Re: Hinting in adventure games
With all the countless old adventures there must be some (now open-source) adventure into which you could put this simply by giving the AI a walkthrough and a few timers. It is an interesting thought and I wish this had come up when I still made adventure games. It would be a great way to circumvent the 'look up a hint' addiction I always got with difficult adventure games.
I am actually quite intrigued whether any adventure game has done anything like this at all. I know some put 'super knowledge' in their dialogue with 'no need to go back there', but it would be interesting to see this in body language.
(Though I remember a puzzle in one of the Monty Python games which took place in a zen garden and you could only solve it by doing nothing for three minutes.)
I think the difference between Jeroen's desire to allow the game to continue playing without input and Thomas's desire to confirm a player's style, has to do with a different approach to dealing with content. Thomas seems to be working very much from the idea of telling a story while Jeroen seems to be more interested in description of a situation.
I'm very interested in the latter, in the idea of simply designing worlds for the player to "be" in. But the tricky part of such an approach is how to keep the player interested.
Even I, with such a strong desire to lose myself in virtual worlds, wasn't motivated to play Grand Theft Auto 3 anymore after finishing the final mission, or playing Ico again after solving all the puzzles. And even now, while thoroughly enjoying Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood's immersive qualities, I am grateful for the treasures I can find and and areas I can purchase.
Jeroen's solution to this problem is clever and daring: just make the game 3 minutes long.
I think the original idea of the game only became doable as soon as I chose the short form - I had some contending ideas of longer lengths but they would have been too much like evolving Dinner Date as they were more linear concepts. The short length makes it possible to suggest their meeting, conversation and evolution of feelings started recently, but well before the start of the game, and means I do not have to return to a worldly context; it can stay their thing.
A requirement is that you can play it a significant number of times, though.
Speaking about 'carrier waves', I suppose that the sensations of a lot of places you want to be in is carried by a narrative, belief or activity. But at the same time I have always felt that if there was a 'sit down' button Beyond Good & Evil would have been a lot better; if there was some way to do nothing yet still gain impressions of Jade... right now if you stop doing anything nothing happens. Perhaps if 'something' happened beyond an idle cycle the world have been more accessible.
That is another 3-minute argument; I hope with Berlin I have figured out 'what ought to happen' for 3 minutes, beyond that mark I have difficultly tying it together. Perhaps this is like starting with compositions with new instruments - once you get to grips with it longer stretches become possible; or I hope so, because the 3-minute format makes narrative hard to do. But right now all I could imagine for a 3-hour piece is dividing by chapters, which just means I am taking the same short-length risk but somehow try to make up for it by doing it a lot and throwing away player involvement every scene switch...
I think part of the challenge for Berlin is selling the length as a concept that is novel rather than strange (as you hint by your juxtaposition), which I figure is more presenting style and PR than actual play when it comes to it. I keep thinking of it as 'variations upon a theme', in the sense that the theme and content is relatively similar, but that does not make 'variation XI' inherently less interesting.
I love the idea that the game goes on, with or without the player.
I imagine this could provide a much deeper feeling of involvement and interaction. Because the game doesn't wait for you to trigger the next scripted event. You have to pay attention to things happening around you and to timing.
I also like that you don't want to impose on the player whats right and wrong / how to play the game.
I think I still tell the player to 'act romantically' (or rather, say that this is the way I believe you ought to interpret the game), but it is rather that I do not relate his actions to romantic success... so you can sit there and watch the events and then get involved if and when you feel like doing so. But doing so should have no risks. Of course, if you want specific things to happen you can play and try to make them happen; and it may be that I never anticipated them and they do not work. But that should not cause
failure, as such.
Considering the AI controlled by an active player simply as more dominant, also makes the game more interactive in the Crawford-sense of the word: it emancipates the AI that is fully controlled by the computer by allowing it to become dominant when the player is less active. Brilliant!
Yes - the symbiotic-AI is more tied to the player than 'filling in' the space between player and computer-AI. I have been thinking on how to do this without computer-AI (or with many computer-AI's, like in a group conversation) but it is quite difficult. I suppose that filling the power balance with a computer-AI who
also wants positive things to happen is the easiest; without this AI the symbiotic-AI would communicate with the player too much (in a sense of the word); with multiple computer-AI's they could actually exclude the player if they all became more dominant. (Though the later could also be pleasant as in Hugo's 'drunken talkers' scenes, I suppose.)
This is an interesting route, though. It is (if I may venture to be so bold) an interesting idea to give a group of students the task of making a game that can finish itself
yet feels engaging to play yourself. Getting some short rough experiments would be interesting in a lot of different game types.
