What I was asking was whether the "message" they were discussing was like a moral - an underlying message that isn''t directly stated, but rather implied. So that through a fictional story, you are making moral or ethical insinuations.

I''d provide an example, but I can''t think of one ... writer''s block! Nooooooooo....

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"Children come to us in a state of purity and perfection from the great undifferentiated absolute and then, like everything else on this planet, we fuck them up."

I think morfe was joking about that...as in if the moral of the story was in games (which usually include killing things) it''s not a good thing

I think what I am coming down to, is that if you try to decompose a story, you get a bare bone structures that include Agents (they could be beings, or objects), Locations (the places where the action occurs) and Schedule (basically, a way to describe what *should* happen if the players don''t do *anything*).
The problem with current plots, is that most of the time, if the player doesn''t decide to go on with the plot, the plot jsut stays in hold. you get things like "Hurry Sir Knight! The boat is waiting for ye", and you go in town fill your bags of equipment, then decide to wait a little bit in the town to get more HP, and then finally go to the boat, who, luckily for you, has been waiting here for 48 hours that you would show up, otherwise the fate of the world would be gone don the drains...

One thing I''d like to point out is that most of the time, the fate of the world is at stake, which create the need for this rigid structures. Or the "world at stake" is just a stupid excuse like in Diablo where the villagers know of a great evil, but knowing that will make plenty of money on brave adventurers somehow make them overcome their fear and stay there, just at the entrance of the gates of Hell ...

morfe : I was saying that no no no I don''t want of a "random message" being generated; "oh yeah, so the moral of this story is that, uh, wait, what does ''best laid plans of orks and trolls always need someone smalle than yourself ?''".
Naaaah.
I am trying to distinguish the difference between the artistic part of writing/plot and the technical part.

Locations seem pretty self explanatory. The areas where we can mess is the Agents, who so far seem to be simple triggers, that stay there and wait until you show up.
As for schedule, they are not really dynamic, it''s more like finite state machines (well, it is actually, isn''t it?) where the plot changes state *only* if the player do something.

I think if you want to give a real impression of life, you have to start makingthe player feel like if they don''t do anything, the story is jsut gonna go on without them. ("I heard some party of brave adventurers took upon themselves to free the princess after you refused to do that quest, Sir Knight...").
Now how cool would that be ?
We would end up with situations that would be much more like in RPG where the DM have to give some real good reasons to a player to go on and follow the actual story they have planned (the *hook* is decisive). And jsut like in RPG, if the players don''t want to do anything, so be it, let''s see what happen (generally, in this case, either you let it go, or something real big happens and kick the player team on their head with a big flashy arrow showing *that way*)

Other thing, we should deal with NPC as if they were information nodes. informations should be spread, distorted, forgotten, acquired, rather than being prewritten dialog items that are enabled/disabled depending on the state of the machine.
This would create reputation, rumors, possibilites to hide info, torture, bribe, and other form of dynamic communication, rather than a simple "we forgot to get the item B, that''s why he won''t stop saying the same thing over and over".
To do that, we have to analyse dialog a bit better ... what is dialoging sp?), what are the components of it, what do we do when we talk ?
We transmit emotions ? We exchange information ? (I don''t want to worry about actual text, just like I don''t want to worry about actual story... it''s all fluff )

Some interesting stuff to read:
http://sigart.acm.org/proceedings/agents97/A018/A018.PDF

Give me one more medicated peaceful moment.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~
ERROR: Your beta-version of Life1.0 has expired. Please upgrade to the full version. All important social functions will be disabled from now on.

Assuming you have overcome most of the other problems with trying to generate a story line in the first place. One way to keep the world ticking over is that in addition to the people going about their daily lives, you also have complex AIs that essentially do the job of the player. A single player version of a MUD to clarify.

Their actions would cause the story to evolve as well as your own and it is better than a MUD as the AIs can be controlled. The program can ensure that the game doesn''t get out of hand. If the player doesn''t do what is expected but the AIs do that''s fine, but if a lot of human players ar*e around, you wind up with a terrible game.

I am going downnnnnn ...

OK, the more I think about it, the more it feels like an adv. database problem (the kind of stuff I wasstudying in BSc, not "how to do a DB in SQL").

To have interesting, self generated plots, you need building blocks, OK. You need Agents (should we distinguish animated/non animated Agents ? Characters vs Objects), you need Locations (the easiest to deal with), and you need some Scheduling, at different level.

Now look at Agents. Take NPC. They have to have a sort of DB of what they know, do, are, in order to give, get informations, and also in orde to generate/accomplish goals. The fact that some goals might be used a quests being secondary.
(I think more and more that if you don''t really try to achieve a goal directly, you will do so and gain much more in the process)
So NPC would have an inner memory (DB) of Agents, specifying the relationship, the last time they saw them, where they might be, who they are, what they do, etc... a set of known Locations with the associated activities, schedules an Agents linked to those places ("I work in my shop, where you can find my assistant". "I go to the pub in the evening where I can meet my friends, who are ...").
As well, they would need to have a memory that records events, past and present ("exchanged information with Agent #3168 yesterday", "go to the shop during the morning, home for lunch, shop for the evening ...").
*Talking* with an NPC, becomes a sort of challenging request to a database. There are plenty of knowledge you could get, but you have to use the proper questions (SQL, here we go again )
Or you could use *other* methods, torture would get you ANY information that is more or les related to the topic you want, telepathy would allow you to go browsing in a human brain, you would have at last a way of detecting lies, because the truth would be existing in the memory of the NPC, etc...

mmm, I think I am gonna have to browse quite a bunch of stuff.
I don''t even wanna talk about natural language here, I''d like to know if it could be feasible in he first place.
Also I''ll have to find some readings concerning the dialog process ...
Yeah, I think I am gonna have more than my MSc to do in the next two years !

Well, my first instinct IS "it can''t be done."

My second instinct is to say that the application would need a kind of "Storytelling" Logic with which to examine what happens and the potential plotlines.

Making it avoid cliche, and suprising the player would require an entirely additional logic. That one I don''t think computer''s can have, but I might be wrong...

I don't think at this point, AI could achieve a "storyteller logic". Even if we were able to come up with some sort of simulation of that, it would be formulated and not really do the job.

When doing something like this, I think it's just part of the territory that it wouldn't contain the same sort of careful planning a pre-written or even loosely-written plot would have.

Again, it's an intersting concept...I still think it could be used in an MMOG.

It could be used in a single-player game but I think the game would have to be constructed knowing that limitation of this method. Perhaps only use this for the "side-quests" and come up w/ a main story that contained more planning.

Edited by - Nazrix on September 11, 2000 7:28:45 PM