zero sum reputation systems
Tags: gamedev, writing
Published: 2023-12-24 16:20:32

---
title: zero sum reputation systems
published: true
date: 2023-11-19 00:00:00 UTC
tags: [ 'gamedev', 'writing' ]
canonical_url: https://onwriting.games/daily/20231119-1156-zero-sum-reputation-systems/
---

We have already established that narrative rhizomes can become difficult to manage due to combinatorial explosion and the impossibility of deriving with total certainty the path that a player took to reach a given point in the story.

That's why it's crucial that we develop strategies and tools that allow us to encompass this problem, helping ourselves with the state for this.

One of these tools I refer to as **zero sum reputation systems**. It's a very simple concept, but very powerful and very _gamifiable_.

The idea is that we are going to define a variable that receives a number, at the beginning of the game it will equal to `0`.

```
set my_reputation 0

```

This variable can be **positive or negative**. And we are going to consider that at both sides of 0, there are 2 opposite poles in constant competition. For example, when `my_reputation` is less than `0` we say that it is our reputation with _Elves_, while in positive it is with the _Orcs_.

Throughout our story, the player will choose options that will modify this variable

```
There's an orc looking at you. You don't feel very threatened by him. Or her.
  * I ATTACK the damn beast!
    set my_reputation -5
  * I wave my hand and smile
    set my_reputation +3

```

And eventually we will be able to use thresholds to make decisions:

```
You see the high orc priest in front of you.
  (1) He greets you and you see a smile drawn on his face.
    freq my_reputation >2 +10000
  (1) He looks at you with a hatred you have rarely seen in your life
    freq my_reputation <-2 +10000
  (998) He just looks at you, as if wondering what you want.

```

In this case, we have that the first 2 options have a very low chance of being chosen (1 in 1000, that is 0.1%), but if the condition that the player's reputation is balanced towards the orcs is met, the first option becomes the most likely (10001 in 11000, that is 90.91%). The second option increases the chances when the opposite happens.

**DIGRESSION**

In this case, I'm not eliminating the opposite chance, it's just highly improbable. I'll talk more about this in a future mail, as this is a special interest of mine (and the reason why I created `cuentitos`).

**END DIGRESSION**

In this way, we can handle decision making, even random ones, and we can control the rhizome a bit more: if we see that the first option came out, then we know that the player has a good reputation with the orcs, and we can use this information to continue navigating the rhizome.

I refer to this technique a _reputation system_ because it's easy to understand it that way, but it can be used for other things that are not reputation, the important thing is that whatever is defined works in a polarized way, where the positive value is one thing and the negative its opposite.

This system has been used a lot even in branching narratives, for example in games like Mass Effect, or The Age of Decadence for an indie title.

Can you think of other ways to tame the rhizome? I'd like to hear them :)