Hello, my name is Matt and I'll be your tumblr for the evening. I'm 19, Canadian, and studying cognitive science at Carleton University. Since no one outside the program knows what that means, my two core subjects are linguistics and computer science. I'm also not very good at being brief! But I try to make my walls of text somewhat friendly.
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Stumbled upon the website psychologyofgames.com, which I will hyperlink even though you could drag it into your address bar, and in addition to being worth exploring on your own I thought I’d link to a few interesting pieces. And actually, I’ve posted about them before - their Three Reasons We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles article is very good at keeping me from wasting my money!
A follow up to something I posted long, long ago is Procedural Generation and User-Generated Content II: Storylines, AI, and Emergent Gameplay. I didn’t title it, so don’t blame me. While I like the idea of generating random contexts, and I’m sure it is being done already in the games we play. The emergent storylines part, in particular, is very interesting to me from an AI perspective - but also in terms of what the player can be allowed to do in something like a browser-based game where players have to be explicitly allowed to do things. Also, basing the game on text (i.e. most of the browser-based games I’ve played, because games made in Flash are “flash games”) makes it super easy to add mechanics. You want to let the player seduce, or murder, or steal from, or lie to any NPC in the game? Easy, just give them dialogue options. No need to animate it all, or have art, or a button dedicated to doing this action, or show what happens when they succeed or fail.
All of that being said, I’m dubious about the idea of totally procedural games. It would have to be very, very sophisticated to match the kind of output talented human writers and game designers can come up with. As soon as a player realizes that they’re being sent to [kill] [X] [for Y coins] for the seventeenth time, by some randomly selected character archetype (last time it was a peasant, this time a wizard!) it will all fall apart. Not only that, it would be hard to craft deep and truly meaningful experiences - mature experiences! - without a human hand to guide the complexity.
Catherine is deep and meaningful by virtue of its subject matter, but then there are games like The Witcher (first and second) that become deep and meaningful through the complexity of the situations they present. Any given quest has various interpretations, based on who you talk to and what you know. So then any procedural generation has to make your gameplay situation, but also add a lot of context in terms of ulterior motives and hidden information unavailable to the player. And then you get into the realm of things that need so much processing power, they have to be generated during development rather than at game time, and that’s cheaper than paying humans but far less dynamic.
Game AI vs Traditional AI offers interesting insight into AI in games, and why it sometimes seems to lack in the Intelligence department. I don’t have much to add to what’s already there, but if I tell you that it’s an article about how to make players feel like they are The Batman will you be more interested?
Yeah, I thought you would be.
Trenches seems like a relatively interesting webcomic project between Penny Arcade and the guy behind PvP, at least as far as a webcomic with five comics can be “interesting.” However, what is very interesting is their Tales From The Trenches that accompany each comic - anonymous stories from people who have worked as game testers. These are fantastic tales of horror, and I highly recommend reading a few. The one you’ll see linked to if you read this the day I post it, titled “Ship It,” is particularly soul-crushing.
