In reaction to
Different folks got different problems,
Andrew Stern commented:
While I agree with Conflict = Story, I don't think Interaction = Conflict is always true. That is, I don't think players will always generative interesting conflict; without some help from dramatists (e.g. a drama manager), naive players may only generate banal, uninteresting conflicts, such as griefing or attempts to break the AI.
But where's the agency in that? Why view the player/client as "naive", and judge her actions as "banal" and "uninteresting"? This is
not at all an attitude that I would suggest.
In
Improv acting, this is called "blocking" (unfortunately, there's other usage of "
blocking" in Method acting - "[t]he placement and movement of actors in a dramatic presentation" -; namespaces are sooo important).
If you are offered an idea by another player that you reject, ignore, or condemn, you are Blocking. The scene dies at this point and all cooperation is lost.
So as a rule, I design my bots so as not to block. A block is a bug. Go with the flow.
But of course,
*stomp* the mofu who insists on playing the nasty for too long. "You know what your problem is? You can't believe that I'M THE BOSS 'round here is what your problem is, dude!" That's your drama right there. So I support
Griefing as a common behavior for all my
Actors, human or not.
What does this have to do with
Interaction = Conflict?
I look at the Imitation Game as an application composed from four components:
Game,
Interaction,
Conflict,
Story. Conceptually, I view the arrangement as two crosswisely operating flip-flops, where one flip-flop unit's output at any time is either
Game or
Story, and the other one's is either
Interaction or
Conflict. At any time during operation, the
System is in one of four states:
Game , Interaction
| Game , Conflict
| Story , Interaction
| Story , Conflict
meaning that there are always two components delivering output. Empty outputs are legal, as well as empty inputs. But the normal mode of operation is that the player/client enters some textual input, which changes the bot's state, the state change generating an output as a side effect.
As for the
Interaction | Conflict pair, the purpose of the
Interaction component is to minimize the effects of
Conflict, and the purpose of the
Conflict component is to minimize the effects of
Interaction.
Death is where maximum
Conflict has driven the value of
Interaction to
zero.
