The Interpersonal Subgame

My theoretical work had convinced me of the importance of interpersonal factors. Much work on the problem had yielded Gossip as a design study, and the result was good enough to integrate into the overall design.

Gossip provided a firm foundation on which to build, but it lacked context. Characters in Gossip adjust their feelings in response to each other's feelings, but there was no underlying dynamic to support these relationships in the first place. I needed a mechanism for creating conflict, a stage with some props on which my characters could develop disputes that could provide fodder for the Gossip engine.

Game design, like any form of software design, turns on the three fundamental steps of interactivity: listening, thinking, and speaking. A computer game listens to its player through joystick or mouse and keyboard, it thinks with its algorithms, and it speaks to the player through its monitor and speakers. Good game designers must keep all three factors in mind while struggling with difficult design decisions. It was the conjunction of these three requirements that made the task of designing some sort of interpersonal relationships game so difficult. How was I to show the emotionally significant interactions among the characters? I knew I could probably figure out some decent algorithms, but how was I to get input from the player about emotionally significant actions?

Gossip provided no help here. I couldn't have Arthur telephoning his knights to exchange catty remarks about others. After months of hand-wringing, I came to the conclusion that no ready solution to the problem existed; interpersonal relationships are pursued with too much complexity to be reduceable to the simple input structures available to me on the 8-bit, 1MHz machines of the day.

Nevertheless, I was determined to come up with something, so I resolved to insert the Gossip engine into the design as a primarily autonomous and low-interactivity system (Figure 20.1). The display showed a group of shields, each shield bearing the distinctive crest of each knight of the Round Table. In the center of the area was a shield representing the player, King Arthur. The other shields were scattered around King Arthur in an arrangement that reflected their cumulative feelings. A good friend would nudge up close to Arthur, while a sworn enemy would stand in a far corner. Of course, the knights also had relationships among themselves, which tended to tug and push knights into different locations.

20.1. Excalibur interpersonal subgame.

Arthur's only options in this display were to bribe the knights with either money or honors. Money came out of Arthur's limited treasure chest; honors to one knight diminished the value of honors already handed out to others. That was the best I could come up with.