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Original post by solinear Trying to sift through the hundreds or even thousands of people who would be walking around even a small town/city streets to find the 3 people who would actually help progress your game plot would be worthless. These are the people who are likely to contribute something to the game experience. Whether it be through quests, information or just comic relief. Even with map size, it's about enjoyment, walk across the town you live in... I know the small city that I live in (~250k people in the 'urban' area) would take an hour or two. Nowhere near fun. I'd much rather take 10 minutes to do the same thing and get on to the fun stuff... combat and quests.

But isn't this a sorting problem? What's funny is that you're assuming a player has to tag every NPC out of those hundreds / thousands / whatever even though you and I do not do this IRL. IRL, you and I have our list of friends and contacts and their daily experiences may generate references based on what we tell them we're doing. If I tell someone I've recently had a need to create a website they may know someone who can help me. When this fails there are directories of services that serve the same purpose, though without the reliability of friendship; these directories may even be rated by some other source for quality, so that I can figure out who in my area is best at repairing something, or making something.

If the future of games involves larger worlds this is one way that such a sorting problem (who has the gameplay I need to get to) will be solved. It might even be fun going from reference to reference and getting caught up in their personal plots and drama.