aigan said:
Penumbra (2007) came a couple of years after HL2 (2004) and seems to have taken some inspiration from it.

Not really, a very different kind of game. It founded the ‘Indie Horror’ genre, and imo also the Walking Simulator. Physics is used primarily to immerse the player with the world in a subtle way, HL2 used it as another weapon. But both games sow the profit of creative gameplay from it. In my experience, simulations have the property to emerge unexpected stuff, which enables creativity as a bonus.

aigan said:
I got a bit stumped by the question of what to do in the game.

I've watched the ‘Systems Are Everywhere’ video from your playlist. It explains what ‘systemic’ means. I really have not heard the term before, tbh.
And she provides answers to this question. So i find that really interesting and promising.
But it's not yet a solution. For example, she lists tools and their effect on systems, giving examples in form of ‘stories’ (which i would rather see as thoughts of player speculations / ideas, or conclusions on what he could do with given tools). But the problem is: None of those examples are convincing in providing fun. It's still much more fun to put the crosshair on everything that moves and shooting it down.
This issue goes through the whole presentation. Examples are about how to model a real world like ecosystem with systems. But there is no fun or obvious motivation to affect this. So she has problems to come up with good examples. The primary idea feels right and promising, but we do not yet know what to do with it.

I guess we need to come up with systems specifically designed around being fun and interesting to interact with. I was hitting this same wall long before, when thinking about how to get emerging options for a game. But now i know other people think in the same directions, and there is related terminology and also games which work.

There also is another interesting about about the presentation, and her vision on how to realize it, aligning to your own vision of modeling systemic stories with layers of situations, NPCs remembering your actions… up to emotions and drama in the end, iirc.
No matter how we call it - layers or systems, it is a top down approach. You know what you want, you divide into smaller problems, you design solutions to achieve the desired outcome.
I failed on playing Dwarf Fortress as well so far, but hearing people calling it a huge simulator of everything, i'm pretty sure that's a good example of such top down approach, e.g. including a system to generate a full history of background story.
Nothing wrong with that, but it has non obvious limitations. The result is not really a simulation in a classical sense, it is rater a approach to model expected input and output using abstractions. It's a model, not a simulation. It's a picture of Mona Lisa, but not Mona Lisa herself. And due to that, it won't emerge as much options as hoped eventually, even if it was designed with that goal in mind.

The alternative - a bottom up approach and true simulation - is a possibility as well. But because it's hard to model and design as intended this way, we don't see many examples.
Maybe Minecraft. There are some blocks which enable to model logic, maybe 'redstone', similar to switches, transistors, and stuff like that. It can simulate electrical circuits with logic gates, i guess. That's something simple, but it's hard to predict what players might do with it. And we have seen, they used it to make basic calculators, up to an Atari 2600 emulator.
My personal development gave me another example. I worked on a traditional particle fluid simulator. Teh goal was procedural creation, e.g. to simulate cracks propagating through a material. To provoke this effect, i have used a curvy velocity field on the floor, intended to bend the material, tearing it apart, etc. And i also gave the material itself the desire to contract or expand.
It worked, cracks have formed as desired, but at one point something unexpected has happened. My block of fluid particles started to move like a snail. It looked lik some underwater animal, and it behaved like being alive.
I have no video, but a picture (which i surely have posted 5 times here already):

You see those snake like edges, and they moved like a snake moves. What started as a simple box of particles, started to crawl around and i was shocked. In this moment, i felt like having learnt something about how life might form out of dead matter, without any intent, logic, or intelligence.

Recently i found some people seriously work on something seemingly similar:

Pretty interesting.
But hard to control ofc.
Still, the bottom up way has an advantage: It creates complexity out of simple rules, and it can emerge the unexpected.

To apply this to our goals here, we would just simulate how atoms work, and we would get landscapes with living creatures having economy, relationships, and everything.

I don't say that's possible or practical, but i think combining top down and bottom up approaches is probably fruitful.
But you can't design bottom up on paper.
You also can not compose a catchy earwig melody on command when you need it.
It just happens while you work on something, coincidentally, by luck.

So you should get started with your text based prototype, and if things don't work out as planned, be ready to change your plans. That's also a form of bottom up, and one that actually works for me, sometimes. ; )

aigan said:
The Indiana Jones film has a lot of action. The main character murders about 13 people. That’s not a lot compared to the Uncharted games that were inspired by it.

Well, the killing becomes an increasing problem with increasing realism. Lara Croft looks pretty real now, and we can see her suffering, and then it really looks just silly if she kills hundreds of men along her way to find some ancient pot of gold.

That's what people say at least.
I don't want realism anyway, so if the killing is needed, just tone it down.

But we also could be fine with just 13 people, if that's ok. (Indy already kills for a good joke, i've seen, so according to Hollywood, it is ok.)
We could make enemies hard to kill. They could be like the helicopter in HL1. An annoying enemy, hunting us a long time. A chore. But then, when we finally manage to shoot it down, the reward is big.

Maybe games are tied to serve primal instincts. And maybe that's not even bad. We can still behave like animals in games, and maybe that's good for us.

But ofc. it would be nice if not each and every game boils down to just that.

aigan said:
I got the feeling from some parts of infocom games. And that's only text. And as I pointed out, also from very few pixels animated.

I guess that's because you then can use your imagination to make the characters alive.

That's imo another thing we've lost, long before we lost oversight by moving to 3D.
When i played Atari 2600 games, i used my imagination to turn colored boxes into worlds and characters. It was a primary part of the experience.

But now i can see every unique hair of beard on NPCs. There is no more room or need for my imagination.

That's very, very bad.
Spurring imagination is a key problem now in game design, imo.
Games which can do it become less and less.
Last example fro me was Scorn. I was constantly busy with making sense out of this strange world. Where am i, and what has happened here? Why is there such a seemingly disgusting disrespect against life, it seems?

So maybe, making the player asking questions is the best option we still have to spur imagination.

@joej said:

We all agree this is not perfect and improvements would be great.
But how would your systemic alternative look like?
No prescripted quests at all? Generating them procedurally? How in detail, providing examples?
Generating dialogue commenting the emerging story as well? Using speech synthesis if we want audio? Using multilingual story and speech generation?

You need to explain it to us, but not by defining goals.
We need examples so we can imagine the idea.

Sorry for the wait. I was thinking of ways to continue describing my vision. I have been working on the thing I been calling the Level 1 implementation. But now I think than the later levels needs to be more clearly described in order to clearly see what Level 1 would be. So I opted to do a more detailed description, but doing it more loosely. Thank you for the push and inspiration.

This is the first complete draft for my next article. But I would appreciate comments or reactions before I published it. I based the example on Witcher 3 Wild at Heart:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wVe958BlSbdx3UWwnW0yNMH3wRnz4kpCtlI0maJRDJ8/edit?usp=sharing​

Please comment here or directly in the document.

@joej said:

aigan said:
Have you experienced the DualSense controller? You can actually feel the grass under your hands in Horizon Forbidden West.

Ha, no thanks. No trackball or proper touchpad for mouselook, no immersion.
Feeling rumbles is not immersive, but rather just annoying imo.
Controlling your view with precision and without lag is simply required for a immersive experience.

I really like the box of those consoles. HW and SW made for games. I'm envy.

But until they realize that mouselook is the biggest innovation for games since Pong, i'll pass. ; )

Console gamer: I can hear the gunshots out of my controller! So immersive!
PC player: hahaha, lol, rofl.

Mouse-look is superior in many ways.

But don't think DualSense is just like rumble. The haptic feedback is on a whole other level. How big of an impact that does is a question of personality and taste. I love the immersion. Skating in Astro's Playroom is an experience like no other. You can feel the ice under your feet.

That along with the adaptive triggers and sound can be used to great effect. Astro's Playroom is still one of the absolute best demonstrations of how to use the technology.

aigan said:
I wrote an article about a control scheme for embodied manipulation.

ugh - ‘console player trying hard to self assure his controller does not suck’ :D
Just joking, did not read. Too many button combos maybe. I always fail to remember more than one button. Atari was good. : )

That's one of the reason I developed the control scheme. Can't make the controls consistent between games but I can at least do something for making int easy and logical within a game for all types of activities.

Better designed games also has contextual button-reminders. And Astro's Playroom is also designed to introduce the controller. It's depicted on screen in the clearest possible way.

@joej said:

aigan said:
WD Legions was not good but had an interesting concept and did some things well:

Skimmed through parts of the video. Their work is something i expect along the RPG promise. Generating characters procedurally and simulating their daily routines.

But i'm not convinced about this to be actual fun. I have tried the game, but played only for 10 minutes or so. Then i thought ‘Meh - why did they remove the well developed character from the former game? Now it's all boring people in every day situations. I don't feel motivated to do anything here.

As said. Its was not good. But the technology is really interesting.

“Anecdote factory” is not enough. There needs to be real relationships and stories based on meaningful themes. There needs to be character growth and progressen there the characters you care about is weaved into a larger story.

But it's still a step above other sandbox games that doesn't do anything with NPCs personality and daily life and reactions to any type of situation.

I feel split in this sense. As a developer, i want freedom and options.
As a player i have a very hard time to feel motivated by a game. I reject most of them within 10 minutes. That's not because refund periods are short. I just don't need more time.

So i guess building up primary motivation needs to be done first and in other ways, and solving this problem is not really part of the systemic approach. From that i rather expect the game grows with me as i play it, if i have decided to play it at all in the first place.

What hooks the player differs. Some tricks works on more people than others. Many games are constructed to appeal to several different types of players, catering to different play styles and, tastes and attention spans.

The idea is to identify the things that hook people and implement it as systems rather than as a single hand-written sequence. Do the work as an author, but write systems rather than words. Encode the rules.

I think WD legions fundamentally failed in that.

JoeJ said:
I've watched the ‘Systems Are Everywhere’ video from your playlist. It explains what ‘systemic’ means. I really have not heard the term before, tbh. And she provides answers to this question. So i find that really interesting and promising.

Wonderful. The first few videos in that list are sorted for recommended viewing order. I tried to only include videos that say something new and interesting. There are a lot more that talk about the problems without providing anything that hasn't already been presented better.

“Systems Are Everywhere” is a good introduction to what a systemic game is. But there are a lot more to be said about it.

But it's not yet a solution. For example, she lists tools and their effect on systems, giving examples in form of ‘stories’ (which i would rather see as thoughts of player speculations / ideas, or conclusions on what he could do with given tools). But the problem is: None of those examples are convincing in providing fun. It's still much more fun to put the crosshair on everything that moves and shooting it down. This issue goes through the whole presentation. Examples are about how to model a real world like ecosystem with systems. But there is no fun or obvious motivation to affect this. So she has problems to come up with good examples. The primary idea feels right and promising, but we do not yet know what to do with it. I guess we need to come up with systems specifically designed around being fun and interesting to interact with. I was hitting this same wall long before, when thinking about how to get emerging options for a game. But now i know other people think in the same directions, and there is related terminology and also games which work.

You are right that Aleissia Laidacker didn’t show how systems make the game fun. But she does mention several other aspects that I really like. For example, how systemic games create the possibility to learn about life. “They want a glimpse of who they could become.”

The second half of my “promise of adventure” article defined more types of games, https://blog.jonas.liljegren.org/hand-written-narrative/ . It mentions open-world, sandbox, linear, branching and simulation and compares it to systemic games. Many systemic games are sandbox simulation games. Everything I talked about here builds on top of that. Most systemic games have what I’m calling a systemic environment. That is when you have systems for how objects interact with each other. When these systems keep running even when the player isn’t directly interacting with them, you will have a simulation game.

I’m not against sandbox simulation games, but it’s not enough for creating engaging stories comparable with hand-written story-based games. For me, systemic environment games are a solved problem. NetHack did it in 1987. Tons of new games keep doing it. Games like Zelda Breath of the Wild is a wonderful example of systemic environment.

With that background; I am trying to show that we need to stop doing simulations in the manner of Dwarf Fortress. The simulation has to rez down when out of influence of the player. Not only for saving CPU cycles, but to give room for adapting to the player choices. The quantum mechanics observer theory of waveform collapse is the core of what enables a systemic story game. This is where the bottom up simulation meets the top down director ai.

NetHack inspired Dwarf Fortress that in turn inspired Minecraft. They are all systemic simulation games and that makes them bottom-up.

Aleissia Laidacker had some simple examples for what systems are. That's not to say that those exact systems would be the most fun in an actual game. Many modern open-world games today have systemic combat, in the sense that it consists of several different systems that interconnect in interesting ways. I haven't spent much time talking about it since I’m more interested in expanding that to something nobody has done yet. But here are some notable systemic games:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the follow up Tears of the Kingdom: The creators call it the chemistry engine.

RimWorld, Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress: Colony sims where the individuals have needs and goals and react to what happens around them.

Minecraft, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program: Allows for creating your own systems as machines.

Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored, Prey, Metal Gear Solid, Hitman, Far Cry, Watch Dogs: Systems that make stealth gameplay more interesting, with different types of distractions and improvised traps, interacting with npc behaviors.

Divinity Original Sin and Baldur's Gate 3: The usual example is the surface mechanic. Made up but illustrative example; You can shoot an arrow, cutting a rope that will make a chandelier drop down, breaking a barrel of oil, that will then start burning when reacting with the candles of the chandelier. The fire will then spread to a water barrel that will eventually break, spilling out the water that will douse the fire, creating a cloud of steam that will allow you to sneak past undetected. These games are actually inspired by Ultima IV, that probably also was an inspiration to NetHack.

The Long Dark, Don’t Starve, Green Hell, The Forest: Survival games with systemic environment. I have not played these since I prefer games with kind companions in a more optimistic environment.

There are lots of other systemic games.

A whole other category are all the games that tries to innovate within the story game genre, often by providing more choice in different ways, or simulating NPCs.

But the player may take the scenario in a completely original direction that will require the game to generate new and updated locations, events and restructure the story.

This raises some technical concerns about generating locations at runtime procedurally, which usually isn't possible, assuming games where the world is static and produced offline. I guess you do not need to create things like new architecture because the story invents it, so you could rephrase that.

And it will eventually be much better than not just story-based games of today, but also better than any other form of media, since it can adapt to every single player.

That's a lot of ‘better’ which sounds generic. But i'm bad with vocabulary and can't propose a better term.
I would cut the claim it's probably better than other media, including Shakespeare books, entirely. That's not needed and goes too far, i guess.

You – Notice anything strange? Maybe her behavior?

Niellen – No, she were her happy, smilin’ self. Nothin’ different of late… She’s not run off, if that’s what you’re askin’.

At this point i start to wonder. How would a program construct an assumption of suspected, hidden argue with the husband, leading to the wife running away at will?
I mean, that's also the point where the story becomes actually interesting. But i guess you can not just tell the program ‘People lie to hide their secrets’, and it constructs such a dialogue? (well, LLMs can do it)
I would assume human authoring is needed here, probably by setting up templates about a ‘suspecting detective’. But still, adapting this to situational, procedural quests seems far fetched to me.

However, idk much about how language works, grammar etc. I have never considered this might be possible or thought about potential implementations.

I like to replace ‘quests’ with ‘threads’ btw. I never liked the concept of quests, so calling it differently already sounds promising to me.

Reading on, my dialogue doubts increase.
I think to show off your system, you would not only need a text based game,
but also included debug GUI, so the player (tester) could observe context, save state and change it, to see how the system can adapt.

I'll press thumbs. The goal is ofc exciting, and basically what everyone wants.
But it's very, very ambitious. You need to start work on a prototype. I expect lots of unexpected problems and limitations…

aigan said:
The quantum mechanics observer theory of waveform collapse is the core of what enables a systemic story game. This is where the bottom up simulation meets the top down director ai.

Yeah, makes sense.
But a problem is, even if you can make it work, that the state of everything increases in size. The more people the player meets and affects, the more memory they need to store. And you can not just make them forget ‘old’ events.
Reminds me on the Skyrim problem, where the save game became so large it did not longer fit into the memory of XBox, causing serious performance problems.
That's just one non obvious problem. AI would need a streaming system. But surely no reason to worry about this yet.

Related: Physics simulators or AI rarely have any level of detail mechanism currently. It's just on or off, but can not approximate stuff at distance for lower runtime costs.
The systems of a systemic open world game would fall into the same category. So they must be designed from ground up for a moving boundary which just turns them off beyond. It's easy to underestimate what this means, in case those systems are meant to be global.

aigan said:
You can shoot an arrow, cutting a rope that will make a chandelier drop down, breaking a barrel of oil, that will then start burning when reacting with the candles of the chandelier. The fire will then spread to a water barrel that will eventually break, spilling out the water that will douse the fire, creating a cloud of steam that will allow you to sneak past undetected.

Reminds me on physics puzzle games like The Incredible Machine. (never played Ultima)
That's kind of the stuff i think about. Mechanical stuff, ideally at a larger scale. Conveyor belts, power networks, etc.
But i can't get beyond the point of a vague desire for an idea.
Even if we construct such puzzles or potential chains of cause and effect manually, it's just not enough to give a proper mechanic for the core game play loop.
So my hope is on characters, animals, or robots. I want a good ability for the player to observe them, and manipulate their behavior indirectly. Stealth game play as currently is mostly too passive. It's ok to wait and see what happens to the guard, but only if you have already prepared some trap or distraction in ways that make you feel smart and creative.
Hiding in a blind spot until he went away is boring.

Well… systemic fun is hard even without caring about story and dialogue. ; )

@joej said:
My personal development gave me another example. I worked on a traditional particle fluid simulator. Teh goal was procedural creation, e.g. to simulate cracks propagating through a material. To provoke this effect, i have used a curvy velocity field on the floor, intended to bend the material, tearing it apart, etc. And i also gave the material itself the desire to contract or expand. It worked, cracks have formed as desired, but at one point something unexpected has happened. My block of fluid particles started to move like a snail. It looked lik some underwater animal, and it behaved like being alive.

Love these cybernetic emergent behaviors. That's what made the game of life popular.

My goal is to model human behavior based on more of what I think is natural behavior rather than traditional game AI. Many games has A* path finding where it calculates a plan every frame. That's rather far from a person that would look around and evaluate the situation after it changed. And it would not know what happens outside of its sensory or memory boundaries. Actions would more be based on habits than some optimal tactical strategy.

But this would still be merged with the top-down story director.