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Sex in Games: The Future

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Posts

  • LamoidLamoid Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Hahahahahhahahahaha

    You guys. He said sex.

    Lamoid on
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  • ViscountalphaViscountalpha The pen is mightier than the sword http://youtu.be/G_sBOsh-vyIRegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Rohan wrote: »
    Facade is awesome stuff. Must go and download it now.

    Facade doesn't look interesting unless there was actual sex eventually involved.

    Viscountalpha on
  • wyrlsswyrlss Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    darkmayo wrote: »
    wyrlss wrote: »
    Clevinger wrote: »
    I've always wondered about how far people should take things in the name of freedom of choice in a game. I'm rather ambivalent about the option of brutally and graphically murdering kids in games, but if you're so for it why should it stop there?

    Should you also be able to graphically rape a woman in the game world? My evil character might do something like that, so I should have the choice, right?

    It's hard to get a decent fucking animation.

    I doubt any game developer, aside from the weird Hentai ones, would deliberate allow rape into there game, as well the exploding children was more of a trick than it was intended (wasnt it?) since you couldnt target kids at all. A game with rape, and child killing would likely be slapped with an AO rating and lose distrobution at almost all retailers.

    Not a good business decision.

    As for how far they should take it, if you arent worrying about the almighty dollar. It would be interesting to see a game that allowed so much freedom, especially a graphically superior one. Would you feel sick after doing it, would you be able to do it. Oh sure your "character" might be able to do it but even its still you pulling the strings. Heck I have a hard time being a dick in games, although clocking that guy in Mass Effect was strangely satisfying.

    I just wanted to toss in a sidetrack from the Fallout 3 thread, which made me think long and hard about the contrast between video games and reality, and what was acceptable to me in a game. I liked the way that Fable handled it, mostly because I don't take sex as serious business. The most giggles in my house come from sex. Sometimes we end up not having sex because we're laughing too hard. And then it's not sex, it's "intimacy" and that's a whole other thing, and very fun, and usually done naked. But a lot of time, nudity isn't sexual.
    So I might have gone completely off track here. I just wanted to point out the Fallout 3 rape question. And I guess append the statement that a shower scene isn't necessarily sexy, which is obvious if you think about how you shower normally.

    wyrlss on
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  • apotheosapotheos Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited May 2008
    Holy shit is the torrent for Facade slow.

    apotheos on


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  • ElementalorElementalor Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    wyrlss wrote: »
    darkmayo wrote: »
    wyrlss wrote: »
    Clevinger wrote: »
    I've always wondered about how far people should take things in the name of freedom of choice in a game. I'm rather ambivalent about the option of brutally and graphically murdering kids in games, but if you're so for it why should it stop there?

    Should you also be able to graphically rape a woman in the game world? My evil character might do something like that, so I should have the choice, right?

    It's hard to get a decent fucking animation.

    I doubt any game developer, aside from the weird Hentai ones, would deliberate allow rape into there game, as well the exploding children was more of a trick than it was intended (wasnt it?) since you couldnt target kids at all. A game with rape, and child killing would likely be slapped with an AO rating and lose distrobution at almost all retailers.

    Not a good business decision.

    As for how far they should take it, if you arent worrying about the almighty dollar. It would be interesting to see a game that allowed so much freedom, especially a graphically superior one. Would you feel sick after doing it, would you be able to do it. Oh sure your "character" might be able to do it but even its still you pulling the strings. Heck I have a hard time being a dick in games, although clocking that guy in Mass Effect was strangely satisfying.

    I just wanted to toss in a sidetrack from the Fallout 3 thread, which made me think long and hard about the contrast between video games and reality, and what was acceptable to me in a game. I liked the way that Fable handled it, mostly because I don't take sex as serious business. The most giggles in my house come from sex. Sometimes we end up not having sex because we're laughing too hard. And then it's not sex, it's "intimacy" and that's a whole other thing, and very fun, and usually done naked. But a lot of time, nudity isn't sexual.
    So I might have gone completely off track here. I just wanted to point out the Fallout 3 rape question. And I guess append the statement that a shower scene isn't necessarily sexy, which is obvious if you think about how you shower normally.

    Chun Li disagrees.

    *Cartoon Titties Removed by Apotheos*

    Elementalor on
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  • ZombiemamboZombiemambo Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Xagarath wrote: »
    Games are not a young medium
    Sorry, but they are compared to film, comics or television. Very young.
    I'm not even mentioning any others.

    Also: Facade is pretty interesting, but be prepared for bugs.

    Yeah, this one stood out to me. Video games take leaps and bounds every few years. It's been about 40 or so since the very first, and that's basically yesterday when compared to other mediums.

    Zombiemambo on
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  • Saul MaloneSaul Malone Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I forgot to mention this little gem:
    Hellmoo
    Its a MUD that is based on the most base. For example: You can level up in necrophilia.

    Saul Malone on
  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Can I ask why bioware never try to do full interaction, but always rely on a cutscene-dialogue mechanic. The dialogue wheel is a wonderful step in the right direction, and I understand that their games are few, and thus significant changes are many game "steps" away, but I'd love to see a bioware take on a half life or gta style environment or game world, but with their classic storytelling flair. See how they'd meld the two very different and interesting situations, and try to acheive a middle ground.

    This is an AWESOME thing to bring up. I had a similar discussion with one of the Storytelling In Games panelists at PAX 07, and my points went something like:

    1) traditional game storytelling seems to be analogous to a choose-your-own-adventure book, where each page written equals some content and time and money. You can make a really branchy story where a 300 page book nets about 15 pages of gameplay with each attempt, and its replayability is legendary among games. Or make a really linear story where a 100 page book nets about 40 pages of gameplay.

    2) game development is new product development and profits need to be made, and it can be hard to justify putting money in things that half your player base (and 90% of your reviewers) will never see

    3) my proposed wacky-idea-solution-that-will-never-work involves open world gameplay (think GTA 3) which tracks virtual relationships, emotions, feelings, etc. Each NPC, even the disposable ones, is a brilliantly-crafted form of a-life, using awesome technology that doesn't yet exist. What could we do if we had that? I imagine true boundless choice for characters. Do something crazy and unexpected, and realistic (if predictable) reactions follow.

    4) players will always figure out the mechanisms behind any game AI, and will have fun gaming the system to achieve the results they want. They will eventually find things predictable and will tire of this world populated with predictable cookie-cutter social stereotypes, with hundreds of jilted lovers and suicidal overworked fathers and vengeful children. So one could further refine this 'society simulator' by building a huge set of well-developed character templates (with dialog and plot info carefully designed by humans, to match a large variety of random NPC's as needed) and a set of plot templates. Constantly watch the game world and the player's interactions with NPC's. Does an NPC or a set of NPC's match a "drama template" you have scripted events and dialog trees built for? Substitute them in! Suddenly that random NPC the player has been wooing, to see how it'll react, begins to show signs of life and humanity.

    I know I didn't explain #4 quite so well standing outside the doors of the satellite theater I was assigned to, but this particular game developer seemed interested enough to give me his business card and want to talk more about it. (In a brilliant show of "wow I fail at networking" I then proceeded to never ever send him any email. Crap.)

    What do you think? More like that?

    I also have my own "games are this" opinion, and I don't want to detract from anybody else's, but: games are learning opportunities, little black boxes we can run experiments in, we can try things and fail in, and learn from. Sex as the physical act of mating certainly contains opportunities for success and failure, but debatably not enough to make a game out of. Sex as a collection of interpersonal dramas building toward emotional and then physical intimacy includes LOTS of ways to go wrong. (For a crude example, see Japanese dating sims, both H and non-H. BAD END indeed.) Physical intimacy includes hugging and holding hands and sobbing on shoulders as much as it includes sexual intercourse.

    Games can also just be games with thematically-related plots and story lines which are revealed slowly as you complete the game. Advancing the plot is a reward for playing more of the game successfully. Sex can work there just as well as any other reward can -- but I'm not sure that's an interesting (art-advancing) discussion. So you use your paddle to break this wall of bricks, and underneath is a nudie picture. Yay. Or you complete the next part of the game and the next cutscene includes a gratuitous sex scene. Yay. Or the character you've grown to love could live or die based on your actions, so you next see cutscene A or cutscene B. I just feel there's more to discuss than this kind of scripted sexual drama.

    mspencer on
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  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Sorry for adding even more bricks to my wall of text, but I just had a thought:

    Much of a game story author's challenge, when building a character to represent the player, is obviously in figuring out what the player wants their character to do next. How receptive do you think people would be to just cheating, breaking the fourth wall and asking the player some questions?

    How to ask these questions is still a mystery, and I'm a poor champion for this idea because I have no idea how to make it work. But suppose periodically, like a GM leading a bunch of tabletop game players, the game were to just ask the player how he/she felt about recent developments? Is the player developing a romantic interest in so-and-so, or not? Annoyed? Frustrated? Filled with murderous rage? This is not necessarily to give the player exactly what he/she is craving, but more information is certainly helpful.

    If a game were to do this, and actually had the rich story framework and thousands of hours of spoken dialog to back it up, do you think players would tolerate it?

    Think back to, what was it, Daggerfall? Morrowwind? One of those games, if I remember, had you answer a series of questions for character creation. Then in Oblivion they stopped doing that and tried to learn from observation, with debatable success. So what if a game did that answering-questions thing, but periodically throughout the plot?

    mspencer on
    MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
    XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
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  • LindenLinden Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    mspencer wrote: »
    4) players will always figure out the mechanisms behind any game AI, and will have fun gaming the system to achieve the results they want. They will eventually find things predictable and will tire of this world populated with predictable cookie-cutter social stereotypes, with hundreds of jilted lovers and suicidal overworked fathers and vengeful children. So one could further refine this 'society simulator' by building a huge set of well-developed character templates (with dialog and plot info carefully designed by humans, to match a large variety of random NPC's as needed) and a set of plot templates. Constantly watch the game world and the player's interactions with NPC's. Does an NPC or a set of NPC's match a "drama template" you have scripted events and dialog trees built for? Substitute them in! Suddenly that random NPC the player has been wooing, to see how it'll react, begins to show signs of life and humanity.

    This would be the best way to scare walkthrough writers ever. Done well, I'd actually love to see this in a game. Say... a single city, filled with cutouts, or colour-drained effigies. As the game progresses, those you interact more, or around, start to take on life and personality, and go about their little lives, triggering other characters to develop. Run quests from those you interact with, and have their destinations randomly selected and characters inflated appropriately. Off the top of my head, obviously.

    Linden on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    There needs to be a push though. Each of the templates needs some sort of conflict, be it personal, physical, emotional, or plot based. It doesn't have to be the same conflict every time, in fact that would be terrible, but a conflict of some sort needs to be included in each template, or the game has heaps of variety but ultimately lacks an indefinable substance.
    The trick is to have so many that:
    1). People who don't like a particular conflict don't need to do or interact with that particular template. So they can ignore that part of the game, but still have heaps and heaps to do.
    2). Any reward is tied directly into the type of conflict. Don't, for example, put a tangible weapon based reward in with a highly dramatic/emotional conflict, or people feel they must complete it and will get irritated if they dislike that conflict subtype. A dramatic/emotional conflict needs a dramatic/emotional resolution/reward.
    3). Market the game in a manner that avoids the backlash that result from smallminded bigmouthed idiot complaining that the game is full of "stupid" emotional conflicts if they don't like that sort of thing, or "ridiculous" plot contrivations if they don't like the driven plot templates. I have no idea how to do this, I'm not well versed in public relations.
    4). Have a thick skin, because a game that tries to do a lot of things and offer a large variety of different experiences is going to have everybody hate some aspect of it and love others. This effect is going to be pronounced because of the conscious attempt to include different conflicts that would appeal to a broad range of people. Most people would only play and enjoy probably three quarters of the template pathways, just because some option will likely disagree with them. And because people aren't naturally logical, a significant fraction of the playerbase will consider this a negative feature.

    Morninglord on
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  • apotheosapotheos Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited May 2008
    Templates have a tendency to feel like templates. I don't know how enjoyable that system would really turn out to be.

    apotheos on


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  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I may have picked a poor choice of words then:

    I'm picturing a set of high-level, mid-level, and low-level "planned branching script" sets which would be dynamically matched to sets of NPC and player interactions as appropriate.

    Low-level script sets control an individual character, and there would need to be MANY of these. A character deviates from their random nameless NPC action sets and is fixed to a specific character type, with voices and attitudes and biases designed by a human. By themselves these are quirky and predicatable -- without a plot and story to control them, they are just unique (legendary, if you will) random NPC's.

    Mid-level scripts control a small group of 2 to, say, 20 NPC's with roles and relationships that match. Say one such scenario template is a love triangle which requires two female NPC's and one male. This particular template must also be built by a human writer, and describes (in a high level) the set of realistic human dramas that can branch from an apparently love triangle. Without this template applied, the NPC characters are free to interact with each other in any (seemingly random) way they want. With this template, the NPC characters must conform to a set of interesting drama "subplots" as chosen by a human writer.

    High-level scripts control entire neighborhoods, communities, societies, etc, and essentially act as city planners and organism-lifetime-scale action scripts. Families and costs of living and unemployment rates and high-rent/low-rent parts of town and everything else is controlled by this simcity-like algorithm. This part is what decides that the person you met in a bar that lives in a certain part of the city might be more likely to have certain problems in their family, so maybe that person's father is more likely to suddenly lose his job.

    This whole endeavor still requires an EPIC quantity of content, but after playing GTA IV I'm no-longer convinced that part's impossible.

    Think of this like a D&D module. The module describes specific noteworthy NPC's but leaves you free to flesh out the rest of the world. The module also describes the general character of the plot your party is going to experience, but still leaves the DM able to improvise and make substitutions and adapt the adventure to fit player actions. These scripts are just lots and lots of modules to play. The DM's ability to adapt and substitute is instead a huge a-life experiment of a city that tries to react in realistic (albeit formulaic) ways to unpredictable player actions.

    So apotheos you're absolutely right, the game is still powered by human-generated content, and if insufficient money is spent on development then the player will burn through that content quickly and the game will get boring. My naive answer is "well just make tons of content and it'll never get old." The big difference, in my opinion, is that the traditional "humans build the whole branching storyline" approach requires paid humans handle routine interactions that a computer could simulate well enough. This approach frees humans up to build only the rich and dramatic parts of the story, and lets the simulation systems handle routine stuff.

    (That is, make your paid humans only write things like D&D modules, leaving everything else open for the computer to improvise, and stop writing EVERYTHING as a huge event and conversation tree.)

    mspencer on
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  • takyristakyris Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Templates would require either no VO (which isn't gonna happen in a story-driven game anytime soon) or really good computer-generated VO. We're experimenting with the latter in our current title, but not for the final game. We're slapping the best text-to-speech software we can into place so that we get to see exactly how long our written lines are before we spend money on an actor's VO session. Nothing hits home the too-long-ness of a line like having to sit there and listen to Dr. Sbaitso tell you about his lost magical acorn while you frantically hit "skip" and then remember that skipping lines hasn't been implemented yet.

    takyris on
  • apotheosapotheos Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited May 2008
    No. Templates was a fine word.

    I just think that creating content, and then allowing it to move from one NPC to another NPC, well, that doesn't really increase the richness of the game world very much. It would be kind of interesting, but I think the major impact would be to increase the cost of content.

    Also, character arcs for NPC's would be really, really hard to make work well with this system

    apotheos on


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  • SakeidoSakeido Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Dagrabbit wrote: »
    Regarding Mass Effect, my wife (doesn't play games) would occasionally wander by while I was having dialogue with Liara and laugh at how cheesey it all was. When she heard Liara describe her species' reproductive habits, she thought it was only something a lonely guy in a basement would think up. It's also not deep. I stumbled across it just because I made a habit of being nice to everyone and exploring all dialogue options because I got XP for them. There's even a clear point where they say, "Would you like to bone me?" When Mass Effect is an example of sex in a video game done right, that just exposes the immaturity of videogames.

    Basically agree completely, here. I found Mass Effect depressingly juvenile, as much as I loved what they were trying to do with it.

    Me too. The further into it I got, the more ridiculous it started to feel. Ashley's played out way better for me. The Bioware employee explained it pretty well - Liara had to be a love interest and the "other" and explain her people, but they were so detrimental to each other I would have preferred she is the "other" for the first game, and then the love interest in the second.

    My personal favorite gaming relationship - Balthier and Fran. They love each other fiercely I'm sure, but they barely ever touch each other for the entirety of the game. Its right up there with Shadow of the Colossus, as far as making you believe the relationship. Lots of the best movies never actually show their stars getting it on; you might get a kiss, or maybe not (Iron Man). Games need to grow up and make the decision to not go all the way for me to take them seriously.

    edit: and then in the movies, when they do go all the way, its either exploitation or its a springboard for further dramatic development (in the way of pillow talk). In Mass Effect, you basically just high fived yourself, but considering how contrived the relationship was in the first place, I don't think it could have gone any other way. They need to be willing to put relationships on the slow boil - especially episodic or epic series, like Half Life (which does this very well). Considering the vast majority of gaming is serialized now, why not let things develop over the course of the sequels? Make it more difficult to "game" the relationship - in Mass Effect, it was pretty obvious if you asked Liara lots of questions and answered her nicely, you were in. It just doesn't work like that. Games need to be willing to acknowledge that some girls just won't like you, and then not just draw that distinction between the party and NPCs or other arbitrary lines.
    Like why couldn't I hit on the good doctor in Mass Effect? I was interested in her character. She could have been a romantic interest in her own way. Or not - why not give me the options to hit on her and then shoot me down in a smoking ruin? I understand resources are limited, but I'm just saying - games generally stop short on relationships right now.

    Sakeido on
  • TothToth Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I agree that Mass Effect is not a good example of a game with "sex done right", but I believe that was because of poor writing. The whole romance angle of Mass Effect was relatively boring, with a high five for yourself as mentioned when you have sex. I actually watched my wife play a girl character, and it just felt there was absolutely nothing believable/interesting about the love interest.

    However, I do not agree that excluding intimacy between characters is always better. That simplifies love stories way too much. A good example that you can compare to Mass Effect, is Baldur's Gate 2. I mean the relationship with Viconia's character was pretty original and interesting. Sure it was all word/voice based, and sure there was a bit of a high five moment when you get into the sack with a highly sexed dark elf woman. However, the way it was written it was actually extremely important that the intimacy take place, because it was supposed to show you how fucked up her character was, yet that she had the ability to get beyond her ugly/vile past and understand that love is more than just physical pleasure.

    I mean in the end it was a bit corny, but still a very viable love story.

    Toth on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    apotheos wrote: »
    No. Templates was a fine word.

    I just think that creating content, and then allowing it to move from one NPC to another NPC, well, that doesn't really increase the richness of the game world very much. It would be kind of interesting, but I think the major impact would be to increase the cost of content.

    Also, character arcs for NPC's would be really, really hard to make work well with this system

    As long as there are sufficiently varied but internally consistent conflicts added to each template, I think it would be believable. Just don't tie silly conflicts to irrelevant templates.

    Morninglord on
    (PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
  • SakeidoSakeido Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Toth wrote: »
    I agree that Mass Effect is not a good example of a game with "sex done right", but I believe that was because of poor writing. The whole romance angle of Mass Effect was relatively boring, with a high five for yourself as mentioned when you have sex. I actually watched my wife play a girl character, and it just felt there was absolutely nothing believable/interesting about the love interest.

    However, I do not agree that excluding intimacy between characters is always better. That simplifies love stories way too much. A good example that you can compare to Mass Effect, is Baldur's Gate 2. I mean the relationship with Viconia's character was pretty original and interesting. Sure it was all word/voice based, and sure there was a bit of a high fire moment when you get into the sack with a highly sexed dark elf woman. However, the way it was written it was actually extremely important that the intimacy take place, because it was supposed to show you how fucked up her character was, yet that she had the ability to get beyond her ugly/vile past and understand that love is more than just physical pleasure.

    I mean in the end it was a bit corny, but still a very viable love story.

    I'm not saying to exclude intimacy. There are no real defined rules when it comes to storytelling in any form. When I really try and distill the essence of my argument down, I'm trying to say that strong characterization and writing is what is needed. Not the two characters bumping uglies on screen. I suppose that doesn't quite fit with the topic "sex in video games" but in a sense of further games as a storytelling form, they will need to get past this.
    By the Bioware guy's description, Liara as a love interest was added in almost certainly just to be there as a kind of selling point. Any kind of relationship needs to have a stronger foundation than that to really carry any real emotional weight with anyone. What was Shephard's motivation for it? What was Liara's? What happens afterwards? The whole time, it just felt like Shephard was going for a notch in his belt, and Liara was really naive and got sucked into it. It was just too contrived.
    Your example is great, fits what I am saying. Sleeping with this character revealed more about her, it wasn't just an achievement, it was an aside, and there was something memorable about it and they didn't bate you with alien ass and side boob.

    To the guys saying that the same techniques you use to tell a story in a movie or theater or book are different than a game, I absolutely disagree. The essence of all of these things is a plot, and devices exist that allow you to move the plot forwards and reveal things about it and its characters. The same techniques will work. The illusion of choice in games - and that's all it is, even in their most open ended forms - just means that you need to think of different ways of moving the story forwards. At the very heart of things, though, you will still be moving things forwards using the same set of tools any other form of storytelling will.

    Sakeido on
  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Thanks for the feedback. This is certainly a problematic idea, and your critique is showing me problems I hadn't seen and making me think about this in new ways.

    If you'll allow me to further pigeonhole my idea until I find a tiny fragment of the universe where I'm right (heh): the point of what I'm proposing is not to make it easier to build today's story-driven games; I'm imagining a future game type that gives you sandbox-like freedom to do nearly anything but on a social/interpersonal level, and then saying "either build it with traditional methods, like Facade did, or use this fancy new thing to streamline the creation of OMGHUGE branching stories."

    So for example Liara from Mass Effect is blue-girl-who-explains-Asari-culture-and-has-a-crush-on-you. She is also blue-girl-who-fights-monsters-and-uses-biotics-as-appropriate. If we're reimplementing Mass Effect as what it already is, we don't need some uber-complex a-life neural network thing to model Liara's observation of her environment, her thoughts about likely future events, and her short and long term strategies for handling that. When she's part of a player party and she sees monsters, her combat actions have nearly nothing in common with her personality when not in combat. When you're having a conversation with her, you can only do and say what the dialog authors decided you can do and say.

    (This is NOT an indictment of Mass Effect, of course -- I'm saying they've MERELY made one of the best games I've played recently, and haven't dared to expand their game scope so far beyond what is reasonable for a commercial game project.)

    If we imagine Mass Effect as the kind of sandbox I'm talking about, these characters could share any number of unpredictable combinations of emotional status and interaction. A certain combination of player interactions (abusive perhaps?) and random NPC's might mean in one play through Liara randomly decides she wants to stay behind on a planet because she's fallen in love with one of the hapless NPC's. Or a thousand other random emotional entanglements, good or bad or a little of both, might be possible.

    Building THAT would be a nightmare. I submit that building that using conventional story-driven game development processes and technologies would be nearly impossible, or require a budget hundreds of times what would normally be called 'unrealistically large'. The systems and methods I propose could, in theory, bring this colossal effort down to the size of, maybe, ten GTA IV's.

    Even the a-life stuff would be a huge endeavor. Does anyone remember Creatures (or Creatures 2 or Creatures 3) back in the 90's? Those creatures were capable of simple speech and limited social interaction with each other. I'm afraid to imagine what would be required to get simulated lifeforms to emulate various facets of humanity in a convincing (if predictable) way.

    mspencer on
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  • SakeidoSakeido Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Scale it down. If you want procedurally generated interactions between characters, why not start with a microcosm and then slowly build up from there? Use the dynamic behavior only for party members, and leave other NPCs as fixed, scripted characters so that they can still drive the story forwards as your own party grows closer/further apart/mutinies/poisons each other's potions.

    Sakeido on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Sakeido wrote: »
    Scale it down. If you want procedurally generated interactions between characters, why not start with a microcosm and then slowly build up from there? Use the dynamic behavior only for party members, and leave other NPCs as fixed, scripted characters so that they can still drive the story forwards as your own party grows closer/further apart/mutinies/poisons each other's potions.

    He's not giving a game design though. He's giving out a concept. With a concept, you want all of it's possibility explained up front, and then typically you scale it down to practical applications.

    Morninglord on
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  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    (Also I should mention that I'm currently a computer science grad student, still at the very beginning of a Masters program, so I feel it's my JOB to propose wild and crazy applications of interesting technology with little regard for your puny human budgets and portfolio management and release schedules. :-P )

    Back in the land of "realistic, useful ideas" I'd love to get more feedback about my "should we start breaking the fourth wall" post, seen here.

    I feel I'm over the "thread hijacking" line, but I feel this is all related to the eventual goal of having (at first) emotional intimacy between players and NPC's on a more regular basis. (I don't think any game has yet had a player become emotionally attached with a love-interest NPC, then later have them fall away from each other and have the NPC be the player's "ex-girlfriend whom I still have feelings for but can't stand living with.")

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  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    On the other hand....why would you want that. :P

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  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    We're talking about sex in games, right? (as in, collection of gameplay mechanisms, opportunities for failure, risk versus reward, enabling rapid low-cost failure . . .)

    I mean, sometimes Super Mario has to fall in the pit.

    I know what you're saying. :-) I just feel if we push the boundaries of interactive narrative, integrating real and complex human relationship drama into a game, there must be opportunities for failure.

    Even from a social perspective, even if it's not good (to steal a phrase I like) wish-fulfillment fantasy to have bad things happen in a relationship, sometimes bad things do indeed happen in real life and a game that makes those bad things impossible may not ring true with players.

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  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    Yeah I know, and the option does need to be there, I was just poking fun.

    Morninglord on
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  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited June 2008
    I'm bumping this because there were so many good ideas being discussed here, plus people were kinda tolerating my crappy ideas.

    That's something else I'm curious about: what would it take to eventually ease the video game industry into accepting AO-rated games? Microsoft frequently publishes games in Japan with a CERO Z rating, and those are harder to sell than CERO D or C, etc.

    For one thing, as long as Microsoft continues to say "we will never sign your AO-rated title with our private key, so the public keys built into retail Xbox 360's will never execute your code" then nothing further can be done. But Microsoft is a profit-motivated corporation -- they must have a price or else they are failing to represent the interests of their investors. There do exist media empires that deal in that sort of content and which can write the kind of checks Microsoft might require. (They publish magazines, I believe.)

    Man, all I want is a world where you can buy the M-rated version of a title in Wal Mart, or buy the AO (original author's intent) version via mail order. X__X

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  • Speed RacerSpeed Racer Scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratch scritch scratchRegistered User regular
    edited June 2008
    Well, the thing is, unless it's a porn game or something, why does it really need to be AO? How is a nice, long, zoomed in shot of the protagonist's cock going to strengthen the narrative of the game?

    I mean you could talk about whether or not porn games should become more mainstream or whathaveyou but since this thread is more about games as a storytelling medium it doesn't really seem like the right place for that line of discussion.

    Speed Racer on
  • PancakePancake Registered User regular
    edited June 2008
    Well, the thing is, unless it's a porn game or something, why does it really need to be AO? How is a nice, long, zoomed in shot of the protagonist's cock going to strengthen the narrative of the game?

    Yes.

    Rockstar proving Brucie doesn't have funny balls would have made GTA4 one of the finest games ever made.

    Pancake on
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  • mspencermspencer PAX [ENFORCER] Council Bluffs, IARegistered User regular
    edited June 2008
    You bring up a good point -- any such games had better respect the player's preferences. No or minimal male nudity plzkthx!

    Seriously though, as the other two pages of this topic have discussed: sometimes interesting plots contain relationship drama. People meet fall in love, become intimate in different ways -- finally including physical intimacy, live their lives together. That kind of relationship is itself dramatic. Sometimes other types of drama occur, people break up, etc.

    Also, remember that 'hot coffee' minigame in GTA:SA? That made the game AO, and that was funny as hell. That pretty neatly disassembles any "real game designers don't care about adding AO content to a game" argument (which nobody is making, yet) because nobody can deny what was shipped on retail GTA:SA disks. Lawl. "AO game" doesn't mean "game which contains everything you find offensive" -- sometimes adult content is funny, entertaining, dramatic, satirical (Leisure Suit Larry anyone?), etc.

    So just because I happen to be straight and have no interest in male nudity, I don't believe all AO content should be banished from consoles.

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  • apotheosapotheos Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited June 2008
    mspencer wrote: »
    So just because I happen to be straight and have no interest in male nudity, I don't believe all AO content should be banished from consoles.

    But you implied, probably in jest, that penises should be.

    This in a nut shell is the North American puritanical obsession with sex that keeps this issue perpetually in the closet.
    Americans love sex, but they love hiding sex even more.

    apotheos on


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  • BigKevBigKev Registered User regular
    edited June 2008
    I think, until retailers start enforcing the lower age ratings, theres no way the higher ones will happen. While a kid can go into a games retailer and buy anything, there is no way it will happen. Tighten up on that, and who knows, maybe we will be trusted.

    BigKev on
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