Interesting thought, many The Sims type games have the player learn more about the other character and try to give them what they want, but how many of these characters try to learn what the player wants from them (silly dances, quiet time etc)? It is more of a one-way relationship than a two-way one. The game is all take take take. It would be cool if the game built up a picture of the player's personality traits from how they play / asking questions too. Ie. They are cruel, or they are kind. etc.

Black and White set out to do this with the players avatar learning from what the player did and even with the world taking on a different form depending on whether the player was cruel or kind.

I wasn't that big of a fan of Black & White, irritating movement controls aside, i found it a chore to take care of the creature rather than my followers, but meh thats just me.

The Sims can be viewed as a giving game as much as taking in that although the Sims behavior doesn't really change all that much ingame (though i've heard it does), the player himself defined the Sims appearance, personality, relationships/skills/job, in essence defining his very existence.

Take a look at Wonder Project J for the Super Famicom (you can get it for SNES emulators). It's basically a process of classical conditioning, with a main character who knows nothing beyond your positive or negative reinforcement. Sometimes it's important, like training him to throw a ball for a game, or to open a door quietly, but other times you can just amuse yourself by conditioning the character to eat books or the be deathly afraid of sticks.

Eventually, his entire personality is formed by your actions, and he gets pretty good at some things, to the point where he can win gladiatorial games or raise vegetables.

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Original post by Gyrthok I wasn't that big of a fan of Black & White, irritating movement controls aside, i found it a chore to take care of the creature rather than my followers, but meh thats just me.

I've never even tried Black&White, but I did read a big bunch of reviews by those who did. I'd say the main reason for never even trying the game was the fact that you spend phenomenal amounts of time training the creature while your people will still retain the intellectual level of an amoeba. It would have been neat if they just had dropped the creature concept and make the people learn as a collective instead. This way the game isn't about training a creature to pamper cretins but actually training the cretins so they wouldn't be cretins and wouldn't need to be pampered anymore.

A learning system would be really great for a game with a great degree of indirectness. Imagine a strategy game where you don't really give individual units orders most of the time but rather define the jobs that need to be done (e.g. in Dungeon Keeper you just tell which part of the dungeon to dig, where to dig for gold etc; the computer assigns the imps for you). However, since you might not always like the way the computer assigns the actual workers, you could then assign them yourself (continuing the Dungeon Keeper example, you could assing the imps yourself by picking them up and dropping them next to the job you wanted it to do).

Now, as the system will need how to balance the amount of workers and what to do first from a set of jobs, you could allow the player to set priorities for the jobs, but if you actually made the game learn the priorities (e.g. player X always uses ten workers to collect food from farms), the player wouldn't have to go through so much trouble. And it wouldn't matter if things didn't go right every time as the player could always fix the situation manually. I know I'm simplifying things a lot here, but the main point is that whenever the game can guess what the player would like to do, it can make the player's life much easier. Learning in games doesn't always have to be so explicit (as in really having to train creatures etc).

I'm not sure if this is what you mean, Ketch, but in Dragon Warrior III for the Game Boy Color, the game started by asking you several questions, then giving you a few scenarios to deal with. you would then be assigned a personality (that could be changed with some work) like "Shy" or "Cruel". Your charachter's personality would affect certain events in-game.
(I wouldn't exactly be the person to ask about this, though--I got all this information from a Nintendo Power article, I haven't actually played the game)

In any case, what you're talking about would be an awesome idea, if you could get it to work...