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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Say you combine the artificial life systems of The Sims with the gameplay, factions and characters of GTA3. That would be a never-ending game that would ALWAYS be fun. I guess that''s the vision I''m seeing here. A simulated world that never runs out of scenarios. I''m not entirely sure how it would be done, but it''s a very neat idea.

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What artificial life systems of the sims do you talk about really? I can not see how GTA3 would be changed this way. Would you have these gangsters that have nothing better to do than shooting and getting driven over all day sleep at night, cook themselves food and try to work up their way in the underground business?

I have to agree with inmate that the communication is painfully hard for this subject, as the mainstream popularity in games has been kindled by simple games that carry the name "rpg". The terminalogy has been worn out by some who do not understand if fully or don''t care to use it ineffectively. How can such problems be prevented or cured?

From my experience of seeing other people, I have to agree with extrarius too, there are never ending games. These games (WC3 & CT are good examples) have a story, somewhere, but that could be seen as an introduction to the real, on-line version of the game. I know people who do play it long and seemingly indefinetaly. For them it''s like going to a squash, soccer or other types of sports training: they practise their skills for fun.

Personally I don''t feel much for these games. I''ve played them myself and my experience is that they tend to have bad effects on me. The games seems to subdue the mind by requiring it to constantly alert on a number of different things.... snipers, bunny hoppers, rushers, creepers, each game has it''s a good number of threats that you have to account for. The entire focus of your mind becomes the screen and the sound. The output you give is racing your hands across the keyboard and mouse and possibly voice communication. Whenever you lose you''re eager to play another to get revenge/make up for your loss. Whenever you win you''re eager to continue the trend. It seems to work a bit like gambling, but more harmless as there''s no money involved. However YOU are involved and you are doing something that''s basically unconstructive. This is my pet peeve for doing anything, if it''s not constructive, if I''m not learning anything, it''s possibly not worth my time.

I don''t follow this to the rule or anything, but if I''m spending more than 2 hours on the same thing everyday that I derive no learning from at all, I am wasting my time.

When you are exploring new things in a game you are learning more about the genre, setting, story. When characters interact you learn what they are like and how people respond to each other. If this is badly constructed I''ll notice and I won''t be happy.

And this is what interests me in roleplaying games: they allow you to play a role and face the consequences (or run away from them) without changing yourself everyday. Roleplaying has taught me I can be who I want to be. Roleplaying games allow me to practise this. Life has taught me that people can''t accept that you change all the time. And this is what I think is the true heart of rpg''s. I don''t need a game to be neverending, I can play a next game and continue the character or make a new one. But as said before, it''s stupid if you have to be angry that your village was burned. You could have disliked them in the first place.

(/rant)

I think open-ended games (as opposed to unending games) are quite possible - the trick would be to have a number of stories running simultaneously - which is one of the tricks used in some comic book series, and in several TV shows. The player doesn''t have to get involved in the stories if (s)he doesn''t want to, and probably can''t get fully involved in all of them, but can still be aware of them... I know - this is just a computer soap... still, judging by the market for TV soaps, at least it should sell well (isn''t The Sims headed that way anyway?)

Anyway, just my 2c (and hideously overpriced )

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Say you combine the artificial life systems of The Sims with the gameplay, factions and characters of GTA3. That would be a never-ending game that would ALWAYS be fun. I guess that''s the vision I''m seeing here. A simulated world that never runs out of scenarios. I''m not entirely sure how it would be done, but it''s a very neat idea.

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I can see a way for GTA3 to become extended in scope. The game is limited by the finite amount of missions you can run. Each mission captures some ground for you in some fashion, and this ground cannot be lost. The game effectively ends when you have captured all the ground you can - at this point it becomes a "sandbox" in which you, the violent immortal, putter around disrupting the lives of simulated citizens. However, what if the game had more than one gangster?

Imagine a cross between GTA3 and Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing simulates a village of people who are always doing things, even when the game isn''t running - their actions and events are updated when the game is restarted, based on a real clock. The village of Animal Crossing is certainly much smaller in scope and I''m not suggesting that the GTA "random mooks" be simulated so thoroughly. However, another feature of Animal Crossing is that it supports multiple players independently - that is, only one can be active at a time, but they can both affect the shared state of the village. Intense competition can ensue as each player tries to procure unique objects to decorate his house, which the other player may then attempt to steal for himself.

Now imagine if two or more "gangster files" could be saved in GTA3. Each "gangster file" records the current wealth and possessions of one of the city''s criminal elite (a player). The shared "city file" records the current state of the city, and what belongs to who. Now, each time a mission is run something is accomplished for the player who completed it, marking that mission as completed by him and granting him property and/or sovereignty on a given area. However, for each such property, there is another mission which switches the ownership of the property, so that the person who completed this mission now owns the property and has effectively undone the previous success.

Now to keep the game balanced, so that one player doesn''t complete all of the missions and can therefore dominate the other players, increase the power of faction, and of the mooks in the factions. Say you run a mission which steals a garage from the Yardies. Now the yardies have bad faction with you; whoever you stole it for has good faction with you; and every player who opposes you has good faction with the Yardies. If you try to complete every mission, you will end up having bad faction with every gang - and by boosting the power of the mooks, this means that it''s nearly impossible to complete those last missions. Meanwhile, your enemies have the advantage of receiving weapons, cash, and support from all the gangs who now hate you.

The only problem I foresee with this plan is that it could stagnate into a multilateral division of the city. Perhaps this could be countered by degrading your faction with your supporters if you don''t go on the offensive enough and try to capture turf for them. In order to get the most out of your holdings you''d have to continually steal someone else''s - which keeps things interesting.

Oh, and of course this could be extended to network play, although given the power of a GTA3 Player Character, the games should probably be limited in number of players - perhaps at most one per faction. It would be nice to actually engage in combat with rival gangsters in person. *blam blam blam* Eat nine milly, bitch! Sorry, got carried away there. On the other hand, preventing players from acting simultaneously would create the sort of impersonal conflict of strikes to resources (rather than direct combat) which rival mobs engage in (at least in the movies.)

That''s about it out of me for now.

-STC

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-SpittingTrashcan

You can''t have "civilization" without "civil".

Networking could solve that problem. After all, we aren''t necessarily discussing GTA here. Making it a sort of mMORPG (minutely Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) would resolve this issue. You could log on, and have a "buddy list" of sorts, featuring the six other guys you''re playing with. You could chat, by either being within shouting distance or using a cell phone or whatever, and work together or against one another to do different things.

As to multilateral division of the city, I think that would be terrific. You can only work in certain neighborhoods, and if you''re seen on enemy turf, you''ll be in a world of trouble. By the end of GTA3, you can''t even return to Portland, because the mafia (and their shotguns) will kill you on sight. If the world was designed such that you could have faction-based reputation, you could do all kinds of fun things.

To resolve the not-online-right-now problem, you could just throw in the ability to send a guy an in-game e-mail (or some equivalent. Try not to get an idea of a specific game here), so next time he logs in, he''ll get it. Operations could be planned, rude words could be exchanged, and ires could be raised through indirect contact. I think that would be a great deal of fun.

I think that in the realm of stories we are talking about, there are two main types: story-driven and character-driven.

Story-driven stories focus on a finite story, that is a story with an initiating incident, development, a climax, an end, and a retrospective. This paradigm is used by almost all stories--the only story I know that does not follow this paradigm is The Catcher in the Rye . It might loosely follow the story cycle, but it is more of a character-driven story, focusing on Holden. Games like these will often put you in any character''s shoes and take you through a great adventure.

Character-driven stories focus on the growth and development of a certain character or group of characters. A good example of this, as was previously stated, is The Catcher in the Rye . After I read it for the first time, I was somewhat disappointed, for there was almost no climax. It took me some time to realize that the story is not based on Holden''s adventure, it is based on the interesting synical character of Holden himself. This is the premise of RPGs. RPGs let you make your own character and define the growth and development of that character.

Stories are generally story-driven (if they were not, what would they be called? Characters?), but most of the time the story will be a hybrid between the two, leaning towards one direction or the other. I feel that The Lord of the Rings is a story that is a hybrid between an adventure and the characters, leaning towards the characters themselves. You might notice that the story focuses more on how the characters are effected by the story than the story itself. The story is about the fall of The Lord of the Rings and The Return of the King, but it focuses on the characters within the story.

The reason that I think that MMORPGs are not endless stories is that there is no story to them. The whole thing is about the growth and development of your character while interacting with other characters. The only premise that a MMORPG has for a story is in The Chaos Theory.

I believe that an endless story environment can be created, provided computers are powerful enough to handle these games. One can look back into history and observe how humans have interacted with each other to provide a model of how humans will respond to certain events. You can make a template human, whose properties are defined randomly and by the parents to provide general characteristics of that person. That human then grows and develops on their own by interacting with other humans. This makes the game somewhat of a MMORPG that the computer will play with itself, and, if done correctly, will model a beginning, a climax, and an end. The thing that seperates this from MMORPGs is that, instead of everyone trying to create their own story and not being afraid of dying, the game will interact mainly with the user and that the AI will play like they will only live once, effectively creating the world all over again, letting the player play all possible stories imaginable.

You could modify this basic concept greatly to effectively create your own universe with your own beings on it. Most importantly though, you would modify it so that although the AI is afraid of dying, it will still take chances, and the characteristics of that person will be exaggerated so as to create a more interesting story.

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Original post by elendil67
Story-driven stories focus on a finite story, that is a story with an initiating incident, development, a climax, an end, and a retrospective.
...
Character-driven stories focus on the growth and development of a certain character or group of characters. ... This is the premise of RPGs. RPGs let you make your own character and define the growth and development of that character.
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Alright, heres where I was talking about the communication barrier we have. For the average RPG player, character development is expressed as a series of numbers and/or grades. You could develop your character in that you can make it so he can smelt iron into a weapon on his own, but thats not what we talk about when we refer to character development on the literary standpoint. What we do talk about is a character presented witha conflict and learning to overcome the conflict. Most often, these conflicts are emotional, or relational. If you''ll allow me to Cite FF7, the main character Cloud suffered from memory and personality disorders. Throughout the course of the game, the literary story provided events that helped him to overcome his issues. The was no EXP, or meter showing how he stood on this issue, it had to be infered. (And even then, cloud faced regression until it occured to himself that he even had an issue, which was after Aerith''s death.)

As computer generated stories are concerned, I have the distinct feeling that a story could never be generated to create that for of situation. Frankly, even the human brain has trouble wrapping itself around a concept, as shown by the immense number of hollywood movies regarding vampires, and the very small number of films presenting real character development.

Now, as for PNP, MMORPG is concerned, yes, you can let yourself pretend to be a character, your DM can present issues that let you try to evolve the character the way you want. Quite creative. But any algorythm computer science can come up with today will only replace a DM with a set of Yes/No questions you answer before hand as to what type of story you want. You will not see any literary development. A to B to C, and no stopping to wonder why you are even on the adventure.

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The only "endless" game wothwile playing extensivly is one where the players have control over the rules.

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Not really. If you think about it. Our world has it''s own rules, and we (the players) do not have control over them. And so far this "game" we call life has been pretty endless, and it''s worthwhile.

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A good neverending game would have an ultra-optimised scripting language which had a Forrest-Gump lowest level

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god did a pretty good job with this. note:Im not being sarcastic.
Really. The only way I see a never ending game is ... well I dont really see how it can be done yet. I dont know if its possible or not, but I cant think up of a way. I guess the best path you can take to make a never ending game is to follow god. Although I think that never-ending would be boring. Even god was smart enough to realize this. He gave you a beginning and an end. There is always a beginning and an end (some exceptions ie: numbers). I mean imagine you were immortal. would you really truely enjoy living for ever. Dont you wanna find out what''s next. I mean this cant be it. can it? I think it''s much more exciting to have a goal set in your life, and to try to achieve that goal. The good thing about life is that it''s programmed in such a way, that you can set your own goal, with no trouble at all. The problem is reaching that goal. In an RPG the developer has to provide a goal, and a way(s) to reach that goal. If the player never reaches the goal then s/he gets annoyed. And after s/he reaches the goal, it''s over.

....a plyer needs something to look forward to...

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Since I favor story-based games...what many would consider linear based games, I''m actually not in favor of it. To me ALL things must come to an end, and most especially stories.

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I agree.
I think a story automatically generates a sense of purpose in the game world. It give you goals to accomplish. You adopt a persona, and through that persona you interact with the environment that the developer has created. In an MMORPG you have to create that sense of pirpose for yourself. I think that''s where the line is, that''s the reason some people prefer "console type" RPGs and some prefer "PC type" RPGs. It depends on how much effort they are willing to put into _starting out_ . Having a never ending story would take away the goal. No goal would resuklt in no motivation, and the joy of completing the goal is gone. I assume with this never ending game, there would be many many many sidequests? What about the big awsome boss that''s difficult to beat, and that you''ve been gaining experience for. Will that battles keep on getting tougher? If the toughness stops and you reach max level, then there''s no point in playing any further. cause there would be no more challenges, no more goals. Of course there is nothing wrong with the "create your own existance" approach. I dont enjoy it (yet), but others do. To me it''s like neing at a party that I wasnt invited to, and on top of that I dont know anyone there, and I dont know how to get around. Basically I dont know where to start. Some people will "mingle", some people will leave. Actually if you think about it, it''s just a different way of story telling, where the user has to get more effort into getting a story out of the experience.

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