Argax Project:: Dissertation: A Rough Draft Node

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Characters

In order to focus on the story, I kept the character models fairly simple in Demeter.

PC

The PC is nameless and genderless. This was to simplify and shorten the game: it was not necessary to ask the player to specify PC details or to explain the nature of a pre-authored PC to the player. Instead, players could project onto the PC whatever personality they cared to. This choice did make certain scenes difficult to author, as it is hard to refer to someone when you do not know either their name or gender.

The PC should be modelled in more detail in the future, though. Roleplaying is an important part of interactive drama. Just as in traditional roleplaying games, a player's choices when constructing a character can give strong indications as to what sort of game they want to play. Players can also provide background material--such as PC history or previous relationships--that could be used to pull that character into the current story.

NPCs

I wanted a social milieu in Demeter. The horror films that inspired the story are as much about the personal interactions of the characters as about the evil they face. To that end, I wanted NPCs to have conflicting goals and arguments but also to allow the PC to influence those goals and opinions.

The internal state of each NPC is modelled using less than twenty variables, even when counting an NPC's affinity for each other character as a separate variable. Since most player actions simply serve to change NPC affinities, I was not particularly constrained by this model at all. In fact, the possibilities of even this simple model were not fully utilized.

Instead, I found that I was constantly challenged to make what NPC states I did have apparent to the player. Explicitly stating certain positions--as in "I like your plan!"--can be rather jarring. But only hinting at stances--such as changing how an NPC refers to the PC based on her affinity for the PC--can be too subtle to be noticed. The long discussion sequence in Demeter was meant to demonstrate the range of NPC opinions, as well as their disagreements with each other. During this sequence, the NPCs even change each other's opinions, and the PC can do the same. But this sequence generally just proved to be boring--especially with the more exciting threat of the revenant on hold in the meantime.

Besides the difficulty of narrating what an NPC's current state is, it is also difficult to indicate when it has been changed and to what degree. This stems largely from the problems already discussed about how best to narrate the full details of the system's internal view of the story events.

Some non-textual channel might be a better approach to this problem. In real life, we often read people's opinions based not only on what they say, but also on subtle tone, facial cues, or body language. For example, different colors or fonts could be used when an NPC speaks to the PC in order to represent different degrees of affinity for the PC. In a graphical system, a bar graph could briefly pop-up over the character's head and animate the change in position resulting from the current event. Such approaches may sound jarringly overt at first glance, but the player cannot be expected to engage in social manipulation without some clear indication that his actions are having an effect. In lieu of clear NPC facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language, some other means of succinctly expressing this is needed.

So one side of NPCs is making their internal state clear; the other is affording clear ways to affect them. This is another problem with Demeter: the interactions with NPCs are fairly limited. It is possible to give items to NPCs, but it is not possible to ask them for an item they have. (This is simply because I did not define this behavior for the NPCs.) It is possible to ask them for their opinions on various topics, but these topics are limited to other characters and their preferred plan. (This is due to the underlying NPC model, as these are the only opinions NPCs actually have.) It is possible to kiss, shove, and attack NPCs, but most players do not try these things. Of course, players must recognize all these actions are even possible--a task which suffers the problems of Inform's poor affordances discussed earlier.

Indeed, many player skip direct NPC interactions altogether, choosing instead to pursue the revenant alone instead. This is a perfectly acceptable choice, and Demeter does support this behavior while still making it a social action. NPCs that care to will join the PC unasked in the exploration of the Zeppelin. Also, there are several actions that the PC can perform that will affect NPCs positively or negatively based on their opinions. For example, picking up a weapon shows SUPPORT for the plan of gathering weapons. This in turn will change the affinity of witness NPCs based whether they support this plan too. What seems to be missing most in all of this is that NPCs' corresponding reactions are relatively simple and hollow.

This leads to the larger problem that Demeter NPCs have a rather "cookie-cutter" feeling to them. My focus in this implementation was on story and events, not on characters, and that choice can be felt in the finished game. But producing unique NPCs is a heavy authoring burden. For example, whenever an NPC makes a statement in Demeter, this text is usually randomly selected from three to five alternative ways of saying the same thing. This is so players do not see the same text repeated by the same NPC over and over again in repeated scenes. Since sometimes a scene may include a series of two or three strings of text randomly selected in this way, the task of making all possible combinations of text flow properly is not always easy. After completing this much effort for one NPC, I was loath to multiply the effort by six to cover the remaining NPCs. Therefore, NPCs all pull from the same pool of possible text. But this is precisely what makes the NPCs feel like they are all the same.

One technique to help alleviate this would implementing a way to "cross-off" text that has been randomly selected for a particular response. This would prevent immediately repeated statements both within NPC and across NPCs, though text would still repeat after all options have been "crossed off" and the list reset.

Providing unique history for each NPC that the PC could explore in conversation would also help distinguish NPCs from each other. However, as mentioned, many players do not talk to NPCs. So having NPCs interject unique comments during the course of action events would be an even better approach. There is a little bit of this in Demeter. For example, the NPC Elijah Roman has seen a revenant before, which he mentions when first witnessing it or reporting seeing one upon returning to the passenger gondola. More of this would be good, though this just means another increase in the already high authorial burden.

So, in conclusion, I tried to build a game that included a high degree of social interaction and manipulation. However, since NPC states and state changes are not very apparent and the possible social interaction are not always obvious or fun to perform, this aspect of the game was not realized very well. Yet characters and their motivations are essential to a good narrative, just as Aristotle and Freytag pointed out centuries ago. So, even when focusing on story, believable NPCs will be necessary in a good interactive drama.

To this end, it does not seem that more complex models of NPCs are needed. Instead, better ways of portraying those states and motivations are needed. However, this is going to remain a terribly tricky problem when portraying human-like characters. If such characters convincingly behaved as humans in a wide variety of situations, they would effectively be passing a form of the Turing test, a long-sought yet still-elusive standard of AI performance.

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