Place holder for a much longer blog 🙂
Month: December 2013
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Rewards, Perspective & Time
I’m really bummed. After a long run this morning, I cleaned up and wrote this beautiful blog supporting the topic. I pressed the”update button” and nothing. Everything went away. Thus now I must try to regurgitate what was once very warm in my brain.
One of the big differences between game engines and the Raconteur engine is the motivation to keep the player “in the game”. I must emphasise the Raconteur engine is not a game engine. Thus many of the core mechanics must change. Visitors of the Raconteur engine are not really players in the game but visitors to the story world. However for simplicity, I will call visitors of the story world as “players in the game” since both serve a simmilar function.
Growing, expanding, leveling, defeating your opponnent are all the rewards which keep the players playing within the game engine. What sets the Raconteur engine apart from other “game” engines is the reward system – the reason to keep participating. With a game engine the goal is to win, grow, get larger, go further, collect more dots, beat the other guy; win. The Raconteur engine is not a game engine. Therefore another must be established.
What draws us to film, books, television and other print media? It’s certaiinly not the opportunity to win. I think rather its about curiosity and resolution. What builds that curiosity is rapport. Rapport is an extremly human “feeling” that controls almost everything we do in life. Why Rapport is so important to us and why it is a cornerstone to our foundation of happiness is the subject for another article. Regardless, the curiosity we have for the characters is what compells us us to participate and resolution is the reward we get for playing.
Since Rapport is so important to pull us into the storyworld then perspective must be one of the primary parameters. Almost any situation can be perceived in almost any emotional context. The rapport we have with the character dictates the emotional response to every situation. Therefore, perspective must be one of the primary tools for keeping the audience in the game.
Perspective is such a very illusive topic. What complicates things is that perspective is not bound by time; it is four dimensional. The brain can tell no difference between the memories of the past, the perception of the present and the visions of tomorrow. All of this contributes to the emotional state of every character, Thus exposure to perspective must be independent of time. Iif some characters are devoting their perspective to the past and others are focussing on the future,how will the Raconteur engine deal with the characters in the present? Two timescales must be established. The first is the story world time. This is constant and moves very similarly to to our own time. The second is the per character perspective time. This time is ultimately bound by the story world time. However, it is not bound by the same restrictions. in fact it is bound only by the exposure to any other perspective it can get in contact with.
There will be more on each of these topics.
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New Direction for Raconteur?
While this thought is not new, I’ve had trouble justifying it in the past because of cost considerations. However, a new thought hit me today and it might be a potential solution for getting this show on the road.
I have not written about this to this blog but this concept has been on my mind for a long time. I’d like to create an immersive AR/VR experience. Currently, there is no way for we as humans to jack into the matrix and have it feed us CG content to override our five senses. However, until that interface exists, there are still millions of problems to solve generating that content and presenting it such a way that it is interesting, motivating and compelling. This goes right along what I am looking to do in the Raconteur engine. The environments, characters and stories present enough research potential for hundreds grad students and researchers for quite many years.
The test bed for this system is a virtual amusement park/adventure land. I’ll call this virtual story world. Visitors to this world will be equipped with a headset complete with VR goggles and earphones. Eventually an emitter can be provided to generate CG smells. In addition to the headset, the visitors will be wearing a trackable body suit. The suit will be used to track the precise movements of the visitor. The visitor’s motions will be fed into central program which will driver an avatar for the visitor. A CG environment and the avatar will be directed back into the VR Goggles. The story world will be constructed of a re-configurable collection of walls, doors, steps and props. The visitor will not perceive the the real story world. Instead, he will see and hear the interpretation of the story world as re-created by the Raconteur engine. Other characters in the world will either be other players or agents generated by the engine.
The story world will be constructed inside old shopping malls, supermarkets or other abandoned large spaces. The visitors will experience an alternative reality story generated by the Raconteur engine. The story world will provide the physical resistance as perceived by the engine. Touch will be provided by the story world; sight and sound by the engine. I have not figured  out a way to deal with physical contact with other characters however yet.