DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Write it like you stole it
So I was working on a game today which simulates a storyworld with multiple characters. They have agendas, interests and timetables. They intersect and affect each other. (The game’s holding page on Steam, by the way, is entitled Miss Mulligatawney’s School For Promising Girls.)
We’re using code from 2021’s Overboard!, which we’ve polished from a hacky Rube Goldberg machine mess into a pretty good system for efficiently railing, derailing and colliding motivated NPCs. But the results are, sadly, not instantaneously magical. It’s like playing the 1980s text adventure The Hobbit: a panel of text pops up to say “Gandalf wanders in, chewing his beard” until a second panel informs you that he has muttered something and gone away. Sure, it’s reassuring to see the escapement tick, but, as with all clockwork, it’s ultimately repetitive.
No matter: this mechanism only exists to give the player something to mess around with. It’s not supposed to be delightful all by itself. On top we layer interference: the dialogue choices and actions that send our mechanical people spinning off their axles, reassessing their goals and creating new plans to overcome new hurdles, causing them to reach new places at new times in new combinations (and even to form new beliefs, because we’re modelling what they think is true as well as what is true. Or are we? Er, yeah, we are).
The result of this is… well, it’s not instantly entertaining either. This feels unfair! Surely playing the maestro is a fabulous role? And, yes, to begin with, it can be very satisfying. A poke here, and Gandalf is off, riding Shadowfax to find Bilbo. Another poke and Bilbo moves too, so now Gandalf can’t find him. Just as we predicted! The game plays like a marble run: swap the pieces and the ball goes a different way. Huzzah!
But just as a marble run is entirely predictable (unless the whole tower falls over), so too the characters in this clockwork world are only ever predictable (or broken). And while there’s a comfort in tending a robot garden, there’s no drama in a thing that either works or doesn’t. It’s town planning instead of street racing: optimisation without reaction, expectation without anticipation. A player who adapts their plans to create a better outcome is debugging the story, not engaging with it.
Like an AI artist, you can only ever get less than what you put in, and whatever the result, it’s disposable
There’s simply too much control and too little risk. Like an AI artist or a Tinder addict, you can only ever get less than what you put in, and whatever the result, it’s disposable, no more precious than alternatives you’ve already discarded. Simulations, like AI generators, invite us to imagine th
