Have you ever played a game where your avatar had to deal with mental / mind issues? Was it replayable? I don''t mean, btw, games like Sanitarium which represented stuff in the head as physical puzzles. Nor do I mean story games where the main character where such issues are fodder for the plot (like in Phantasmagoria) I mean things like: A crisis of faith... Overcoming some block... Being conflicted about some major moral / ethical issue... That kind of stuff. I was thinking that I''ve never seen that in a game that was replayable (and a part of gameplay). And in comparing games to literature, this may be why one entire dimension of expression is cut off to us. But can this even be gameplay???? -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

First of all, let me say that I like the ideal.
With that said - how would you implement this in a game?

I have thought about it for a bit, and have decided that you would have to remove the psychological elements that are usually placed on the player and move them back to the avatar. Just as we take strength and health and place them in bars or numbers for the player to see... we would have to do something similar for the player’s psyche.

In the example that I give below, I have specifically focused on MMORPGs (UO to be exact). I played UO for 3 years and immediately thought about this (and similar games) for the application of your idea.

Let’s say we were to take the players conscience and place it in a bar, just like health and manna, etc... And let’s say that you are in the game and decide to steal something from another player, your conscience bar would decrease from 100% to 95% or some pre-determined decrement value, possibly based on the type of misdeed that you have performed. Or you decide to murder another player (PK) your conscience bar would again drop in level by some predetermined value.

Essentially this wouldn’t mean anything to the game – but what impact would this have on the player? The game would have to simulate the player’s conscience or penalize the player in some manner – based on his conscience.

In an MMORPG, the system could allow the player that had been killed to follow his murderer around and haunt him as long as his conscience bar was at some level below 100%

To have the conscience have any kind of impact on the player you would have to affect the play in some way – that would change his play and maybe this is the reason that we don’t see this done in game?

I think it would be cool to implement a conscience into a MMORPG game and I look forward to seeing it in some game in the future.


Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

Difficult...

It wouldn''t be so difficult to simulate such pshological problems in the avatar''s companions, but for the avatar him/herself, well...

If something, say a mental block, stopped the avatar from doing something the player wanted him to do, that may just aggravate the player to the point of abandoning the game.

However, if the game could be so deep as to cause mental conflicts in the player (not serious ones - if a game caused players to go insane or develop mental blocks, then a designer could get in some trouble), that would work. If a game could actually make a player seriously think twice about stealing or getting in a fight because of the consequences (despite the presence of saves), then games would reach a whole new level.

I think I''m starting not to make sense.

Heh. Leave it to me to bring up an impossible topic.

I like the mechanistic representation of the mind / psyche, but you''d definitely have to hide it from the user. We''re not used to thinking of euphoria and depression in the same way we think of HP and status bars, but some graphical system might work.

But I guess this gets to the heart of the whole role-playing issue in games. If you had some terror, or crisis of conscience, or sense of guilt it would be difficult to make that mean something in game terms. Either the player is their avatar, or their not-- in which case they lose control.


Rather than entirely negative effects, what if mental issues simply changed your abilities. Then it would be a trade-off, and though the player wouldn''t be in complete control of their avatar they could at least manage getting in to situations.

EXAMPLE: Blind rage. Upset over the slaughter of your kinsman, you fly into a terrible rage whenever you see the noble responsible. This effectively puts you in to combat mode with a threat directed toward the object of your hate.

So what you really need to do is not confront the nobleman in the open, but get to him some other way.


(Hmmm... that idea has a high corniness factor...)

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Hmm. I think having numbers for avatar emotional state is ok, but tricky.

1) Balance the good with the bad. If you employ fear/insanity as a penalty to character performance, then you ought to have emotions that improve performance as well. Happiness, or passion or something.

The default is for characters to be at their optimum and slowed down by fear or doubt. Make characters default state normal instead, and provide emotions or causes that improve performance as wlel as those that hurt it.

2) Use emotional effects indirectly or in combination. Instead of instant insanity, let the player choose actions which slowly eat away more or less of the avatar''s mind. Let the sanity loss have a detrimental effect on other skills, but not render them useless. Smaller penalties means the player is more likely to accept them and keep playing rather than reloading.

3) There shouldn''t be any situations that cause heavy emotional impact to the avatar that can''t be avoided or neutralized by playing carefully or role-playing consistently.

Example: The sewers are a dark dangerous place. Just wandering around in them gives a character The Creeps (-1 fear penalty). But if the player has a driving reason to be down there (as opposed to the player who just likes to explore) then this penalty is offset or ignored.

So when Our Hero tracks his missing sister to the sewers, seeking answers (driven, +2 bonus), the creepiness of the isn''t even noticed (no penalty).


Just some thoughts...

I''m surprised that Black & White and its quests haven''t come up. The quests have multiple solutions depending on your moral orientation.

For example, a farmer comes to you and complains that kids have been stealing his sheep. What do you do?

- Kill the kids as punishment.
- Ignore the farmer.
- Kill the farmer for bothering you.
- Make the fences around the sheep bigger.
- Turn the kids into sheep.
- Transport the kids to another island.
- Make the sheep carnivorous.
- Etc...

Introducing moral considerations makes for an amazingly complex story, but also amazingly complex code and AI.

By all means go for it, just make sure you''re not biting off more than you can chew.


"NPCs will be inherited from the basic Entity class. They will be fully independent, and carry out their own lives oblivious to the world around them ... that is, until you set them on fire ..."