natural at quickly transitioning though those expressions. So in that sense, I think it’s an open question as to whether it’s purely a tech limitation vs. human limitation (although there’s certainly tech limitations in addition to human ones).

the last thing I would want in a game is a totally naturalistic/realistic expression of what is going on in an NPC’s (or PC’s) head.

Why? I can only guess, but perhaps you would dislike losing some control / god-like power over the characters.

For my taste, I prefer peer-to-peer relationships with characters, as opposed to god-like relationships. As a player, I don’t want to have more power than the characters I’m interacting with; it’s an aesthetic preference, I suppose. I also don’t enjoy the typical “player character” layer in a game; I want to completely be the player character, that I fully define, without being told who I’m supposed to be, what I’m thinking, etc. Cutscenes are therefore an anathema.

come up with interesting interpretive models in the game world that cause us to re-see the outside world

Yes: drama. Drama can do that. I’m not interested in realism; I’m interested in experiences with a particular dramatic focus — life with the boring bits taken out. The particular bits that comprise the drama are carefully chosen to implement a particular model of a scenario.

It sounds like you’re getting a bit hung up in the artificiality of artifice, rather than embracing it for its positive, creative powers

Well, there are many ways to represent and enact interactive characters and story, and the interface to them. We’re debating the finer points of differing approaches.

Also, you got to build houses. That was fun too.

But anyway, it seems to me that the last thing I would want in a game is a totally naturalistic/realistic expression of what is going on in an NPC’s (or PC’s) head. Programmers would have to come up with the interpretive models to implement it; it seems unfair that they should keep those models to themselves. Or, in other words, don’t try to replicate the outside world into the game world; come up with interesting interpretive models in the game world that cause us to re-see the outside world. It sounds like you’re getting a bit hung up in the artificiality of artifice, rather than embracing it for its positive, creative powers.

Juicy quotes from the article:

“The solo game… is about the pleasures of hanging out with machines even when you’re aware they’re merely machines.”

“[S]lightly dumb and helpless AI can often seem more emotionally ‘real’ than stuff that’s trying to be too smart. Much like the uncanny valley effect in graphics — where cartoony characters can seem more ‘real’ than super-detailed faces — AI often seems most gripping when it hits a sweet spot considerably below omnipotence. If the AI is actively asking us for help, it triggers what sociologists call ‘interpretive charity’: We feel more warmly toward it.”

“Perhaps most interestingly, Simon thinks that gamers actually enjoy the process of gradually understanding the logical rule sets that govern the behavior of our AI friends. ‘You have to suss out their algorithm,’ he says. We learn what makes them artificial, but we also understand them more completely — it’s the machine-age version of psychology.”

For those at DiGRA last year (including Mary and Michael, from whom there was woefully little blogging — I tease), did you see Simon’s presentation, and/or talk to him?

When I mentioned dialog technology as the limitation, I forgot for a moment that Sims characters, at least to date, don’t have the luxury of speaking dialog! So yes, traditional Sims characters would need to do all their expression in animation and iconic thought balloons.

So say you want a situation where you’re talking to Alice, and the goal is to get her upset. It’s good to let the player know right off that the way to talk to Alice is >TELL ALICE ABOUT X, and it’s good to let them know that Bob is a reasonable topic to tell people in the game about. It’s bad to display “Alice thinks about Bob .. Alice considers Bob’s relationship to Carla .. Alice gets slightly more upset” when you >TELL ALICE ABOUT BOB. But it’s good to display the last bit, “Alice gets slightly more upset” — that creates an immediate question and goal for the player, why does Alice get upset? When they think they know the answer, they can do something that demonstrates their system mastery and try >TELL ALICE ABOUT CARLA and be rewarded for it.

(That said, what I wrote doesn’t really apply to the Sims, where you’re not interacting with the characters as equals, you’re interacting with them in a God-role. In that case seeing them work their brains is the equivalent of seeing your dog fetch a ball — it’s part of the appeal of having a pet.)

I see this more of an issue of limitations in discourse management and NLG tech, i.e. the tech needed to choose what to say and when, and/or to dynamically write expressive dialog.

I agree, it’s important to fully express the character’s mental state. For this to be done with dialog, acting and gesture, it would probably need to be performed over the course of at least a short period time, such as several lines of (dynamically generated?) dialog. Each line, facial expression and gesture would need to be packed full of information — yet even at best, it would probably be a less efficient communication of information, and certainly less precise, as a display of stats/sliders.

Yet, aesthetically, I seek experiences that retain that naturalism — even if they are less efficient and risk miscommunication, as long as they are adequate.

If you’re only showing one aspect of the character’s mental state, you are not showing *everything* the player needs to build an accurate mental model.

Some argue that it is ok only showing part of the character’s mental state. It’s ok as long as you’re showing the “most important” part of the character’s current mental state. “The player doesn’t need to know the rest”, it could be argued. But this response attempts to pre-judge for the player what is and is not important for him to know. It is pre-parsing the situation *for* him. This is restricting the player’s agency at its most fundamental level – instead of letting him perceive the situation, we are perceiving it for him, and giving him just what we think he needs to know.

jtirrell, could you further explain what you mean by “the question of whether sufficient complexity is distinguishable from “true” agency”? Your other points about distributed agency are interesting.

The data should be completely transparent to the player, but the processes should be hidden. The player reverse-engineers the processes by directly observing the way the data changes over time.

If the player isn’t given the data or the processes, then there are too many unknowns (to use the metaphor of simultaneous equations). In fact, it is worse than that, the player doesn’t even know how many unknowns there are!

If the player is given the data and the processes, there would be nothing for him to reverse-engineer, and the whole system would be too manipulable.

I think exposing the data, but hiding the processes, is how to steer between the Scylla of opacity and the Charybdis of mechanical manipulation.

This is a good point, because it raises the question of whether sufficient complexity is distinguishable from “true” agency. But let’s keep in mind that interactions in The Sims aren’t wholly reducible to numbers (or at least, no more than any other kind of interaction) unless you limit its scope to the game code itself, and through this lens, all software is reducible to numbers. I think the key feature of this issue is that The Sims is not actually, as is commonly depicted, a person simulator; it is a situation simulator. Sims are enmeshed in a broad network that includes players, in which the distinction between player character and non-player character (as well as that between actual and virtual) is ambiguous. It is this distributed, situational agency that allows “players to experience and gain understanding of the nature of real people, e.g. human behavior, psychology, and culture.” It demonstrates that identity/agency isn’t discrete, but predicated upon a network of influences incorporating tangible and digital personas and things.

I have an in-progress paper about this issue online, for anyone interested.

btw, as I’ve stated in the past, and now put in the terms of this discussion: one of Facade‘s biggest failures is not doing a good enough of a job in helping players form a mental model of the characters, and player agency suffered for it.

This discussion has already made this critical design goal all the more clear to me for future work, so, thanks!

Anyway, I’ll go on about this at much more length on Monday and Tuesday.

I don’t disagree that the above paradox may hold; after all, people have learned to suspend their disbelief about artificial fictional characters in general. There could be a particular kind of pleasure in alternatively hiding and then revealing the inner workings.

My guess is, you believe that by offering transparency of the characters’ inner workings, it becomes a (the only?) means for allowing players to form the mental model that is so critical for player agency and satisfaction — and that’s why you are for it.

But if there are other implementable means by which players can learn such a mental model (as I wonder about in my post), which approach would you choose?

There is a bit of a difference, though, in that humans interpreting other humans are mapping a fairly simple high-level model onto a very complex low-level model. With game characters, the low-level model is usually actually kind of simple, so it’s not clear how well it supports making up high-level stories that are interesting and partially predictive.

Sort of along those lines, Mateas’s “alien presence” idea is, imo, an interesting investigation of the edge case of a deliberately fairly tenuous/muddled relationship between how a system actually operates at a hidden low level and how it’s partially interpreted at a high level.