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From: rfermier@athena.mit.edu (Robert G Fermier)
Subject: Open-Ended Game Engine
Message-ID: <1992Nov23.205607.7722@athena.mit.edu>
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Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 20:56:07 GMT
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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
