Month: June 2009

Sims 3 (Mobile version)

imagesLately I’ve been thinking more about emergent narrative — in particular, the idea that a sandbox-style game can produce elements that the player then weaves together into a story that he finds satisfying. The story isn’t really a product of the game, and it’s not necessarily true that anyone else playing the game would perceive the same story. The onus is on the player to determine which of the many otherwise insignificant events contribute to the narrative.

I’m pretty skeptical about this idea. Or rather: I can see that some such thing does happen, in that lots of (say) Sims users construct elaborate stories with their characters, and share movies and narratives. But in general this is not what I would call interactive storytelling; it seems more like handing the user a really complicated dollhouse that happens to have built-in tools for recording and editing the best scenes.

Still, I thought I ought to put a bit more research into this topic before I dismiss the possibilities. It’s been a while since I had (and got tired of the grinding aspects of) the original Sims, so I tried downloading Sims 3 for my iPhone.

Alas, I find it a dead bore.

Continue reading “Sims 3 (Mobile version)”

Alabaster feedback

As Alabaster is in large part an experiment with the underlying conversation system, I would very much welcome feedback about how the system behaves so that I can refine it for future use.

As background: how much the system prompts the player is already an adjustable feature (up to turning off quip prompts entirely, for a standard unprompted ASK/TELL experience). Likewise, it will be possible in the final version of the library, though not demonstrated here, to use a numeric menu to offer the player options.

So what I’m particularly interested in at the moment is how to improve the player experience when the game is using the same library settings as Alabaster. Some things that have come up already:

A common misapprehension seems to be that it’s necessary to retype an entire quip name verbatim, whereas in fact the game parses quip names in the same way that it parses object names: the first few words of the quip, or any unique word, will do. The system does not, perhaps, do a good enough job of teaching new players this fact, especially when the tutorial mode is turned off; so perhaps there should be a mechanism to notice if the player is typing in very long commands and mention (once) that these can be shortened. (Also, perhaps, to point out that the whole ASK INTERLOCUTOR ABOUT structure can be shortened to A.)

I’ve also had a request for tolerance of spare question marks (which some players find themselves typing even after an indirect question such as ASK ABOUT WHETHER SHE IS COLD).

Another point is that Alabaster doesn’t give good feedback when the input is

>SNOW WHITE, [valid quip name here]

In general, I’m not sure I want to encourage players to approach things that way because it encourages them to think there’s actual natural language processing happening — which there isn’t. But there could be better error messages in response.

Anyway, comments are welcome; it would also be useful to have transcripts that demonstrate interaction with the game, since these would provide also some idea of how often commands are failing, and what kinds of commands. If you have one you’d like to send in, I’d appreciate it: emshort@mindspring.com.

Alabaster status

GothPrincessesCurrently there’s a release 3 available here. Release 3 addresses several bugs and adds new vocabulary for certain actions. It also plays significantly faster on slow machines, especially under Windows.

(I haven’t built a Windows installers for this yet, so that installer still contains release 1. I’ll update that when I have a chance.) (All the installers now contain release 3.)

Jay is Games kindly carried a review. There’s also a discussion on the Legendary blog (which covers various forms of mythical creature) on the game’s premise. (Image by Claire Beauchamp.)

Official Release

Cover

The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you’re alone in the forest, it’s hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…

There are some eighteen possible endings to this fairy tale.

Some of them are even almost happy.

A fractured fairy tale by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Emily Short, Adam Thornton, & Ziv Wities.

Illustrated by Daniel Allington-Krzysztofiak.

Available now from

http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/alabaster/

(Changed because the old site went over its traffic allowance.)

Please note — as the site also points out — that you’ll want the latest available Glulx interpreter to play (Git 1.2.4 for Windows, Zoom 1.1.4 for Mac). Alabaster is processing-intensive and makes use of the latest Inform optimizations.

Another warning: some of the comments here get spoilery.