The 'Spock dilemma' (aka emotions)

[dfisher]

@gau_veldt

@dfisher

This is a potentially huge area

Huge enough that I have not yet come up with a concrete set of action sets that could elicit a generalized change of perceptions in characters. Every game may want to do it slightly differently also and there’s just no way to cover all the possible ways an author would want characters to react.

One possibility is to have character values (an enumeration) and the presence of a particular value for an actor could be used in conditions for altering the actor’s regard for another. For instance:

This is off the cuff so may not be fully syntactically sound:

{…}

From the few commented parts it’s already evident there could be a number of twists in even a simple set of general values.

Interesting stuff …

It sounds like you are writing a general library for social interactions. Originally I understood you were saying the PC in your game was someone/something that could read and influence emotions telepathically. If that was the idea, then maybe that could be all the PC can do, which would not only make the implementation easier, it would focus the player on what the game is about (manipulating emotions).

I appreciate Emily Short’s comment in another thread:

@emshort

Do not build a “general” social engine. That will take forever/doesn’t work. Instead, figure out what your story is about and then tightly model a few specific forms of social interaction that are thematically and narratively relevant to that context. {…} Make those few things as mechanically robust as possible.

I agree that it would take a very long time, but I do believe it would work. I can’t prove that to someone else though.

But I totally agree with focusing on what is most appropriate for the story at hand, not only to keep the implementation manageable, but also to communicate to the player how they are meant to interact with this particular game.

That said, I think a general social engine could still work. It looks like someone has already attempted something like this for the Unity engine. From the description, it tracks relationships between NPCs (with emotions influenced by NPC personalities), though the application that calls it is responsible for triggering it when needed and acting on its responses.