[MUD-Dev] Re: Eye movement.

[Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt <hhs#cbs,dtu.dk>]

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, James Wilson wrote:
>
> One could also construct misperceptions between races, nations, and economic
> classes of humans, of course. Members of a clan might notice details significant
> only to their clan (or perhaps to an opposing clan). 
> 

Not as much economic classes ad educational. 
If you are able to place the character in an educational context, you 
could do some word 'rearrangements' to describe the world differently. 
Less educated (read non-educated) tend to describe things with relation
to what they use, need and see every day. f.inst.

Bette enters the room,

Buffy the lady in waiting sees:
  Bette appears wearing a fine cyan dress decorated 
  with elaborate golden broidery from the far coast.

while Buffo the brutish stableboy sees:
  Bette appears in a cornflower-colored dress with
  glitter stuff on it... Good boobs.

As the runling of misunderstanding different races may be good
in-game, deciding when Buffo have learned that the glitter stuff is
indeed gold, and called 'broidery' and recognice it as comming from
the far coast, as well as being able to use the abstraction 'cyan' for
the color is indeed a non trivial task. You would have to handle the
knowledge of a person, and relate this to your database.

> This will be an important area
> aesthetically, as the amount of interpretation provided will color every user's
> experience. 

Indeed! deciding where and when to do this kind of interpretation is
indeed important. If one was to use it, it should be as a tool for the
player, and player controlled. You should provide every player with
the means to manipulate his knowledge tree. Then the user could
decide, that now she knew about 'whatever', and thus you would not
as much hinder the user, as providing a tool for roleplaying.

This ofcause require some elaborate user interface, most likely some
natural language parser that allows knowledge tree/frame-updates with
respect to the game environment. Even better would be to detect
whenever a person heard another person describing a concept they knew
about, and the update the knowledge base automatically.

Defining the world would then require some descriptions based on
detailed concepts, as well as a database of conceptsintroduces, and
their description with regard to other concepts. All this ofcause is a
_major_ task, but it would be cool :-) 


Hans Henrik Stærfeldt         |  
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  at University of Copenhagen |   Technical University of Denmark.