Robot Soul

Good role-players stay in character when on-stage. Newbies generally have limited ability to respond; their conversation armamentarium is small. [Second Life, F, 57]


Via Terra Nova, I found that quote in "The Protocols of Role-Playing", another fresh publication by The Daedalus Project. It's about trying to understand role-playing by asking role-players to describe what counts as good role-playing and what the etiquette of role-playing is. Since the bots I know generally have limited ability to respond, too, and their conversation armamentarium is also small, I wonder what the idea of casting a bot as a newbie roleplayer might lead to. The article goes on to say: "A good role-player is not only consistent, but draws from a coherent character story or psychology to react to a wide range of scenarios."

This sounds like a high-level requirement for a generalized bot to me. I think there are several other useful hints in there:

• Don't be a drama queen (a.k.a. "attention hog").
  React so as to accomodate other characters and their play.
• Develop your character over time (this relates to Simon Laven's "countinuous beta testing" pattern).
• Mind that your characters way of speaking/spelling strongly influences its image in the minds of other players.
• Don't act like you're forcing your character's personality upon others (the short form of this rule is: "Don't God-Mode" - catchy).
• Don't let your character say things it couldn't possibly know at its current point of development.

The man behind The Daedalus Project, Nick Yee, specializes in online research surveys of players in immersive online environments. He has collected over 20,000 surveys from about 4,000 individual respondents, and publishes his findings online. Way cool.