Sean

Idle Thumbs 90: Passive But Deadly

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Hi Thumbs,

Your discussion of Miasmata, and your various discussions of the Far Cries, have got me rethinking an experience I recently had IRL, and about stress and frustration in games and fiction, and environments.

I was in Thailand this past November, on a vacation with two friends. We were on an island in the south Thai sea, taking a day hike. The hike started off well. The thin, steep, but gorgeous trail took us up a jungle-encrusted mountain and, in theory, down to a beach shortly after hitting a vista near the top of the mountain.

I say in theory because after hitting the "peak" we lost the trail and, being in thick jungle under heavy canopy on the east side of a mountainous island, night fell on us almost without warning. We only had my iphone for light, a compass, and an emergency communication device. We began to proceed in a chain of three effectively blind men and, after trying unsuccessfully to make a final push toward the ocean (which we could hear), and retrace our steps back to the path (which was hopelessly invisible in the darkness), we split the single granola bar I'd brought between the three of us and attempted to find high ground to use my meager emergency reception to call the Thai authorities to report ourselves as missing and describe the vicinity.

After being bounced between the police, tourist police, emergency services, and the tourism company on the crummy and sweat-soaked guidebook we had, we remained unreported and had only been given the advice to "try walking." Here I'll add that as the only member of the trio, I was advocating the opposite of walking in the dark in vertical terrain where the ground often gave way to sinkholes under our feet, because I know that in the wilderness you never risk injuring yourself even in ways that would seem minor in civilization (e.g. an ankle sprain). I said we should bed down somewhere relatively dry and wait for dawn while we were still generally near the trail we'd lost.

My companions outvoted me, and we pressed on through thorns and vines, taking perhaps a full hour each to wind and pull our way across straight distances of maybe 60 meters. This period of the trek was marked by warped senses of distance and shape provoked by the dense, dark foliage, and repeated disappointments that, whenever we were able to peer through the jungle at the ocean we were trying to reach, we were inevitably dozens of meters above water breaking on cliffs.

In the end we huddled together for five hours under a stone overhang, awaiting dawn, then walked down a small river and its various waterfalls, harassed by deep woods mosquitoes for five hours, until we happened upon a decrepit access road that got us to the beach.

My 19 hours in the jungle taught me the value a machete and the rapidity with which one can apparently get used to and desensitized to the notion that severe injury or death can easily occur if one makes a small, easy mistake.

Now: back to games. You've discussed the difference between the empowerment of the protagonist over the elements of Far Cry 3, and the realistic lack of empowerment in Miasmata. The broad idea of lack of empowerment expresses itself, in small instances, as frustration--the inability to scale a hill, the necessity to wait in hiding while a predator passes you by instead of pwning it--frustrations that games intended for a broad profit like FC3 conspicuously avoid. Yet frustration and inability clearly provide a certain type of player with intense delight; expanding this concept of frustration to literature, I also think Cloud Atlas tickles this same pleasure center when Mitchell cuts off the reader's enjoyment of a climactic moment to introduce an entirely new story.

My question is: Where does this joy in frustration arise from, given that in real life no one enjoy real, unfixable failures and frustrations? I found the real deep jungle to be--as contemporaries of the lost explorer Percy Fawcett described it to him--a green hell inimical to life. Obviously if the jungle was populated by a genuinely murderous conspiracy all the worse. Yet I'm itching to play Miasmata (can't though, have a mac).

As a side consideration: is it true that mainstream games will always trend toward empowerment while frustration will always be the territory of enthusiasts like the Idle Thumbs community? Is there an analogy to be drawn between our kind and the relation of S&M enthusiasts to the general population? What is up with we who like simulations of situations we would despair of in real life? Why should mere fictionality reverse our experience of frustration from aversion to attraction?

Keep casting,

Luke

PS: Alternative question: I tried to trim that submission up as best I could, but another shorter question occurs to me relative to your discussions of jungles; what other environment would you like to see produced in a high-fidelity, high-reality simulation? Consider keeping it limited to a feet-on-the-ground exploration. For instance, I love how Assassin's Creed 2 let me get all up on renaissance architecture, and I think the upcoming Jonathan Blow game will explore a different theory of architecture in a different way. I'd love a game that has you running a new settlement on a new planet, trying to build a subsistence settlement while also discovering the ruins of a long-gone culture. Also: why has no one made a game based on Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness? Great setting.

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The joy in the frustration comes from a ton of things, but a large part of it, I think, is that it takes place in a safe, structured space, where nothing bad is going to happen to you. Maybe S&M is similar. But there's something fundamental about humans that makes us want to be scared or in danger or challenged or hurt in contexts where this can't actually happen, maybe for the same reason kittens (and children and so on) play-fight with each other.

Also, on an unrelated note: I appreciate the effort not to spoil Miasmata, but going back to a discussion that happened a few episodes ago, Greenlight is such shit, because it spoiled the fuck out of Miasmata for me. Part of that was the developers' fault, but really, the incentive on Greenlight is to show your goodies, so they showed them, including the thing you didn't want to spoil. Lame.

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Dwarf Fortress does a bit of procedural narrative, in that the world crafts a readable history, including the items. It often comes out like gibberish "An exquisite grate covered with jeweled engravings depicting a legendary grate."

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Akrasian: I agree with much of what you say, and very interesting comparison to architecture.

I think one of the problems with procedural narrative that we haven't commented on, but that your post made me think of, is not so much person vs. computer but one author vs. multiple. That is to say, procedural narrative is not hard because a computer is doing it, but because it's trying to create a narrative that responds to the actions of chaotic players, which is bound to create incoherency. It's hard whether it's a computer or a person: in tabletop RPGs, for example, DMs running sandbox games face a similar problem. In such games, the narrative necessarily exhibits many features that would commonly be considered to be failures in computer-run systems but that in that context everyone just accepts as a fact of the game and works to overcome.

Your point about chess and anthropomorphiziation brings to mind something else I was thinking about when I wrote my original post but didn't say: why does CK2 come to my mind as narrative but, for example, Europa Universalis III doesn't, despite the two games being incredibly similar mechanically? And the reason, of course, is that EU's principle agents are nation-states, which are abstract entities we don't generally consider narrative agents (except when we do), whereas CK is about people. The difference is not in the rules but in the fictional context.

Which brings me, obliquely, to your final point:

Finally, I don’t think you need to worry about soullessness, at least, not more than with having an author. A thousand stories created by the same rules, if they’re good rules, like a thousand stories from the same head, if it’s a good head, will have a certain character to them. I think it’s a bit silly to worry that procedural narrative reduces characters to numbers, or turns a writer into ‘mere rules’. It’s like saying the universal is more meaningful if you don’t understand the rules that govern planetary movements, b/c it all seems like a beautiful mystery.

Only if you’re more in love with the feeling of mystery than the feeling of comprehending a complex, nuanced system.

I'm not in love with mystery, but I do think the notion that we can reduce human beings to mathematical systems is a dangerous one. Bear with me, this is a bit roundabout:

While obviously authored stories rely on all sorts of structures and rules and theories, those stories that are solely or largely the product of those rules (e.g. airport novels) often feel hollow and rote; we recognize them as mechanical and repetitive: everything proceeds according to plan, and we can sense it. I think the reason for this, though, is not the use of rules per se, but rather that the rules in use were created with a specific goal in mind: that is, an author has a specific story they want to tell (e.g. "I want to write a Stephen King-esque horror novel") and they work backwards from that goal. If the rules were designed to create a specific story, then that's the story that results, and none other, which while sometimes desirable, is ultimately rather boring.

When games and procedural narrative comes up, there's often a conceptualization of this as a game using these sorts of rules--systemizing the rules of plot and such, to create a proper pacing and twists and Checkov's guns and whatever. And games can succeed at that, but I think the result is mostly not very good; even when it works, you just end up with the same kind of story every time, with meaningless differences, like those bad mad lib-style plot generators you find on the Internet sometime (or tabletop procedural storygames like Apocalypse World).

In games like CK2, rather--and this goes to Badfinger's reply as well--the goal is less to work backwards from the desired story (although that is certainly still present to a significant degree) and more to create a number of low-level interconnected systems that produce results not even the developers can predict. I think this sort of narrative-out-of-simulation works better than a simulation of narrative, and I think that good authored stories work in the same way: when authors talk about characters leading them in unexpected directions, etc., this is, I think, the video game equivalent. Emergence.

This is also really interesting, I think, in light of the idea that we recognize stories as stories due to anthropomorphization. Because if we think in terms of unpredictable emergence rather than adherence to what we already know and expect, then really, we should not be thinking of CK2 as procedural narrative because it applies a fictional context of human beings to its mechanical processes, but because the mechanical processes consist of real agents (in Jesper Juul's half-real framing of games) interacting with each other in a real system that is producing real emergent results even if we don't recognize them in human terms. CK2, in that sense, isn't producing stories about fictional human beings, but rather real digital agents that we can tell stories about.

...okay, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. something something object-oriented ontology something something proceduralism something something Ian Bogost (in the shell).

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I think I've almost worked out steamfruitcake.com .

Basically it is going to be a "popularity" contest. People can submit their steam fruitcake, for this to register they need to have the fruitcake in their collection or inventory. This will will add a count of 1 to the game as a steam fruitcake. Because companies will probably game this system they can get involved. They can had out steam keys for extra points, when people claim it and register it as a fruitcake they will get even more points. For example, a company hands out a key, they will get 5 points, when the person takes the key and claims it to be a fruitcake, the game gets an extra point, if the person re-gifts it instead of putting it in his own collection, the receiver can claim an additional point. etc. The more re-gifting, the higher the fruitcake score. If the key unlocks 5 copies, you can play with 5 fruitcakes. Obviously, if people don't claim the game to be a fruitcake the game doesn't get a point.

For this to work people obviously will need to have their profile public for the time registering it. How the key distribution should work, I don't know yet, because it needs some safeguarding (e.g. only people with a steam account older than X months can claim fruitcakes).

And then somewhere around xmas the stats will be reset and idlethumbs can hand out the award of Steam Fruitcake 20XY to the game that scored the most points. This plan could give an initial boost to The Ship given the fact that IdleThumbs has 300 keys to hand out.

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There are also certainly people who DO want the harshness and loneliness of being stuck in an unfamiliar spot for real. "Unfixable failure" might be beyond the pale, but frustration certainly isn't. I don't know if you've ever seen Survivorman, but its premise is that this dude gets dropped in a location with basically only the supplies he can carry or the normal "tourist" might have in that location, and has to survive and make it to an extraction point in 7 days. The big deal of the show is that in addition to being the show's only actor, he also films the entire thing with no crew. So even though they prep and scout and all that, he's still alone with just a backpack for an entire week. Some days he goes to bed hungry because his snares and lures didn't catch anything or didn't work or broke.

I wonder similar things about people who love truly scary/frightening things. I don't really care for/about haunted houses, or thrill rides (roller coasters are not meant to "scare" but it's similar emotionally). What is it in human psychology that causes people to actively seek out things our animal brains would want us to avoid desperately? I don't like being frightened of things, that's why they're scary.

Final thoughts on CK2- I appreciate your thoughts on it and attempts to reconcile it within the framework of that procedural narrative email, but we have to be honest with ourselves (especially me, since I'm arguing AGAINST it but with a stacked deck in my favor) that CK2 is not even implicitly trying to be the thing the email was about. Crusader Kings is NOT about crafting a story with a plot. The digital actors aren't all participating in service of the story and definitely not all in the service of the player. In my crude imagination procedural narrative storytelling is more like choosing two things, and having that generate a page of text for a book, then when you finish reading that you pick 2-3 more things and it generates the next page. That would be, to quote various game journalists, "Hell of janky".

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Dwarf Fortress does a bit of procedural narrative, in that the world crafts a readable history, including the items. It often comes out like gibberish "An exquisite grate covered with jeweled engravings depicting a legendary grate."

Haha. And that's often the case when people try to build programs that build stories -- they get final products that are syntactically correct but devoid of meaningfulness and/or not worth caring about, but are still at least funny. =P

I have a pet theory for how to avoid some of that disbelief-inspiring gibberish. I think the problem is that items in game "worlds" lack most of the connotations they have in real life. From your example -- in real life we know that a grate is an item that has a humdrum functionality and some moderate decorative potential. We know that it isn't the sort of item that becomes Legendary without prompting a great many questions. =P But in a game (even Dwarf Fortress) I'm guessing that to most of the game systems, it appears to be just another collection of Value Units, Burden Units, and a description that's just for the player's benefit.

To use another (and hackneyed) example, a doll half-buried in the smoking rubble of an abandoned house could be evocative -- but an NPC couldn't procedurally find it evocative because it doesn't know that dolls represent childhood, friendship, playtime, security, responsibility, etc. On a basic level, it's not known within the program that "Dolls are happy" or that "Rubble is sad".

I (uncertainly) think that it might be interesting to try and make some semi-procedural stories (or at least some procedural NPC reactions to manually authored world events/situations) but only if the designers are willing to pour some Scribblenauts-esque thoroughness into imbuing all the Nouns in their game world with some abstracted and simplified "meaningful connotation" descriptors. Human experience and understanding needs to enter the picture somewhere, and if that's not an author piecing together story elements based on all his unspoken knowledge of how players will respond to those elements, then maybe it can be an army of interns mapping a giant list of game items to a small library of Feelings. :P All for some unspecified Future Robot Shakespeare to make use of...

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The joy in the frustration comes from a ton of things, but a large part of it, I think, is that it takes place in a safe, structured space, where nothing bad is going to happen to you. Maybe S&M is similar. But there's something fundamental about humans that makes us want to be scared or in danger or challenged or hurt in contexts where this can't actually happen, maybe for the same reason kittens (and children and so on) play-fight with each other.

Also, on an unrelated note: I appreciate the effort not to spoil Miasmata, but going back to a discussion that happened a few episodes ago, Greenlight is such shit, because it spoiled the fuck out of Miasmata for me. Part of that was the developers' fault, but really, the incentive on Greenlight is to show your goodies, so they showed them, including the thing you didn't want to spoil. Lame.

I do agree that the safety, the fact that the threat of harm is simulated, is the key separation/fictional aspect. What I've been fixated on is the fact that that separation seems not just to alleviate but to in fact reverse our natural inclination not to be frustrated or limited. Play fighting is a good comparison to bring up, but I'd suggest that it also fulfills the competitive urge that most people have to greater and lesser extents regardless of context. There are even plentiful accounts of people enjoying combat even when it is not for play; e.g. Scandinavian berserkers, let alone thrill seekers in the contemporary armed forces. Less common, however, are people who enjoy being generally persecuted by the environment (a la Miasmata) or genuinely tortured (a la S&M).

The above suggestion of Survivorman is certainly apt, too. To that the best I can say that--on a way more minor scale than Les, the Survivorman--I've by now found myself in both situations. I've gone on weeks-long backpacking trips wherein I'm prepared to go from point A to a distant point B and hit some hikeable mountains on the way, and I've been caught completely unprepared and been amazed by how numbing it feels to have such little control of my wellbeing. I personally find that overcoming challenges along the lines of the Survivorman idea--I reiterate, to a way, way less intensive degree in my case--is thrilling and brings lasting satisfaction. Being lost with no safety valve and very little assurance that what I was doing was a good or bad call was only crappy, and only brought relief when I got out rather than a sense of satisfaction.

BUT I'm thinking now that maybe I'm drawing a false distinction between games prominently employing frustration and simply good challenges, like a puzzle or FTL. I'll have to think on it for a bit.

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For the steam codes for The Ship you could organize some kind of thing where you give the 300 invites to dudes in the steam group who you trust will give their five invites to other dudes in the steam group.

Seeing as the group has 1,233 at the moment, everyone in the group gets the ship. PACKAGE DEAL, BRO.

P.S. I've never had fruitcake

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I think I've almost worked out steamfruitcake.com .

Basically it is going to be a "popularity" contest. People can submit their steam fruitcake, for this to register they need to have the fruitcake in their collection or inventory. This will will add a count of 1 to the game as a steam fruitcake. Because companies will probably game this system they can get involved. They can had out steam keys for extra points, when people claim it and register it as a fruitcake they will get even more points. For example, a company hands out a key, they will get 5 points, when the person takes the key and claims it to be a fruitcake, the game gets an extra point, if the person re-gifts it instead of putting it in his own collection, the receiver can claim an additional point. etc. The more re-gifting, the higher the fruitcake score. If the key unlocks 5 copies, you can play with 5 fruitcakes. Obviously, if people don't claim the game to be a fruitcake the game doesn't get a point.

For this to work people obviously will need to have their profile public for the time registering it. How the key distribution should work, I don't know yet, because it needs some safeguarding (e.g. only people with a steam account older than X months can claim fruitcakes).

And then somewhere around xmas the stats will be reset and idlethumbs can hand out the award of Steam Fruitcake 20XY to the game that scored the most points. This plan could give an initial boost to The Ship given the fact that IdleThumbs has 300 keys to hand out.

This is brilliant.

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You're right (Akrasian, not Mington) but at the same time, just because it's not "procedural generation" as you've defined it that's the problem, maybe you would agree that "procedural generation" as it refers to computer programs trying to craft a narrative is indeed the problem when it comes to, for i n stance, human interactions, right? Sure, it's not the fact that it's procedural that trips us up, and really it's a fact about the nature of the narrative more than anything, but computers are bad at something humans are good at and a good way to describe this distinction when it comes to video games is procedural generation vs. a crafted narrative, because we're talking about what the game is doing. Just because you can say "oh, but the humans are also procedurally generating the story" doesn't mean that procedural generation isn't the issue, because it is: games can't do it (for certain kinds of narratives).

It's like saying that paper Pong is no different from normal Pong because they're doing the same thing (moving the ball and paddles and so on), just in one case the human does it manually by turning the pages and in the other case the computer does it. In one sense you're right, but the point of paper Pong is that humans are very bad at moving paddles and balls at a speed that is fast and accurate enough to make a fun game, whereas computers are really good at that, so when we play Pong we want to play it on a computer. And computers are bad at crafting human narratives with dialog and interactions and stuff, so when we do that we want the human to have done it.

I find "a computer doing it" an odd way to put it, since someone still has to write the software with intentions about how the social interactions will go down - the author of the software puts the same kind of thought into how they'd like their stories to go down as the author of a book. But I totally agree with your point it's horses for courses - procedural generation vs hand authorship have different advantages and disadvantages, you'd use them in different situations.

Akrasian: I agree with much of what you say, and very interesting comparison to architecture.

I think one of the problems with procedural narrative that we haven't commented on, but that your post made me think of, is not so much person vs. computer but one author vs. multiple. That is to say, procedural narrative is not hard because a computer is doing it, but because it's trying to create a narrative that responds to the actions of chaotic players, which is bound to create incoherency. It's hard whether it's a computer or a person: in tabletop RPGs, for example, DMs running sandbox games face a similar problem. In such games, the narrative necessarily exhibits many features that would commonly be considered to be failures in computer-run systems but that in that context everyone just accepts as a fact of the game and works to overcome.

While obviously authored stories rely on all sorts of structures and rules and theories, those stories that are solely or largely the product of those rules (e.g. airport novels) often feel hollow and rote; we recognize them as mechanical and repetitive: everything proceeds according to plan, and we can sense it. I think the reason for this, though, is not the use of rules per se, but rather that the rules in use were created with a specific goal in mind: that is, an author has a specific story they want to tell (e.g. "I want to write a Stephen King-esque horror novel") and they work backwards from that goal. If the rules were designed to create a specific story, then that's the story that results, and none other, which while sometimes desirable, is ultimately rather boring.

When games and procedural narrative comes up, there's often a conceptualization of this as a game using these sorts of rules--systemizing the rules of plot and such, to create a proper pacing and twists and Checkov's guns and whatever. And games can succeed at that, but I think the result is mostly not very good; even when it works, you just end up with the same kind of story every time, with meaningless differences, like those bad mad lib-style plot generators you find on the Internet sometime (or tabletop procedural storygames like Apocalypse World).

In games like CK2, rather--and this goes to Badfinger's reply as well--the goal is less to work backwards from the desired story (although that is certainly still present to a significant degree) and more to create a number of low-level interconnected systems that produce results not even the developers can predict. I think this sort of narrative-out-of-simulation works better than a simulation of narrative, and I think that good authored stories work in the same way: when authors talk about characters leading them in unexpected directions, etc., this is, I think, the video game equivalent. Emergence.

This is also really interesting, I think, in light of the idea that we recognize stories as stories due to anthropomorphization. Because if we think in terms of unpredictable emergence rather than adherence to what we already know and expect, then really, we should not be thinking of CK2 as procedural narrative because it applies a fictional context of human beings to its mechanical processes, but because the mechanical processes consist of real agents (in Jesper Juul's half-real framing of games) interacting with each other in a real system that is producing real emergent results even if we don't recognize them in human terms. CK2, in that sense, isn't producing stories about fictional human beings, but rather real digital agents that we can tell stories about.

...okay, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. something something object-oriented ontology something something proceduralism something something Ian Bogost (in the shell).

I don't think we're really arguing. I think my idea of procedural narrative can avoid all the pitfalls you outline, though they're possible outcomes. Emergence is exactly what I'm talking about, exactly what I'm hoping for. Emergence is a property of rule-based systems.

Yes, very simple rule systems produce unsatisfactory results. But even "don't plot things like an airport novel" is a rule, it's a rule that a lot of great authors have. Every great author has millions of opinions about different things about good prose and character and plot, and they emerge across their body-of-work as their 'style', the unique 'character' of their works. Every author has concerns, preferences, instincts, some kind of internal logic driving their decision making. That's what I mean. Get a program with as complex a set of "low-level interconnected systems" (ie rules) as Hermann Hesse, and you'll get a story worth playing.

I sense a little bit that you think that emergence is unpredictable or the outcomes in CK2 are unique. True, Emergence is often unpredictable to us, but every outcome is already present in the possibilities of the system at the outset. Emergent systems can't generate anything that wasn't latently present in the "low-level interconnected systems" to start with. An author can only write a book based on what her brain is capable of.

Finally, "the notion that we can reduce human beings to mathematical systems is a dangerous one" only if you think a mathematical system is a demotion! There's nothing wrong with being a system. We already are. All life is the emergent outcome from the low-level rules of DNA. It's only a problem if you believe that being a system somehow precludes one from having humanity, complexity, nuance, personality etc, which we have proof that it doesn't.

TL;DR: If your problem with simple systems is they're too simplistic, maybe try complex systems instead?

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Soccer and other good multiplayer games are a good example of how games generate stories procedurally -- that is, their systems are balanced in such a way that the forces in play often create events that we instinctively interpret as plots and stories. CK2 does this as well, as does DOTA etc. The weakest parts of CK2's story generation are the actually authored bits. The game creates events that suggest stories to us, but all meaning they have obviously comes from us. Games can make stories as long as you leave the meaning-making to humans. I also wonder if you could make a system like CK2 that didn't end up Macchiavellian...

Hah, all the articles and books I read shy away from the computational model of the human mind. Could be just my field. AFAIK even Chomsky backed away from it and he's the most culpable for bringing it to linguistics. I'll do my very best not to comment on it further :P

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I find "a computer doing it" an odd way to put it, since someone still has to write the software with intentions about how the social interactions will go down - the author of the software puts the same kind of thought into how they'd like their stories to go down as the author of a book. But I totally agree with your point it's horses for courses - procedural generation vs hand authorship have different advantages and disadvantages, you'd use them in different situations.

The computer isn't doing everything, obviously, but it's crafting the specific narrative the player experiences, and when those narratives involve certain things, computers are really bad at it. Now, WHY are they bad at it? Well, I guess because we're bad at programming them to do it. So you can always back the analysis up a step. But the point is that when you read a narrative, if a computer spit it out right then and there, it's going to have some weaknesses when it comes to, say, dialog, compared to a narrative a human spit out the old fashioned way.

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Hah, all the articles and books I read shy away from the computational model of the human mind. Could be just my field. AFAIK even Chomsky backed away from it and he's the most culpable for bringing it to linguistics. I'll do my very best not to comment on it further :P

Yeah I'm a bit iffy about it myself, but I think my argument works even without suggesting that the whole mind is a computer. It only requires that a sufficiently complex system can fake it, in one area, well enough for the purposes, on account of the resemblance between creative processes and emergent systems. (which I think is reasonable. Creative processes and emergent systems do seem to have a lot in common.)

It doesn't have to be perfectly like the mind, only seem like the mind seems, and only enough to make a satisfying game.

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I think this "The Ship" thing must only travel in certain circles... I don't know anyone who has even heard of The Ship, and I'm sure there are other games I've come across that are far more fruitcakey than it (at least, amongst the folk I game with).

That reminds me... I still have two copies of Torchlight left over (fruitcake leftovers?) from when I bought the four pack of Torchlight 2. There's no significance there, I just wanted to somehow use the "fruitcake leftover" gag without it looking obvious.

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Started to work on my steamfruitcake.com idea today. Technically it is possible, I still don't have an idea how to handle the keys companies can provide, but that isn't a biggy.

Anyway, started to write some PHP code again, and decided to use FuelPHP ... my god.... I forgot how terrible PHP was. And FuelPHP isn't making it less of a POS... spend an hour or two track in it. Also the fact that steamcommunity is mostly returning 502s isn't helping.

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I think as far as procedural story generation, it makes sense if you're not trying to make an exclusively narrative game. I mean, even in improv or role-playing games that are about telling a story, part of the fun is pitting two wits against each other trying to be the most clever, which is something that's mighty difficult to code. Ostensibly, improv games, even if they have win conditions, can't actually be lost unless someone decides to quit: all the participants have to support the others and work each other towards the end-game. Same with games like Microscope RPG.

So one problem I figure games like Facade have is that they're strictly trying to be something new from the ground up, instead of working off of a formula that exists and has been proven. There's no grounding.

If you want a procedural story, why not base it on emergent gameplay? I really liked how it was handled in Mount & Blade. It was rudimentary, but for the most part the relationships were obvious and developed mostly in the choices you make in-game (whom you side with, whom you aid in battle, what missions you do, where you start your business, &c.), rather than as part of the dialogue trees. Its not much, but there's an obvious story going on when a lord won't give you the time of day, until he hears you helped his son fight off some bandits, and he decides to offer you a quest. If you were to build a few more nuanced relationships into that system, you'd have a full-fledged procedural storytelling engine.

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I looked up "Secret of the Magic Crystals" to see what it was.

Turns out I bought it for a friend as a gag gift about 2-3 years ago.

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On the subject of fruitcake, it doesn't look like there's any staff overlap at all between Overlight (The Ship) and Blazing Griffin (The Ship Authorized Spiritual Sequel) though my guess is that both being based in Edinburgh helped with the transfer of rights. Best to Blazing squad all the same, as I'm sure they refer to themselves, in getting New Ship successfully launched. Pharris is probably in a better position to comment.

I'd like to nominate Zeno Clash as the Orange or Toothbrush of Steam for 2012/13.

With regards to The Locked Room of Japantown and talk of video game survivalism, do other Thumbs think there would be a market for a combination of the two? A voluntary kidnapping business that leads participants to believe that their immediate and inevitable future consists of having to dig and then lie in a shallow grave far from anyone that cares, only to be dropped off home at 2am with a commemorative certificate and a warm cup of tea. Essentially,

as an Action Weekend for the adrenaline deprived city-dweller, only without the multiple deaths, while retaining the same sense of confusion (and mild satisaction) at having paid for the experience.

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I just got an email from Paradox saying that they've given away half a million steam keys for Europa Universalis III: Chronicles.

I could see this becoming a sort of fruitcake. =)

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Crap.. I should hurry up and finish steamfruitcake.com then. I'm a bit burned out on programming for today.

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Progressed quite a bit on steamfruitcake.com yesterday. The steam profile scraping works, now I only need to implement the part to register a game as a fruitcacke and show the overview. After that the site design stuff needs to be made. Could use a bit of help for that to make something awesome looking.

I switched to use Eclipse PDT for editing my PHP files, much better than using a normal text editor. I've become lazy with formatting my code, Ctrl+Shift+F to auto format made things to easy for me ;)

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I switched to use Eclipse PDT for editing my PHP files, much better than using a normal text editor. I've become lazy with formatting my code, Ctrl+Shift+F to auto format made things to easy for me ;)

Eclipse :(

NetBeans is a lighter-weight and cleaner PHP IDE, if you're looking for a full IDE (and still free). Though lately I've switched to just Sublime Text 2 with a bunch of extra packages installed.

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I'm not planning to return to extensive PHP development, so Eclipse PDT will do. Especially since I've been using Eclipse for Java development for the past 7 (or so) years.

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