"As a young cadet, your confidence collapsed whenever you were in the presence of the great captain. You found yourself making mistakes, or even stuttering. But that's all past now. Now that you've become a captain yourself, you can look him in the eye, and when he looks back you see respect." People develop personality traits that strengthen their ability to achieve certain goals in life. They also develop traits that can be their downfall (like posting excessively on GameDev. O.o) What if, both for the purposes of your character's own personal story, and boosts or drawbacks in gameplay, you leveled your character along a tree of personality attributes. The attributes would be things like "Uncanny calm", "dogged determination" or "winning smile" and could be pulled off like magic spells or combat moves when needed. Using them would burn "Morale" points, which is one of two or three critical resources you'd have in game (recharged by character specific events, like victories over a favored enemy; or by items ranging from hard narcotics to an encouraging letter from a trusted mentor). Along with positive traits, negative traits would also crop up. "Untrustworthy" would make it harder to get people to help you; "thuggish" would make people more afraid of you; "long-winded" would mean people stop reading your posts. [razz][grin] Since nobody would willingly choose a negative trait, negative would automatically be paired with positive ones. So you might have "Superficial" ("winning smile / untrustworthy"), Humble ("winning smile" / "unconfident"), etc. as varities of choices. The choices would radiate out from a moral center like rays from a compass, in directions that made you more humane, savage, rebelliously freethinking, fanatical, etc. The farther you'd get down a path, the harder it would be to reach its extreme opposites. You'd build up personality "points" in a manner similar to experience points, but the points apply to different moral categories. So giving a sick old woman food would give you the option to spend points developing humane traits, while attacking the old woman would build up savage trait points. Points in opposite areas would subtract from each other in a kind of "lightside/darkside" system (but with more options).

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Freeplay Mode Example: You're wandering a city map when you encounter a group of thugs mugging an old man. As you enter the area, an icon ghosts in in the corner, alerting you that a defining moment is up ahead. If you continue, it strengthens, and you can click it (if you want to be deterministic about it) to see how the situation might affect you. If you click the icon, this popup appears: "Thugs victimizing the weak. The old man needs help, and some part of you says it would be the right thing to do. But why should you stick your neck out for him? After all, everybody's got problems in life, and if he can't take care of himself he shouldn't be out here. Anothing thought crosses your mind: You could use this whole situation to your advantage, while the thugs are preoccupied..." In this random event, you can either level toward a Just personality type, a Dispassionate personality type, or an Amoral type. As you advance in personality, the popups should reflect the choices more consistent with your personality type, almost as if it were an inner voice.

A bit OT: That pairing of good with bad traits reminds me of Fallout, and the lightside/darkside reminds me of Black & White. Both great games btw.

Creating a game just based on this idea seems a bit small, i don't know what you have in mind but using it to complement a game would probably work nicely, i'm imagining a spy/hacker game where this is a 'weapon' of the main character(manipulation/social engineering), the lightside/darkside could even be used to turn the main character(agent-double agent/blackhat-whitehat). =)

I like this idea a lot. It's the sort of stuff I've been thinking about for my own project.

It is a random event but it has clear-cut explanation to the player as to how this will effect them.

Big Question
I personally think it's bad to tell players things... Now just hear me out for a bit. Say you have this game that tells you everything, asks you everything, and formulates the dialog based on what it knows about those two things.

Why Ask?
Why are you asking them in the first place? Why do you want them to choose who, what, and how they are? I think the downside to this is that people don't know themselves. They will help an old man one day, then the next they'll kill him dead and loot him because he thinks he's the guy that killed him and gave him negative experience.

Example: Simplistic
Now don't let that get you down of course, since this is a good idea. I just don't think that you should ask the player what he is, I think you should determine who he is as he progresses through the game. A good example is alliances. If you kill goblins, then you'll be a goblin killer. Say if you're a goblin killer all the goblins hate you and will agro / link to you. Also say if there have been more goblin killers at any point in time, and you haven't killed a goblin in 1 year game time, chances are they'll forget you and you won't be a goblin killer anymore.

Asking If You Know
Now this is a simplistic example, but it shows a point. You don't have to ask the player "Do you really want to kill this goblin? Goblins are really nice experience, but thenagain what did the goblins do to you?" Text can be extremely annoying and pointless sometimes. Why ask the player what he wants to do, when he already knows what he will do?

Annoyance In Repitition, Benefit of Obscurity
Good idea, just needs some work. I would suggest incorporating a hidden-system if you will that bases interaction on personality types, that sort of thing. Now lets say you were to talk to some NPC, that's where I could see dialog changing. I couldn't see "thought bubbles" popping up in a game and not being increasingly annoying due to their variance and repitition of what you're already thinking at the time.

Variance in Age and Day To Day Experiences
Another issue I think is the age range. Most people from around 13-18 dont' know themselves, they have an average idea during the late teens but chances are one month they'll choose to be goody-goody, and the next week they'll be evil incarnate. That's why I think it's good to start off with zeroed stats, if they help the old man then give them points, but if they just say they'll help the old man at the start of the game it doesn't mean they'll help the old man in two days.

If It Lacks Something
If your game lacks dialog, then I would see a very good use for this. Even if you're limited to how many paths you can safely choose within your Personality Engine that will have good responses, if your game lacks dialog then you definately need something more.

All your ideas bring me back to that psychological profile system of yours. This is brilliant, and has merit as an alternative to level grinding. Experience would be experience, and skills would be skills. Beautiful.

I agree that actually telling the player exactly what the consequences of a given action are ahead of time would seem to cheapen the system. Maybe you could do something like the good cop/bad cop system from True Crime. Arresting people is good, incapacitating them is neutral (but cuffing them afterward is good), and killing them outright is bad. Obviously, your system would have to be more nuanced.

I think it would be terrific to see my character develop from a green-horned cadet into a battle-hardened commando and then into a war-weary general. It would be such a fine, epic use of lifespan and experience.

And what a great sense of progress! I'm always pleased when my horse in Dynasty Warriors can go through a whole brigade of enemy forces without stopping (if you try to run down a unit of superior level, your horse will buck). Being able to send your guy into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and have him hold his own under their interrogation would be absolutely spectacular.

Once again, I recommend Wonder Project J. It's a cute little game for the Super Famicom where you train an android and then send him out to address problems on his own. If you do your job well, he'll perform admirably. If not, he'll wuss out, or break (or do something wholly inappropriate, like eat the cat).

That sort of gameplay for key scripted events, like setting up a hyperjump while under enemy fire or infiltrating an enemy science facility would really give the character a sense of competence. In the beginning, you'd just do your grunt job and like it, but as you get more experienced and skilled, you can play a more important role in the story. WIth a reputation, major figures might call on you, Sam Fisher-style, for tough jobs and tricky assignments.

This could be a revolution in video game character development.

I don't think it's actually true that people develop new personality traits as they age - a winning smile, for example, is something a person either has or doesn't have by the time they're a young teenager (barring dental work). As I understand it, a child starts out with a basic personality type determined by genetics, modified by whether they form a secure or anxious attachment to their parents. Children as young as 4 have distinct personalities. These personalities simply specalize more as the child grows depending on positive and negative reinforcement and traumas, and a person's personality is fully developed and unlikely to change by the time they're 18.

That said, I think the idea of growing a personality is a neat one - kind of parallel to a monster breeding and development game only more interesting to a mature audience. Might be a great idea for an MMO or FFTactics type game, or even a Princess Maker/Tamagotchi type game, where all new characters start off as children (newly-hatched aliens, newly-manufactured androids, etc.) and the player influences the development of their personalities.

That is quite a good point you have there.

I would see a great advantage if the player was aging as he progressed through the game. So he might start out at 10 years old in the world, and then he progresses through the game, he ends up being in his 20s or 30s, maybe even on into his 8000's (Hey, sometimes old guys can whip up some really cool spells that do alot of damage, like the old wizard type).

So along with personality mapping, you could also relate that to age, in both dialog of the NPCs and what the character looks like in game (he will slowly age graphically).

From Stephane Bura's post in this thread

http://www.intelligent-artifice.com/2005/03/chris_crawford_.html#more

Quote:

So, as I understand it, I.S. has been about making the natural game play (story) that emerges from game systems into something that is percievably story-like. We're no longer looking at running, jumping, punching and shooting as the main verbs, but, instead, at character modeling (motivation, morality, reasoning etc.) and interaction, meta-actions - actions ABOUT actions (well, in game language!).

I.S being interactive story telling.

Thinking about this I see that it would be possible to make a game where the first few stages - adolescence and young adulthood would shape (level) the character's responses and their *general* responses to things. Ie. If at the start of the game it allows you to be anything from good to evil, then it will start to "remove" or at least hide, the out of character responses. Ie. If someone goes around saving kittens, then they shouldn't be as easily able to kill a defenceless deer. For example.

This is an excellent idea.

I would like to see an example of such a tree.

I don't think a tree is really the way to go, because it would turn into a tree of death, with so many branches at the detailed end that it would be impossible to program for. Better to take the approach Xenallure does - have a list of personality axes and use the player's in-game choices to assign them a place on each axis. Then, when you want to use this info to customize what choices you are making available to the player, only check the axes which are relevant to that particular instance, making it a simple 2 or 3 dimensional Venn diagram problem to calculate which choices should be available in that instance.

Some examples of what I mean by personality axes (these are only the extremes, one might want to add a 'medium' choice to some of these axes, although medium characters make for more boring stories):

Social Position (Leader, Follower, Switch, Loner)
Social Orientation (Introverted, Extroverted)
Serotonin Level (Optimist, Pessimist)
Testosterone Level (Excessive, High, Low, Insufficient)
- Male: Brute, Alpha, Mama's Boy, Poof
- Female: Butch, Alpha, Mothering, Fainting Lady
Energy Level (Intense, Laid-back)
Anticipation (Paranoid, Cautious, Easy-going, Reckless)
Acting Ability (can't lie worth a darn, lies passably, professional actor/spy)
Self-Esteem (High, Low)
Self-Discipline (Hedonist, Ascetic)
Attention (Attention-seeking, Attention-avoiding)
Morality (Immoral, Amoral, Relativistic Morality, Absolute Morality)
Base Emotion (Bored, Annoyed, Happy, Anxious, Content, Sad, Angry, Mischievious, Self-righteous, Stoic)