Lovely post Michael!

A certain immediacy and intuition seems to be prerequisite in games made today. Why would the average customer choose high investment entertainment over a lower one? I think this has done a lot of damage to the strategy games I used to enjoy. The development of intuitive games falls easily upon realism. If a game looks and acts like the world we know, we discard the investment of learning its rules. This raises the minimum development cost across the board, striving for realism in physics and graphics. This also pushes out the interesting worlds, a grimy war zone more familiar than even a historical setting.

Emergent programming presents a nice balance. The designer can set up a system capable of more scenarios than they've explicitly considered. Though we do find difficult (and more mathematical) problems very quickly! You mention Dwarf Fortress, which is quite happy to let systems interact unchecked. Both the design and the agents in the game face problems from the lack of predictability.

How does one program intelligent characters for unforeseen situations? It's quite easy to establish an oscillation in discrete time systems like these games. How can a player sympathize with a character surprised by longstanding routine events? How can the computational cost of forecasting the future reflect the randomness or regularity a character has actually observed?

Further, how does one control gameplay once off piste? In a scripted game the pace of events and challenges can be mapped out at the designers leisure. Allowing emergent challenges could result in unwelcome fluctuations, long periods of boredom sparsely populated with moments of literal impossibility.

Please keep us up to date as you build the mind of the fisherman!

David

Great post, @Michael Hale ! - And a great discussion. I've added a few animated GIFs. I am sure @Rob Lockhart, who is in the game industry, would be curious to take a look. And you guys would probably be curios to know about his Important Little Games and perhaps his recent post on game analysis: Analyzing a Dataset of Game Releases (or @David Gathercole's Analysis of 'Magic the Gathering' card game ).

On a general note, the whole thread reminded me of the game Heavy Rain. I liked the presence of sophisticated narrative, - more sophisticated than in an average game. I enjoy an original fiction book or movie. I'd love to see that incorporated in games more tightly via interactivity and a good story (NY Times Book Review grade). But Heavy Rain also would progress to a number of different endings depending on the sum of the player's performance even if all the characters become incapacitated in some manner, that's interesting. I am probably too old school and missing a lot of new developments in the game industry.

Again, great conversation !

Thanks, Vitaliy. I put the original post together via remote desktop over a mediocre WiFi connection while hanging out with a friend during their bar tending shift. After the connection dropped several times, I gave up on adding any new visuals. Now that I'm back on a good connection, I added one more image of the property influence network for the current full set of rules.

Thanks for the links. They are all interesting. I haven't played Heavy Rain, but I've heard people talk about it. Yes, I would say the goal is to get branching behavior of at least that granularity, but without having to hand script all of the possible outcomes. Perhaps an even more recent step in that direction was Until Dawn. Their marketing even refers to the engine supporting the "Butterfly Effect". I haven't played it though, so I can't personally comment on how intricate or responsive the game world is.

I'm hoping that this design process will identify the most interesting choices and branches a story could take early in development, to help allocate content creation resources appropriately. Probably the last big action game I really enjoyed was Bioshock Infinite. Ironically, for a story about intertwining character arcs in the quantum mechanical multiverse, the game was extremely linear. There were many cutscenes where I thought it would be interesting to make a different choice. Perhaps an approach like this could help developers identify and explore those options early on in development before they are already committed to a particular story or set of choices.