How can the power of the players IMAGINATION be harnessed by games? Any ideas are welcome. Here are some thoughts on this: The player''s imagination can really help with conveying powerful experiences by gameplay. For example they are going through the corridors of a shooter, and think that they see something jump.. but then it disappears and they are left to feel paranoia about the creature following them. 1. A persistent environment which exists outside of the player.. ie. things occur around the player in real time, not just when scripts are triggered. 2. There needs to be a consistent environment with processes that occur "naturally" ie. hungry monsters search for "food" unless they have other things on their mind. Fighting leaves signs .. ie. blood, broken environment (lamps etc). Thus when a player sees a blood stain (having previously seen blood stains generated in REAL TIME) they will think that there has been a battle there.. and wonder why is it here? 3. Ambiguity.. don''t [immediately] explain everything that occurs in the game or its scenario.. allow the player to wonder what the meaning of that cryptic warning was. The Thief series was good at this, its setting has inspired much debate amongst its fans.

I definitely agree with you here. Especially the persistant part. I still think there's advantages to a simulated, persistant world and just letting things fly. Let the people and things have certain properties and certain persistant reactions. Like, the hungry bear will always kill the salmon. Stupid example but you get the point

This goes along w/ Wav's idea of combining strategy, sim, and rpg together. It allows the player to know only what he/she can figure out from inquiring, reasoning, etc rather than everything being spoonfed or intentionally hidden from the player. Plus it allows for the world to do a lot of the work of creating a story.


A CRPG in development...

Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.


Edited by - Nazrix on April 30, 2001 11:22:25 PM

I agree - a game that leaves a certain element to imagination is what good program design is all about. A human''s imagination is much more complex and deep than any storyline another person could try and convey thought any known medium. The imagination can take a ambiguous and somewhat vague horror and turn it into his/her own nightmare. On the otherhand, Defining exactly what is lurking in the shadows gets plain boring. In short a good story line should rely on the players imagination than it does on scripts and such.

Use the WriteCoolGame() function
Works every time

Creating a persistent world that lives by itself could force the player into imagining game events that could motivate game signs. I''d really like things like climbing on a tree in a forest to see birds repeatedly flying away in the distance and wonder what are they running from. Or wonder why my pet dog yelps and looks scared. Or wonder what is causing a distant "Thump" that makes circles in pools of water (a la Jurassic Park). But it looks like an extremely hard task. And, you may still end up learning what all the signs mean (like in the last three cases, they all mean the bad monster is coming), and by now the imagination goes away.

This can be fixed to a point by making very different game events produce the same sign (this is Ambiguity). Birds fly away when the troll party sets out to kill whatever they find. Or when a snake climbs the tree. Or when an adventurer blows a whistle of bird scaring. The dog can be scared by hearing the sound of a bee that bit him a while ago, or by smelling a bear or something. And the Thumps could spell either Dragons/TRexs or the Underworld God is angry again.

BUT, anything the player can imagine are game elements (a limited amount), and the gameplay can still end up in risk assesment and logical thinking rather than imagination. Btw, the game should manage a huge database of signs. Things like tracks, smells, piece of cloths, arrows, corpses, etc. This will increase the resources needed even more.

To fully use the POWER of IMAGINATION, the players must imagine things that really ARE NOT part of the game. The gameplay relies on game elements solely though. This is the most cost effective way to add content to a game. And the only way to do this massively is by text.

ADOM had very short and good hand written descriptions of all monsters. The game had absolutely no graphics (text based rogue-like). Yet its monsters and quests have more personality than whatever AAA rpg is out there. Here is an example :

*looks at Blup, the water dragon baby*
A small dragon scaled in dark blue. Its yellow beady eyes filled with sorrow as it howls to the sky. As you approach the poor thing, you''re filled with pity. Seeing the dragon crying its head off now and then makes your heart break.

Sure after this the quest to find Blups mother isnt all too boring work like the average kill all monsters to rescue princess and then deliver her to KingStreet no. 45.

Or another random example of a random monster description:

* looks at Goblin slavemasters *
Rather than fighting for a chieftain, this disgusting creature traps young humanoids weaker than it and sells them on the black market. It has no qualms about selling goblin children, or relatives. On its belt is a long whip, which it uses to keep the slaves in line. A coward at heart, the slavemaster flees from adventurers, and picks on others not its size.


Thief too had lots of text, and I used to read whatever I could get my sneaky hands on. It didnt really help the game (most of the time), but it was plain interesting. If you count the game elements of Thief, you finish in no time : 5 types of guardians, 20 types of furnitures, that many textures, 4 types of robots, three types of surveilance machines, etc. Yet the Thief world was incredibly rich. Because even though those silly sleeping snoring NPC''s were repeating from level to level, in each level you could read specific stuff about them. This is a cook in Lord Baffords manor, and they are suspected of stealing, hehe. This is a regular out of the box hammerit, but wait, I''ve read that prayer he says in one of their holy books. This is a regular surveilance mech face, but hey, I''ve read how much the stupid bank is paying for them to keep me out, .


The NPCs dont have but a very primitive AI (though a lot better than other games). Yet I had in my head a huge world of intrigues, charactes that dont even appear in the game, trade, corruption, religion, hate etc. None of these were part of the game. Knowing any of these didnt make the game easier. It made it hugely better though. It made it worth taking risks not just to fill my pockets with gold, but also because I was honestly curious what of other peoples notes would I find .