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A gamer's time, for instance, is one of the most singularly important commodities that a designer is never allowed to waste. This is why in RPGs when you commit a crime in town, you're never forced to just sit in a cell with nothing to do. Activities MUST be regularly and repeatedly provided or the game is rightly called boring.

Damn straight! I’m all in favour of sacrificing realism for fun. What I object to isn't unrealistic gameplay, it's the contrived stories to justify the abstractions that remove the boring parts. Rather than just state, or imply, this is the present and the gameplay is based on peoples everyday experience of e.g. watching paint dry, the fun parts are modelled this and this way, the tedious parts are modelled by this cute quarter-second animation, which you can turn off in the options menu. No, it has to be set in the year 2345 on planet Zyqflop, and the paint is radioactive nanomachines from another dimension, and that’s why the boring parts are gone.

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I'm very interested in if you still feel the same way given the design requirements I've bulleted above

I'll try to look more into it tomorrow.

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When you die, you're reborn later, further along the timeline. You can't undo mistakes or restore the world state. (The tech of the game universe fluctuates, so if something like cloning or consciousness-transfer exists, you'll have an in-game means of restoring; and I'm also working on a family / progeny dynamic that allows you to become your offspring)

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* You are able to take personal involvement in the development of a civilization, over centuries (regardless of life extending tech), even though you're just as mortal as its people

There's a fine tradition for immortal rulers in 4x-games. Civ-players keep complaining about armour units occasionally getting beaten by a phalanx, but nobody apparantly minds meeting Frederic the Great and his furhatted entourage in 3500BC, then again in 1500BC etc.
But the player in your game isn't immortal, just get reborn with all stats and influence intact, right? Yes, you'd better have some backstory to explain that, but it doesn't have to tie into how politics work in your universe, does it? Personally I'd like it better that way.
You could get the same effect with say, the player is the chairman of a loose organisation working towards the chosen goal. The power and influence the player gains really belongs to this organization. If he dies his leutenant becomes chairman instead and continues the work.

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* In every age, there are specific, special NPCs initially dedicated to opposing you. They advance like you do, vye to alter the game universe, but will ignore you if you keep a low profile.

Sounds like the sort of enemies a powerful politician will acquire whether there's a Cosmic Engine or not.

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* There are two routes to power in the game: Level up performing freeform actions, or curry favor with those in power.

What are these levels? Do they make it easier to do the currying? Anyway, RPG-players don't need a backstory to explain why they have stats for vitality, charisma etc. If you introduce some new stas for political skills, you don't need a story to explain that either.

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* As in an empire game (this is a hybrid RPG-empire game), there must be a victory condition. Rather than a story-based plot trigger, I've opted for a control based victory condition (like in Civilization: conquer X cities, gain Y wealth, get Z votes to be leader, etc.) which links with the story.

Maybe it's because I'm more into strategy-games than RPG's but why can't you just have a victory condition like in an empire-building game?

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Finally, the emotional component provides what I hope is a kind of concrete, gameplay relationship between the characters, the player's decisions about them, the backstory, and the heavies in the game (monsters which devour emotion).

But it's to concrete. That's what I and (I think) Estok and msgrey object to.

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What does a stand-and-deliver, last-man sacrifice to save innocents mean if you can just restore? What does a betrayal by a trusted friend mean if you can just jump back to a savegame before the betrayal and off him? Even an ambush or gun-to-the-head standoff is meaningless if you can always avoid it.

On the other hand as you posted above, you don't want to waste the players time. That means that the player must feel they have advanced a bit by playing through this event, compared to the situation before the event, even if it they're now dead. This also makes it a bit meaningless, since the player know, that they'll always be levelling up a bit whatever they do.

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Original post by deformed rabbit There's a fine tradition for immortal rulers in 4x-games. Civ-players keep complaining about armour units occasionally getting beaten by a phalanx, but nobody apparantly minds meeting Frederic the Great and his furhatted entourage in 3500BC, then again in 1500BC etc. But the player in your game isn't immortal, just get reborn with all stats and influence intact, right? Yes, you'd better have some backstory to explain that, but it doesn't have to tie into how politics work in your universe, does it?

I've learned from past feedback that if I don't weld the elements together tightly people will complain that they're unrelated. If you don't reinforce the RPG elements with great meaning, the empire parts will be seen as tacked on. I learned that it's not enough, as it is for empire gamers, to just change the world-- RPG players want some reasons behind who they are, why they can do what they can do, and where everything is going.

The design can't bear the mess of real politics at an RPG level (which, given multiple governments in multiple time periods, would be horrible). I'm also working with a sentiment-based limitation: I don't think players will find abstract ideas of governance and rights all that interesting, but they most definitely will be able to relate to how people feel (oppressed, optimistic, etc.). This is one of the main reasons for the abstraction, because only a dedicated political game focused on dedicated political wonks (like Republic: The Revolution) could bear the weight of the additional complexity. (And Republic, with its house-to-house campaigning, soccer-game fixing and popular-will influencing gameplay did horribly in the market.)

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The power and influence the player gains really belongs to this organization. If he dies his leutenant becomes chairman instead and continues the work.

Part of what makes communicating this so tricky is I don't think people yet get the scale of changes I think are possible. Consider: What if the government the organization is a part of goes through a spasm of civil war and total collapse? What if it's invaded by another power? You need an almost-magical way of saying, "No matter what happens to the human race, I will still be able to play the game."

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Sounds like the sort of enemies a powerful politician will acquire whether there's a Cosmic Engine or not.

Put it this way: I don't think King Tut's enemies, even in the form of generations old secret societies, are doing much of anything today. Yet that's what you'd have to say: Even though the Egyptian empire collapsed, for some reason Tut's decendants and his enemies are still fighting it out.

Remember, I'm using the same paradigm as Civ, except set in the future. Now I can rely on cloning, life-extension, hibernation and time dilation (and probably will in some ways), but if all that tech crashes (unlike what's possible in Civ) and you revert to a Fallout-style backwater, I need something that transcends the limits of the society you're in.

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What are these levels? Do they make it easier to do the currying? Anyway, RPG-players don't need a backstory to explain why they have stats for vitality, charisma etc. If you introduce some new stas for political skills, you don't need a story to explain that either.

No, what I meant was that you could gain power with money by buying equipment and followers, or you could perform missions and gain rank within a faction, which is part of an empire. If you do well for your faction, you gain influence in the empire.

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Maybe it's because I'm more into strategy-games than RPG's but why can't you just have a victory condition like in an empire-building game?

Initially, this was the plan. Then I got beat about the head by the story-stick whenever I said the words RPG in this forum. [grin] So I compromised and created an epic backstory with story threads that run through lifetimes.

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But it's to concrete. That's what I and (I think) Estok and msgrey object to.

Can you give me an idea of how you see yourself experiencing this? This is what I find totally confusing. Do you imagine yourself saying, "Meh, I made these people in this city all pissed off, and that broke the seal on some doomsday weapon... that was totally stupid, how can thinking break some psionic seal!"

I want to be able to boil the discomfort down to a simple idea. Here's the best of what I can figure, at this moment:

Resistance comes from:
A) "There should not be an alien artifact in the game that is affected by the emotion of entire populations." (Yet a story involving First Ones could explain this: What is consciousness? What is thought? Why, if life is so likely, haven't we been visited yet?)
B) "Machinery should not affect people's emotions" (It doesn't, if this is the complaint it's a misconception).
C) "To change human beings, you should only interact with human beings" (If this is the complaint I can chalk it up to preference and move on.)
D) "If the sole goal of the game is to motivate and manipulate people, that's debasing." (Bullshite, you do that in most games all the time! The only difference is that it's a story script that you trigger, not freeform gameplay)

I'm really scratching my head for all options. (This is kinda like having a bad haircut you can't see... you want to shout, "What?!!?!" [lol])

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On the other hand as you posted above, you don't want to waste the players time. That means that the player must feel they have advanced a bit by playing through this event, compared to the situation before the event, even if it they're now dead. This also makes it a bit meaningless, since the player know, that they'll always be levelling up a bit whatever they do.

This is why you have to give them two things to care about: Leveling something that survives their mortal death, and worldbuilding. You can win at one or the other, but not always both. The best way to die is peaceably, continuing on as a clone / child / AI construct so you can keep up worldbuilding you may have started generations ago. The worst way to die is to have your nemesis kick your teeth in, kill all your allies, roll-back your world-building changes, and leave you to be reborn in some fascist hegemony his evil ancestors rule (he'll probably shoot your dog, too... [wink].)

The thing that really throws me about resistance to this concept is that I don't completely understand it, even after all this text. I would think that if you've been into empire builders, it would be fun to see how the society develops from the ground up.

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Original post by Estok The choice of Cosmic Engine is a poor explanation of the gameplay requirements you listed.

Wait a second. What's this game's backstory? It can only be a poor explanation if you believe that the trope "massive artifact, built by ancients, affected by emotions" is unacceptable no matter the game. If that's your contention, then it all boils down to preference, not some underlying principle of game design.

So I'll throw this back at you: In what kind of game is it ever appropriate to have a person's thoughts affect an alien artifact?

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Look at the situation at Iraq today. Are you able to characterize the situation with an emotion? In what ways is the Emotion of the land influenced by the actions and Emotions of the foreigners? How does the media fuel the tension, affect the activities worldwide? How would you use to media to direct the Emotion toward construction? In what sense can this only be achieved through the faith of individuals over lifetimes? How is such faith attacked through generations?

Estok, do you play any games? If so, what were the last 5 games you played, and your opinion of them?

I need to know this in order to clarify where we stand. I suspect we are not speaking the same language because you have an artistic expectation of games, whereas I have a gameplay expectation of games. If that's the case, we are never going to agree. The people in a game world, no matter the fidelity, will always be recognized by us gameplay focused players as marionettes. I don't care how good the story is, if there's no gameplay value to the people, they're going to be nothing to us.

Artistic players, OTOH, are happy being immersed in the story. They create a vivid reality of the character interactions in their head, and try to ignore the scripted sequence / dialog / behavioral limitations of the NPCs. It doesn't matter so much that the NPCs stand out in the rain all night, forget you've just visited them, and retell the same tales infinitely-- artistic players treat that like theatre goers treat artificial thunder, as a concession to getting to the beauty of what they enjoy.

If what I suspect is correct, you will never be able to accept the basic "alien machine is affected by mass emotion" concept because it should (in theory) be as offensive as the real-life notion that all human beings are puppets of DNA or whatever. That is: Emotional content should remain the domain of emotional beings.

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Do you see how this Emotion is already capable of affecting Terraforming, Defense, Control, Trade, and Transportation?

I do understand why you think it's redundant from a "real people" artistic standpoint, yes. From a gameplay, given the load limits of the design (everything you have to learn to play the game), it's still a useful abstraction (though only one of many, with a science-fantasy edge, which is the goal).

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Do you see how the Cosmic Engine nullifies the intellectual perspectives and arguments?

Save for a game devoted to wonks, a game cannot HAVE intellectual perspectives and arguments of any great depth. If you make your game about the moral injustice of government assistance, or Locke's impact on individuality and man's rights against the state, I wish you luck. Someone will play it, but the inclusion of aliens and spaceships will be considered by them a horrid joke.

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It is because the designer only see the game as a medium purely to satisfy the need to manipulate, where the meaning of the subject being manipulated is out of consideration. The result is that the designer end up presenting something with the name that is void of its content. Words without their meaning. Games about emotion, but not emotional. The perspective that such transformation is acceptable is demeaning to games as a medium.

I don't know if this is the case or not, but to me, a game is first about gameplay. What I can do, what consequences I must weigh, and the rules that inform those possibilities-- to me-- is more important than elevating people to some sort of artistic consciousness. This is why I don't play Shen Mue and can't stomach games like it, whereas I know many who are happy with it.

Games as a medium can only be demeaned if they have a direction, a "should be." You're never going to be able to convince me that this is so.

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Games should not be recognized as a platform where ideas are casually striped of their defining qualities in favor of superficial manipulation that you call 'gameplay'. You have just sucked the souls of the concepts and presented them as zombies. Gameplay is a much deeper and richer medium. It is capable of presenting the complex qualities beyond their facades.

You show me the example and we'll talk. Until then, you're talking theoreticals, which are infinitely easy to propose without real code behind them.

Re: Snipping through the mist

It is not a question on preference. You are correct that I do not have full knowledge of what you are trying to do and I am snipping you several hundred feet away in gusty wind and heavy mist. I did not say that your notion of cosmic engine has no place in any game in any context. I am not attacking something general. I am attacking a specific implementation for a specific concept.

In order to do that, I would need to guess the underlying concepts. Based on your original post, these are the lights I use to aim through the mist:

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Would the player care more about the relationships between NPCs if a given relationship opened new powers / possibilities?

- This was the opening statement of the thread, an advertisement by the designer to highlight the distinctive feature of the design. This statement said that the player will receive rewards for the relationships the PC influence between NPCs. What kind of powers/possibilities will be opened is unknown. It might be something related to relationship, objectification of the asbtract properties that the player should normally obtain, or it might be something irrelevant to the relationship, yet plays a role in other parts of the gameplay.

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Normally, save for story, you have no real reason to care if the town merchant hates the governor or what have you. Imagine, however, that people's thoughts toward one another create an emotional web. This web, when tuned a certain way, would unlock the power to change the game world.

- The first sentence is plainly false, but excused because it is just used as a hook. The first sentense showed the designer's narrow perspective on the role and capability of relationships. The designer is proposing that 'in order to care about the relationships between the NPCs, their relationships must affect the ultimate goal of the game.' In another thread I had said that this view is incorrect. In the second sentence about the Web, the designer gave out the story element that would allow the individual relationships to accumulate and combine. Normal designers would not introduce the Web. They would refer this mechanism as some kind of alliance or cause-and-effect structure. Why did the designer mention the Web?

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Basic Concept: You and other special NPCs have a quantum AI growing inside of you. The (hidden story) reason you're being used by mysterious forces as a guinea pig is to gain control of a lost Cosmic Engine, which can be used to control reality (time & space) itself.The Cosmic Engine has hidden nodes scattered around the various worlds you travel to. People around the node can unlock it with their "emotional / psionic resonance". Nodes vary in number of people required to unlock them, with more people the more powerful the node.

- This explained what the Web is. The Web is not an implementational simplication, but an explanation to justify the effects of the relationships. The mention of controlling reality (time & space) symbolically represents what the designer see as the real deals of the game, where the relations are empty chess pieces on a board that has nothing to do with relationship. The connection between the relationships and the control of reality is fictional. This part also gave out the fact that the power/possibilities mentioned in the starting question correspond to the powers of controlling reality. Those powers had nothing to do with the protraits of relationships themselves.

Together with the narrow perspective given in the previous part, one can infer that the designer is proposing the following:

"Relationship between NPCs have never done anything consequential to games. In order to make the players want to deal with relationships, let's make the relationship have an impact on the overall game. In this design, the player will play a game about controlling reality. In order to control reality, the player will have to use various methods to influence the relationships between the NPCs. It is clear that this normally doesn't happen. But to make this happen so that there is gameplay, we will introduce the idea of quantum AI and the cosmic engine to explain this interaction."

This interpretation of the design shows that relationships are use as an excuse to include gameplay about manipulating emotions. It is just a way of inserting tokens into the cosmic engines. The designer could have very well chosen the implementation that, in order to deposite coins into the cosmic engine, the PC will have to defeat monsters, arrange monuments, uncover artifacts, etc.... But the designer didn't choose these methods because, one of the emphasis was introducing emotion to gameplay. In this perspective, you can see that the role of emotion as a trigger that allows the cosmic engine to be controlled, is as shallow as other implementations where the means and the goals are thematically but not semantically related. In other words, the implementation of emotion appears to be an excuse to introduce gameplay.

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To create change, you'd want to influence leader NPCs, who in turn would control a faction or block of people. All the people would then take a certain action (war, peace, indifference, etc.), which would then unlock the node. Since it scales, you'd go from influencing a gang leader or town mayor to whispering in the ear of an emperor or president, with challenges to get access harder and harder (requiring you to level in wealth, power or prestige).

- This part shows that the designer had been designing from the tail end and lost sight of the capabilities that the means already provide. All of these can be implemented by emotion and relationship without the introduction of the cosmic engine. Recall that the basic premise of this thread IS introducing emotion to gameplay. What this shows, in the designer's own vision, is that emotion, diplomacy, and relationships are capable of sustaining every part of the gameplay without the cosmic engine. This means that, in terms of promoting emotion to gameplay, the cosmic engine is redundant.

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Changing the Cosmic Engine would be the whole point of playing, btw, the way you get to the victory screen. Linking this with other ideas I've posted so far, you'd basically be world-building from an RPG character perspective over lifetimes, single-player or co-op, against bots who are your immortal rivals.

- This showed again that the point of relationships are not really about enjoying the interactions and the relationships. The relationships are just for the sake of manipulation, it gave an implication that the emotional conflicts are not presented as emotional conflicts, but as strategic pieces on a chess board. In order to fully understand this statement, you need to recall again the premise of the thread, which was to introduce emotion to gameplay.

Now, look at this design objectively. Is the 'Emotion' the designer now included really the 'Emotion' that a player is looking for? What is the point of including 'Emotion' if there is nothing emotional about playing it? Based on your own judgement, is Emotion included as something deep, or something shallow?


Given the premise being including emotion to gameplay, think about this question:

Would you call this design a well-integrated design about emotion and gameplay?

If you would pick a game that represents a game where emotion and gameplay are well-integrated, what features will you pick from this design to justify your claim?

Based on what presented in this design, would you expect the game to be an emotional game? If you think that the game will be an emotional game, is it due to the introduction of the cosmic engine?

These questions have nothing to do with the backstory. They have nothing to do with preference.

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So I'll throw this back at you: In what kind of game is it ever appropriate to have a person's thoughts affect an alien artifact?

The above told you that I was not making a generalized attack based on just tropes. It was a very specific attack. The question you ask here is irrelevant. Becaues everyone knows that there are infinitely many good reasons to include a trope in a design.

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Re: Artistic Expectation

Strictly speaking, the last five games I played were:

1. an online forum game based on suspicion and voting
2. bejewel
3. go
4. square2 (Someone posted a link about this game awhile ago asking for improvements for a similar design.)
5. Spank the monkey

The reason behind this list is that most big games are just big wastes of time. I mean, why would you level up a character for 60+ hours to get the thrill when you can get it by just slapping the monkey at 756mph? I would rather play something small and to the point. If I feel like mindlessly killing things then I would just play a game where I can mindlessly kill things. It is a lot better to NOT impose a story to a game just for the sake of having a story. If you are trying to include a story, then the artistic expectation kicks in. RPG design is one of the most wasteful resource drains.

Your statement that I have an artistic expectation is correct. But your implication that I do not have a gameplay expectation is not. Also, having an artistic expectation is not equivalent of expecting a story.


My point of posting is not to convince you or change your mind. I don't need you to agree with me. I was only replying because I didn't think you understood what I was trying to say. I was just clarifying it, such as this:

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I don't care how good the story is, if there's no gameplay value to the people, they're going to be nothing to us.

This statement only makes sense if what I have been suggesting has no gameplay value. Therefore this statement does not make sense. Because the gameplay exhibited in my examples share the same gameplay elements in your design, only without the extraneous explanation through the cosmic engine. In order to say this statement you must not have understood what I have been talking about.

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Artistic players, OTOH, are happy being immersed in the story. They create a vivid reality of the character interactions in their head, and try to ignore the scripted sequence / dialog / behavioral limitations of the NPCs. It doesn't matter so much that the NPCs stand out in the rain all night, forget you've just visited them, and retell the same tales infinitely-- artistic players treat that like theatre goers treat artificial thunder, as a concession to getting to the beauty of what they enjoy.

I am not the Artistic player you are describing. I am not sure what you were thinking when you made this comment. As a game designer, the major medium to master is gameplay. Game design is not about providing a container to play movies. The ART of game design is about presenting a concept through game, to provide an experience that other media cannot achieve. Artistic Expectation refers to the use of gameplay as the medium to present concepts. This thread was about presenting emotion and relationships. My argument was that your design failed the artistic standard of presenting such concept, because, the end product of what you called 'emotion' is no longer emotional. You didn't use the medium well.

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If what I suspect is correct, you will never be able to accept the basic "alien machine is affected by mass emotion" concept because it should (in theory) be as offensive as the real-life notion that all human beings are puppets of DNA or whatever. That is: Emotional content should remain the domain of emotional beings.

What you suspected was incorrect. My attack was very specific. To be more precise, I was not attacking the fact that the cosmic engine exist. I was attacking the fact that the existence of the cosmic engine is redundant and counter-productive to the presentation of emotion and relationship through gameplay. The argument was very discriminatory:

"The choice of Cosmic Engine is a poor explanation of the gameplay requirements you listed"

I was attacking the association between the Cosmic Engine and the Objectives of the design. I am not attacking the Cosmic Engine by itself, out of context.

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Quote: Do you see how this Emotion is already capable of affecting Terraforming, Defense, Control, Trade, and Transportation? I do understand why you think it's redundant from a "real people" artistic standpoint, yes. From a gameplay, given the load limits of the design (everything you have to learn to play the game), it's still a useful abstraction (though only one of many, with a science-fantasy edge, which is the goal).

Such abstraction is not needed. What is it that prevent the game from displaying, "City X is still holding very strong hatred towards our kinds, it will be too risky to form an alliance with them for this mission." or "The defending city's morale is too strong, we must defeat their spirit before attacking it. Let's make the people question the queen's loyalty toward their king." Insert numberical representations if you want. I am not attacking those. Do you see how the cosmic engine plays no role, and provides no benefit in abstraction?

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Re: Combining various elements

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Quote: Do you see how the Cosmic Engine nullifies the intellectual perspectives and arguments? Save for a game devoted to wonks, a game cannot HAVE intellectual perspectives and arguments of any great depth. If you make your game about the moral injustice of government assistance, or Locke's impact on individuality and man's rights against the state, I wish you luck. Someone will play it, but the inclusion of aliens and spaceships will be considered by them a horrid joke.

I think you are too defensive. You are just grabbing anything and throwing them at me. This argument does not make any sense. Think about this design:

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Cardinal Prime Central Idea: - Emotion as the basis of logic, power, motivation, and life. Story: Many years in the future, human and machines are all connected to the net directly or indirectly. The PC is member of a government network crime investigation team. Most of the cases involve individuals hacking into various systems. But lately, a series of similar homicide occured. In each case, the victim is always a member of the churches. The case comes to your team because the only thing that seemed to be shared among the murderers was the Cardinal network that the churches shared. The department suspect that a terrorist group had hacked into the network. But the preliminary investigation suggested otherwise. Gameplay: The gameplay involves the PC making choices on the investigation, including assigning tasks to the subordinates, visiting the churches, and interrogating the networks. The clues for the investigation come from the conversations and the relationship between the PC and the other team members. The PC will discover that once the investigation began, the problem was no longer contained in the Cardinal network, and the PC himself became at risk of being murdered by his own teammates. Design: Through the story and gameplay, the player will experience the relationship between emotion and logic, power, motivation, and meaning of life. This is a game about experiencing the perspectives and arguments related to the concepts. This is a game where the player focus not only on the effects of the choices, but on the meaning of the choices.

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to me, a game is first about gameplay. What I can do, what consequences I must weigh, and the rules that inform those possibilities-- to me-- is more important than elevating people to some sort of artistic consciousness.

Gameplay is important, but not the sole evaluation. The second part of the comment is correct. When every game is like that, a designer from another media can't help but ask:

Is that all you game designers can do and plan to do?

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Games as a medium can only be demeaned if they have a direction, a "should be." You're never going to be able to convince me that this is so.

I said you demeaned game and emotion. It is quite an oxymoron, because to demean is to reduce something's worth, if you are the one demeaning it, of course you won't consider it demeaning, because it does not worth as much as the accuser claims it to worth. Therefore, in general I can't convince you that you are demeaning game as a medium, I can only explain to you my perspective.

A way that can convince you is have you list a list of games you played and have you order them by how much you like them. One of the patterns being sought is:

"I enjoy games where elements related to emotion are emotional more so than those where they are only outlets for manipulation to achieve a gameplay goal. T/F?"

If you don't want to go through the list, this is the only question you need to answer to whether you are demeaning game based on your own scale of worth. You can also ask yourself this question:

"I believe that the only way to include emotion in gameplay is by allowing emotion to open up powers and possibilities that intuitively has nothing to do with emotion, but serves other functions for the gameplay, and by adding story element to explain the situations. T/F?"

While this question is not for convincing yourself, it helps clarify other people views about the argument.

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Re: Introducing emotional elements

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Quote: Games should not be recognized as a platform where ideas are casually striped of their defining qualities in favor of superficial manipulation that you call 'gameplay'. You have just sucked the souls of the concepts and presented them as zombies. Gameplay is a much deeper and richer medium. It is capable of presenting the complex qualities beyond their facades. You show me the example and we'll talk. Until then, you're talking theoreticals, which are infinitely easy to propose without real code behind them.

It wasn't theoretical. The topic revolves around making games that are emotional and attractive to the player. There are hordes of examples, practically all RPG, graphical adventures, text-based games, and now any game with a story is doing this, including FPS and RTS. The following are some gameplay elements related to emotion and relationships. Below each item are two views that the designer can introduce as player motivation:

Any alliance or diplomatic options:
1) I want NPCx and NPCy to hate each other so that I can do actionZ while they are fighting each other.
2) I want NPCx and NPCy to hate each other because I think that both of them deserve to die, and I will finish them at the end.


Relationships with Consequences:
1) I know that if NPCx doesn't trust NPCy, then NPCx will give itemZ to me instead of NPCy. (Think gangster games)
2) I must make NPCx not to trust NPCy, because I know that NPCy is a villain, and I don't want NPCx to get killed.


Dating, or getting married
1) I am going to make NPCx and NPCy get married because their offspring will be uber and I will kidnap it.
2) I want NPCx and NPCy to get married because they had fought so hard for it I think they deserve to be together.

The difference between the two views are pretty distinct in terms of the player's motivation. If you are a designer desiging an emotional game, which view do you think you will be aiming at?

These aren't theoretical stuffs, just common sense. When you compared the two views, would you say the designer1 is presenting emotion as well as designer2?

If you are attracted to design1, you are supposed to say, "This game really did a good job of integrating emotion to gameplay, because now I have a motivation to care about the relationship between the NPCs."

If you are attracted to design2, you would say this, "This game really did a good job of integrating emotion to gameplay, because it provides me with options and outlets to express my feeling to allow the context to dynamically change in a certain way."

[Edited by - Estok on May 25, 2005 6:47:12 AM]

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Original post by deformed rabbit Quote: Finally, the emotional component provides what I hope is a kind of concrete, gameplay relationship between the characters, the player's decisions about them, the backstory, and the heavies in the game (monsters which devour emotion). But it's to concrete. That's what I and (I think) Estok and msgrey object to.

For the record, I don't object to it at all. I can understand what I believe Estok's concerns to be, but I don't share them.

Even if the Cosmic Engine is just a bolt-on extra to let stat-crunchers have a motive for investigating the emotional simulation layers of the game, it doesn't automatically degrade the quality of teh game's handling of emotion and the player's reaction to it. For instance, compare the following two scenarios:

1) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there watching the daily lives of the inhabitants.

2) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there before discovering that the local Engine node can only be activated by intense suffering.


In both scenarios, the player will (hopefullY) develop an emotional attachment to the people and want to maintain their way of life. In the first, there's no reason why the people shouldn't continue to live happily ever after, so there's no real decision for the player to make. In the second, the player is presented with a dilemma: maintain the earthly paradise and forgo the power boost, or take the power boost at the cost of destroying paradise. Of course, if, like many "story-driven" games, you are forced to take one choice over the other in order to "win", that is demeaning, but the potential for dilemmas caused by conflict between the two styles of play is anything but.

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Original post by rmsgrey 1) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there watching the daily lives of the inhabitants. 2) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there before discovering that the local Engine node can only be activated by intense suffering.

This comparison is unfair because you didn't install the equivalent dilemma in example 1.

1) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there watching the daily lives of the inhabitants, however, the player discover that a group of vampires (or terrorists) have been hidding in the kingdom. Entering the kingdom to eliminate the vampires will bring hatred, suffering, and terror to the last peaceful kingdom.

2) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there before discovering that the local Engine node can only be activated by intense suffering.

When you compare this way, you can see how the cosmic engine does not introduce conflict, but serves as an explanation of the conflict. Which explanation of the conflict seem more meaningful to you? Which one seem imposed?

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Original post by Estok Quote: Original post by rmsgrey 1) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there watching the daily lives of the inhabitants. 2) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there before discovering that the local Engine node can only be activated by intense suffering. This comparison is unfair because you didn't install the equivalent dilemma in example 1. 1) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there watching the daily lives of the inhabitants, however, the player discover that a group of vampires (or terrorists) have been hidding in the kingdom. Entering the kingdom to eliminate the vampires will bring hatred, suffering, and terror to the last peaceful kingdom. 2) The player encounters a happy, well-governed kingdom, stable and secure from outside threats and spends some time there before discovering that the local Engine node can only be activated by intense suffering. When you compare this way, you can see how the cosmic engine does not introduce conflict, but serves as an explanation of the conflict. Which explanation of the conflict seem more meaningful to you? Which one seem imposed?

The Engine version has a much clearer dilemma to my mind - it's far from clear how going after the vampires affects the good people of the community - or, if the vampires are valuable members of the community, why you'd want to eliminate them. For that matter, it's not clear why you'd have to go after them in the kingdom - if they're causing trouble outside the kingdom, you should be able to catch them there, and, if they're not, either they're causing trouble within the kingdom already (so you're not the one to introduce suffering), or they're not causing trouble anywhere (so why go after them)...

It's undoubtedly possible to refine the vampire scenario so that the choice rests between going after the vampires or preserving the kingdom, but doing so without appearing forced is going to be tricky.


The Cosmic Engine example seems forced in isolation, but when you consider the logic of a large number of nodes, each designed to channel a given emotion, the inactive nodes are going to be in places where the prevailing emotion is opposed to the node, so the disrupting-the-peace scenario comes "free" with the Engine concept - along with the equivalent "rebuild society" scenario... The issue then is how easy you find it to swallow the Cosmic Engine in the first place.

Personally, I prefer the one big device that automatically gives rise to numerous interesting scenarios to a number of individually crafted scenarios that are dropped in by hand. If you could come up with a game world where the dilemma of the vampires arose out of the underlying logic, then, depending on how forced the assumptions of that world felt, I might prefer it.

Re: Arbitrary Emotional Conflict

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The Engine version has a much clearer dilemma to my mind - it's far from clear how going after the vampires affects the good people of the community

I don't see the difference in clarity. In the vampire example, the player is held the decision to whether to turn the peaceful kingdom into a battlefield. It is the same emotional situation you get, when you knew that your husband is cheating on you but at the same time he seems to love you just as much. Would you reveal his secret risking losing the family?

I don't think there is an antidote for you if O represents peace, X represents suffering, and a game of tic-tac-toe makes you emotional because now you are forced to draw X's on the grid.

Your point is that the cosmic engine introduces situations at a lower cost. My point is that the situations introduced by the cosmic engine are worthless compared to the normal execution of emotions.

Suppose there are 5 main emotions: Love, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear. Put them in a grid of initial and final states, it yields 25-5 = 20 transitions, such as from Love to Joy, from Love to Sadness, from Love to Anger, ...

The example you gave can be classified as a transition of J2F. That is just one node. Suppose on the grid, the four adjacent nodes require the transitions of F2L, L2S, S2A, and A2J. The actions that the player can perform to affect the emotional content of a node can be refered to as an Emotional Operator (EO). It is expectable that each EO may act on a single node or a multiple nodes, and the contents of the nodes may interaction with one another through some Emotional Inference Rules (EIR).

Intrinsically there is nothing wrong with EO and EIR. They can be as realistic and as numerical as it gets. Moveover, what I have described so far has nothing to do with the cosmic engine.

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Now, let's add the cosmic engine to the picture.


Cosmic Engine

The player is facing a grid of nodes, each has its own requirement of transitions. Based on your argument, the transitions are free. It means that there is no contextual reason for the transitions at each node. Let's look at the player's emotional response for each randomly generated (free) transitions, and what the player might do if there is only one EO (killing, for simplicity):

J2F - I need to bring fear into an otherwise joyful town. I feel hurt. I don't want to do it. I am going to randomly kill villagers.

F2L - I need to make change fear into love, I am happy because I am doing something positive. I am going to kill the landlords that had been oppessing a loving couple.

L2S - I need make a loving town feel sad. It cuts me deeply. I am going to kill one member from each married couple.

S2A - I need to make a sad town angry. hmmm, I am not sure what I am supposed to think about this. I am going to kill the dead body of their respected leader.

A2J - I need to make a angry town joyful, I am happy because I get to do something positive. I am going to kill the local evil landlord.

*Note again that the rules behind the EO has nothing to do with the cosmic engine. Imagine what kinds of rules you will add based on the cosmic engine. It is a premise that none of the rules that you can add based on the cosmic engine will make sense without the details of the engine. In order words, the additional EO and EIR you add based on the cosmic engine will have to be illogical from the standpoint of emotion.

You can imagine the player response after playing the game as the player recap on what he had done and experienced overall:

"In this game I have change the emotions of the towns. Some transitions make me feel sad, some makes me feel happy. Overall I am able to achieve the emotional pattern to unlock the ultimate power."

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Now let's look at the normal version without the cosmic engine, to answer your second inqury, I would use the emergent content from the warfare design:


BattleCry (old thread)

J2F - The enemy has just successfully capture a city and res'ed the fallen commander previously captured there. Your Flag is gathering but it wasn't enough to retake the city, but you want to recapture the city before the enemies discover that there was an artifact hidden in the keep. Therefore you split your Flag to pretend that Flags from your side are about to counter attack. The newly rescued enemies didn't want to risk another character death again and choose to retreat.

F2L - You and your partner Flag are defending a city that is seemingly doomed. But the two of you kept RPing so much that even the enemy is enjoying the story. As much as the enemy appeciated the RP, they have to take out your city. What they didn't know is that your RP attracted several ally Flags to help the defense.

L2S - The enemy city is defended by a pair of Flags. The pair has complimentray strength, making it quite a strong combination. The idea here is to do something that will separate the Flagss, and your Flag decided to fake an artifact in transit. To lure one of the Flags out. The news about the transit was deliberately delivered tot he enemy. Of course the Flags are not just going to separate, but it created a discussion in the Flags that maybe they should have gone to take the artifact. The discussion made the Flags think that ultimately they can't stay to be complimentary Flags forever, maybe they should choose a different upgrade next rank so that each of them can be more independent. And that is exactly what your Flag wants them to do.

S2A - Your Flag is destroyed in a skirmish, you are upset that your fellow Flag was attacked while getting to you Flag. While the Fellow Flag is resing your Flag, the enemy tells you that your Fellow Flag was delayed because they diverged to attack an artifact in transit. You find that you have been kept in the dark the whole time about the artifact business.

A2J - Your Flag has been repeatedly defeated by the same enemy. People in your Flag started arguring who is at fault, and how the Flag is not run right. So as a leader you decide to take a break and go creep hunting with the Flag, leaving those victory-hungry hotheads behind. With the smaller group your Flag went into the mountains and get better equipments and discover the true style that you and the Flag wants to play.


You can imagine that the resulting response is very different. This is not a nominal design. The emotional contents are never forced, and is completely delivered through gameplay.

Although the design is aimmed for MMO setting, you can easily see the parallel implementation in single player using EO and EIR (The MMO version has no need to declare EO and EIR). For example, the efficiency when two Flags are attacking together is scaled by the emotional affinity between the Flags, and various rules to model the strengthening and weakening of bondings between Flags. Something that you can do in this version that you can't do in the MMO version is to provoke a mutiny in the enemy Flag. In this implementation, every Flag is a node. There is nothing related to the cosmic engine.

The expected response of a player (single-player game) might be this:

"In this game, emotion added a dimension to the warfare genre. No only could I attack the enemy with tactics and strategies, I could also influence their decisions by manipulating their emotions. Soldiers and commanders, after all, aren't machines. And emotion is one of the biggest weakest that all human share. In this game, true power lies in the command of emotion."

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Original post by Estok "In this game I have change the emotions of the towns. Some transitions make me feel sad, some makes me feel happy. Overall I am able to achieve the emotional pattern to unlock the ultimate power."

I realise I'm quite possibly going beyond anything Wavinator originally had in mind here, and it's possible that his originally intended implementation would "force" you to destroy the peaceful kingdom. However, if you're not forced to unlock the ultimate power in order to win, then you can also have a player whose reflection is:

"In this game, I was faced with several interesting choices. By resisting the temptation to seek power at any cost, I now feel better about myself, and have managed to achieve a more satisfying victory by creating a "perfect world" than I would by achieving Ultimate Power over a world riddled with fear, anger and sorrow."

Even if you are forced to "Ultimate Power", it's still possible for a player to reflect:

"In this game, emotion added a dimension to the RPG genre. Not only was I solving puzzles, but also doing so by manipulating NPCs' emotions. People,after all, aren't machines. And emotion is one of the biggest things that make us human. In this game, Ultimate Power comes from the command of emotion."

Quote:

"In this game, emotion added a dimension to the warfare genre. No only could I attack the enemy with tactics and strategies, I could also influence their decisions by manipulating their emotions. Soldiers and commanders, after all, aren't machines. And emotion is one of the biggest weakest that all human share. In this game, true power lies in the command of emotion."

There might also be a player whose reflection is:

"In this game, I have manipulated the emotions of the enemy to gain strategic advantages. No transitions made me in the least uneasy, so I was happy to perform the required pattern of manipulations to achieve victory."


Either game can be "meta-gamed" by someone willing to reduce it to a pattern of numbers, and the moral dimension has been entirely lost from your Battlecry examples. Maybe the Cosmic Engine is more prone to meta-gaming, though that may be something that could be addressed in playtesting.