HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rfermier@athena.mit.edu (Robert G Fermier)
Subject: Open-Ended Game Engine
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 20:56:07 GMT

Well, it isn't that you choose one of N professions, but instead that the things
you do (and thus the skills you learn and the power, political or otherwise, that
you gain) are left open to the player.  True, there is no real way for the player
to decide to become "a plumber" or really anything else which is not suited for
even vageuly accomplishing the meta-goals of the genre.  However, you do not have
to choose to be a Merchant Class character -- you can simply decide to do
merchanty things throughout the game.  Parts of the engine recognize this fact
and alter the likelihood of certain events and tweak the power levels of other
plots to be in accordance with these facts.  If you then decide you are sick of
the Merchant life and want to go into politics or whatever, then that is already
built into the engine!  That's one of the really nifty things about the concept.

There is a sort of Script Language for defining the explicit plots as well as the
characters and other agents that make up the core of the engine.  There are three
different "flavors" of plots in the engine:  Explicit, Implicit, and Parametric. 

Explicit plots are hard-wired behaviors of specific agents or of events/elements
in the game universe.  These will obviously have the strongest feel of being
written.

Implicit plots come out of the nondeterministic interactions between the agents
and between the agents and the player.  However, they hook off of the same
mechanics and plot events as the explicit plots, and so "ride the coattails" of
the explicit plots and should not read as obviously generated as opposed to
written.  If our algorithms work as we think they will, it will be extremely
difficult for the player to tell the difference.

Parametric plots read the strongest as being "generated" because, well, they are.
In many ways they are a glorified version of random encounters.  However, because
they DO affect the agents in the World and the player, they can spawn implicit
plots and thus can be encountered in non-obvious ways.

-- Rob Fermier
   rfermier@athena.mit.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: mechalas@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (John P. Mechalas)
Subject: Re: Intelligence Assumptions
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 04:37:22 GMT

In article <Bxzwpq.AvL@news.cso.uiuc.edu> amead@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Alan Mead) writes:
>Mark 'Mark' Sachs <MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>
>>What is the net.opinion on confirms in adventure games, anyway? While they
>>do warn the player of some unobvious deaths, on the other hand they can almost
>>always be rewritten out [...]
>>presented with a message like "It's too dangerous," if the player REALLY
>>wants to land in the courtyard, then... Thoughts?
>
>My opinion as player and author is to give people the right to do stupid
>things.  For TADS users, v2.0 makes this moot, I believe, with its new undo
>feature (supposedly up to 100 levels under "most conditions" whatever that
>means).  Somehow this seems the best of all possible worlds.  People are free
>to do dumb things (ie, experiment) and yet they won't get hung up saving their
>position every five minutes.

As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead...  If you die, you have to restore.
I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..

-- 
John Mechalas                                          "I'm not an actor, but
mechalas@gn.ecn.purdue.edu                                 I play one on TV."
Aero Engineering, Purdue University                     #include disclaimer.h
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: neilg@fraser.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: TADS efficeincy (eg Abe)
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 19:26:25 GMT

librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik) writes:

>I guess my computer isn't slow enough to make evaluation of a bunch of
>compiled "compare" and "jump" instructions noticeable.  But what IS slow
>in TADS is resolving nouns: in a game with a bunch of different doors
>scattered throughout it -- each with a full name like "north door", "jail
>cell door", etc., but all accepting "door" as a synonym -- there is a really
>perceptible one- or two-second pause when you type "examine door" -- even
>though there's only one door in the room.  I'm guessing the parser is
>descending the list of "door"s, looking for one in the current room.

 This is a major wall I've run into also. My totally unfinished game
has the player wandering an empty deserted city. Naturally there are a
lot of doors, most of which are unopenable. So I got to the point when
it would take something like 10 seconds to do anything to a door. Agh!
Since selling my elderly Mac Plus and buying a 33 MHz Quadra is not
feasible, I was disappointed by this.
 
>This is TADS 1.2, by the way; the new version may have speeded this up.

 God I hope so... Does anyone know what the upgrade cost from 1.x to
2.0 is going to be, by the way? Assuming you don't have to buy a brand
new package.

 - Neil K. (n_k_guy@sfu.ca)
From: kludge@hardy.u.washington.edu (Kludge)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Open-Ended Game Engine
Date: 23 Nov 92 14:45:16 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle


  This idea sounds interesting...  I assume that there would be code
(in some sort of "metalanguage") for each plot - it wouldn't invent the plots
themselves, would it?  :)  I've been working on a role-playing game for
entirely too long and have decided to handle it like this:

 - There are 4-6 different (pre-designed) characters that you can pick to
   play.  All of these have different skills/backgrounds, and a different plot
   unfolds for each of them.

 - The other characters (the ones you aren't playing) are still in the game -
   computer-controlled (though you can go get in their way if you try hard
   enough, which could mean you get mixed up in somebody else's plot.)

 I don't think any game can be *entirely* open-ended, but your ideas seem
pretty close.  How do the smaller (sub-plots) get generated?  Is there a pool
of code for various people/actions that gets mixed together into a sub-
story?  The problem that I see with that is you'd be getting plots that
seemed... well... generated, instead of *written*.  In my RPG, there are
actually a couple of main plots (saving the world from destruction - the normal
thing, plus a bit of politics.)  Without at least one of those, I'm afraid
that a game would seem pointless and misguided - you'd just wander around
doing things... and they'd happen.  How would the scenario interact with
player action?

								--Kludge
From: ptd2@po.CWRU.Edu (Palmer T. Davis)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Searching for a sense of wonder
Date: 17 Nov 1992 10:05:03 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: ptd2@po.CWRU.Edu (Palmer T. Davis)
NNTP-Posting-Host: thor.ins.cwru.edu


In a previous article, rbryan@Mail.trincoll.edu (Russell L. Bryan) says:
>
>Try to teach a computer to know that "the king is
>pregnant" is a ridiculous premise.

Ever read _The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness_?

-- 
Palmer T. Davis      ___
<ptd2@po.cwru.edu>   \X/   cthread.  cthread_fork().  Fork, thread, fork!
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: greg@huia.canterbury.ac.nz (Greg Ewing)
Subject: Re: Searching for a sense of wonder
Reply-To: greg@huia.canterbury.ac.nz (Greg Ewing)
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 23:39:00 GMT

In article <1992Nov16.042649.20208@starbase.trincoll.edu>, Russell L.
Bryan <rbryan@Mail.trincoll.edu> writes:
|> The programmer's standard solution to preventing this is to
|> make the door too heavy to kick or to preach on the immorality of
|> destroying such a beautiful door.

My point is that the author shouldn't *have* to go out of his/her way
to make every other solution impossible, nor think of all possible
solutions in advance. Somehow the framework needs to make plausible
things work automatically.

Very hard, I know, but it's an example of how the computer might be
used to make the game more interactive and less linear-story-like.

|> If he cuts the rope at any other length, he swings safely to the
|> wall only to have the carriage land on his head from above.

Seems more like if he cuts the rope at any other length he splats
into the wall.

|> The cave is actually a balcony for a very
|> comfortable bedroom, and your fall is easily broken by cushions / bed. 

Is this visible from outside? If not, then anticipating a very
substantial horizontal velocity after swinging in a 90 degree 70 foot
radius arc (even in 1/2 earth G) I would be very apprehensive about
attempting such a trick!

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, Canterbury Univ., Christchurch, New Zealand
Internet: greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz	+--------------------------------------
Spearnet: greg@nz.ac.canterbury.cosc	| A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a
Telecom:  +64 3 667 001 x6367  		| wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan Inc.
From: FXS@tredysvr.Tredydev.Unisys.COM (Foster Schucker)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Advsys, is there a new version?
Date: 18 Nov 92 16:42:27 GMT
Organization: /usr/lib/news/organization

May 1986.  I'd like to find one to see if it fixes some problems that I've
been having.


Thanks!!!

Foster Schucker == foster at nzkites.uucp 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: dmb@xbar.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Parser heresy (was Re: Searching for a sense of wonder)
Date: 17 Nov 1992 07:30:06 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: xbar.ai.mit.edu

In article <BxttrL.E6x@acsu.buffalo.edu> goetz@acsu.buffalo.edu (Phil Goetz) writes:
>Well, let me throw a bit of heresy at you which I believe:  Parsing is not
>a problem for adventure programs.

Heresy?  Well add me to the list of heretics.  *Syntax* parsing is
almost solved.  We have principles-and-parameters parsers here that do
extremely well and can parse up feeds off the news wires in real time.
(Other places have similar things too.)  Of course, they have no clue
what the sentences are *about*, but they can sure make pretty trees for
you, and they can tell you what all the lexical categories are.

No, it's not a parsing problem.  And when you point out that you
wouldn't *want* to use most complex sentence types in a game,
you're dead on the mark.  Purely for playability reasons, we
would NOT want to add, say, adverbs to our parser.  Can you *imagine*
the following:

*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
>get the book from the troll
The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away.  He laughs in your face.

>get the book from the troll very quickly
You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.

*** Your score just went up ***
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*

I have one thing to say:  "NOT!"

>2. Conversation.  This is not a parsing problem, it is a knowledge
>representation and reasoning problem.  If you give me a good representation
>for the concepts in a sentence, I can write a parser for it quickly.
>Syntactic structure is easy.

Again, right on the mark.  Syntax is really hard, but it (again) is
pretty well-understood.  But *reasoning*, that's not undertood at all!
Do you think Deep Thought plays chess the way Kasparov does?  Not a
chance.  Most AI to date has consisted of clever programs, IMHO, and
not anything like reasoning, or even a lame approximation thereof.  It
is no coincidence that every major upset in the computer chess world
has been accompanied by a significant hardware advance.

My personal view is that we should be working more towards
understanding the fundamental elements of intelligence in animals, and
then see how we could go about applying this knowledge in machine
settings.  Until that happens, we are left with, as Phil said, a VAST
language *understanding* problem, but a minimal (syntactic) parsing
problem.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
dmb@ai.mit.edu *** Compu$erve: 76440,2671 *** GEnie: ADVENTIONS
From: rfermier@athena.mit.edu (Robert G Fermier)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Open-Ended Game Engine
Date: 22 Nov 92 08:06:37 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hello to everyone out there in netland.

Me and a friend (both MIT comp-sci undergraduates) have been doing a bunch of
tfhought experiments on writing a truly open-ended and non-linear game.  We
believe we have developed algorithms and a game design language that would allow
game designers to implement such open-ended games.  We have not yet done the
implementation, but believe that such would be possible and do-able in a
reasonable amount of time (not 10 years down the line or anything like that).

By opened ended, I mean that the game does not end when all the explicitly
specified plots have been resolved, but that in fact a majority of the
interesting things going on are implicit plots that result from the game scenario
interacting in a quasi-random fashion with player actions.  Eventually there
would come a point where the state of the system had reached equilibrium, but
in any event the POSSIBLE plots in game are huge in comparison with the explicit
plots.  I realize this is probably not very clear, I can give more examples if
necessary.

By non-linear, I mean that the player does not have to go through the game in any
particular order, or for that fashion follow any particular "career track"
through the game.  In the example of a fantasy setting, the player could become
an adventurer, a politician, a soldier, a merchant, or whatever and the plots in
the game would tune themselves accordingly.  Similarly, depending on the order in
which the player decided to deal with plots that presented themselves, plots that
did not get dealt with would develop into different plots in the player's absence.

What do you people out there think there would be in terms of interest in such an
engine?  We are both Seniors at MIT and interested in pursuing this idea, but
actually implementing it would take a fair amount of time.  Unless we could get
some major company to back us (with funding) or decide to try and publish it
ourselves, we would just never have the time to do so.  Any ideas on how to do
either of these or whether this idea is worth it?

Of course, this engine does not need to be tied to a particular interface, but
given the current market would probably wind up with some sort of graphical
interface unless there was a strong reason to do otherwise.
 
In any event, I'd like to hear the opinions y'all have on the idea.

Thanks!

Rob Fermier
rfermier@athena.mit.edu
From: goetz@acsu.buffalo.edu (Phil Goetz)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: {Re: Re: Adv. generators}, Puzzles & Pulp IF
Date: 16 Nov 92 17:18:20 GMT
Organization: State University of New York at Buffalo/Comp Sci

In article <92318.193307MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu> MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu (Mark 'Mark' Sachs) writes:
>In article <JAMIE.92Nov14093637@kauri.vuw.ac.nz>, jamie@kauri.vuw.ac.nz
>(Jamieson Norrish) says:
>>I think that rather than creativity being almost totally
>>unconstrained, the need to justify what you create is missing, or at
>>least in many cases. I don't think this is a good thing; I would much
>>rather find an ordinary object in an ordinary setting, which had a
>>reason for being there, than finding an amazing object in an amazing
>>place, with absolutely no justification for it being there.
>
>Actually, _my_ preference is for finding an amazing object in an ordinary
>setting. This sort of thing is the basis for nearly all of my favorite
>adventures, books, movies, et cetera... I might go so far as to state that
>(for me) a primary ingredient in the "sense of wonder" is that said wonderful
>thing COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN to the real world.
>
>Thus, in Trinity: you start out in completely ordinary London, 198-, when
>what should you happen on in the middle of a nuclear war but a plain white
>door leading to a bizarrely fantastic landscape. In Hitchhiker's Guide
>your sleep in an ordinary house on ordinary old Earth is rudely disrupted
>by the arrival of an alien space fleet intent on destroying the planet. In
>Planetfall, the dull life of a Ensign Ninth Class in the Stellar Patrol is
>ended as you tumble upon an undiscovered planet full of secrets. And so on.

I agree with both of you.  I think the "door to another world" plot can work
very well (I think of the Narnia Chronicles, which all start this way,
or those Susan Cooper books, which I'm sure must have had some such device,
or the _Wrinkle in Time_ etc. books.)  BUT in these books, there are usually
ONE or TWO such anomalies.  I think the first poster was objecting to
games where objects are commonly just lying around - for instance, Scott
Adams' _Pyramid of Doom_, where there is no reason for anything in the game,
just a lot of nifty objects thrown together in a spooky setting.  (Though I
liked the game.)  No strange new world should be so strange that a rational
being would leave a +4 Sword of Sharpness lying on a bench in an empty tavern.

Phil
goetz@cs.buffalo.edu
From: dpn2@po.CWRU.Edu (Damien P. Neil)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Intelligence Assumptions
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 06:46:29 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University
NNTP-Posting-Host: b63519.student.cwru.edu

In article <1992Nov20.043722.2838@gn.ecn.purdue.edu> mechalas@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (John P. Mechalas) writes:
>As far as I know, you can't UNDO being dead...  If you die, you have to restore.
>I don't know if this is true for TADS 2.0, but it is for Infocom games that
>support undo...or at least all the ones I have played..

Really? All the ones that I played allowed you to UNDO death.

You have died. Do you want to RESTORE, RESTART, UNDO, or QUIT?
> Sue the implementor.

:-)
+-------------+------------------+---------------------------------+
| Damien Neil | dpn2@po.cwru.edu | Case Western Reserve University |
+-------------+------------------+---------------------------------+
From: john@gu.uwa.edu.au (John West)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Parser heresy (was Re: Searching for a sense of wonder)
Date: 19 Nov 1992 04:31:15 GMT
Organization: The University of Western Australia
NNTP-Posting-Host: mackerel.gu.uwa.edu.au

blasius@gmd.de (Volker Blasius) writes:

>>>get the book from the troll
>>The troll sees your lame attempt from a mile away.  He laughs in your face.

>>>get the book from the troll very quickly
>>You snatch the book away with a lightning-fast jerk.

>>I have one thing to say:  "NOT!"

>To be honest, I can and I saw it in WORLD: some things you had to do slowly 
>or cautiously or some such, and it seemed quite natural to me - life isn't 
>just a binary do-don't. Where is the problem? Does it complicate the game 
>too much? To use your example, should 'snatch the book from the troll' work,
>just because it is orthodox syntax? I just don't understand your argument.

The problem (as I see it) is that this approach gives the character
absolutely no intelligence of its own. The player has to do *all* 
the thinking, even the fiddly little details that you would normally
expect to be done on 'auto-pilot'.
Its the same as having to open doors before you go through them. If I
tell you to go through that door, you aren't going to say 'I can't. Its
not open', are you? And if I tell you to go and get the book from that
troll, you won't casually stroll over the the troll, say 'excuse me,
could I have that book?'. You're going to rush up, grab the book, and
get out. As fast as you can. You know what trolls can do if they catch
you.
If I tell my character to get the book, I expect him to use a little
common sense. If the game then tells me that it didn't work, I'm
going to try to find another way of doing it. It just wouldn't occur to
me that I have to tell the character what to do in ridiculous detail.

John West
--
For the humour impaired: Insert a :-) after every third word
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: djohnson@cs.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Searching for a sense of wonder
Date: 15 Nov 92 22:46:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: sdcc12.41026
Organization: =CSE Dept., U.C. San Diego

>>Can do with a lot less of this, thank you.  To me, and hopefully
>>a lot of other people, frustration does not correlate with fun.
>
>I wholeheartedly disagree.
>
>The more frustrating a puzzle, or any undertaking in life, the more
>rewarding it is to find the solution.

Well, I guess for some people it is ok then.  Generally, rather than
finding the solution, I will just stop playing the game.  I'm talking
about the common case of sitting down and playing for 2 or 3 hours,
and get no further in the game and quit in disgust.  Eventually if the
solution is ever discovered it tends to be something stupid (give
jalapeno to grue) or something that can't be solved because you messed
up weeks ago and don't know it (ie, rescuing the baby hungus
prematurely).  I've never felt anything rewarding about figuring
things out after days of staring blankly at the screen (usually because
they were stupid puzzles with no clues or logic behind them).

All it takes to get frustration is a zork style maze.  If you feel
you must put this in a game, at least put a frustration level on
the package.

-- 
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu  --  How come my mind went off for lunch before I did?