If I remember correctly, the title above means "New Project."

Creating an Adaptive/Learning Game

In my fictionalized world of Tarex Station, I have been hoping to include what I call "New Luxor", a city on the Saturnian moon of Dione. The concept of New Luxor came out of a photo shoot that I did in the winter of 1997. New Luxor represents a world apart from the warm comfortable planet Earth: in more ways than one.

The idea that I have been toying with was to have a game developed around the world before the story is completed. The Tarex Station, the city of New Luxor, and the outlying areas as described on the introduction page of this web site set the stage for the story and the game.

Simulation

The game represents that world in a simulation format: similar to the games "Sim City" or "Civilization" except that the emphasis is on the social interactions that successfully or unsuccessfully make things happen. Meetings, contracts, social customs and communication, as well as the physical assets make a civilization work. On Dione these social-economic realities are also present...

The difference here will be the strange customs and challenging realities of this "alien" world. And much like the first computer adventure game "Zork", all you know is "your in a forest" and your basic commands seem to be all you know. Naturally this could be played like the original "Zork" with a simple command line entry, but I suspect that will be boring to many of todays youth.

To handle this problem, some amount of graphics and visual tools would be produced to make it interesting. Progression in the game would be indicated by three main measures: at the personal-individual level (G1); at the Corporate level (G2); and at the Community level (G3). Each of these would determine your overall game position/score. The game score is the traditional measure common to pinball games. The game position is more of a "will you be around for the next challenge". How this would be controlled follows in the next section (see unique identifier under  "A Profitable Venture").

The sophistication required to pull this off may involve what I call "burst real-time transactions" and some Artificial Intelligence. A burst real-time transaction represents a section of time that is essentially the same as what you experience when you drive your car or talk to a friend. For you time is uninterrupted, continuous. Some "real-time" computer simulations approach this using a real-time clock, separate from the system clock. All of the real-time progamming tasks of the simulation run at a given frame rate and all must complete within an overall given time frame (ex. 150 msec). This helps produce the fidelity necessary to simulate real world environments like aircraft flight simulators.

Burst Real-Time Transactions are similar in that they are a snapshot of the linear time in the "life" of your game characters. Each time you play, you continue from exactly where you left off in terms of events and time remaining to live, based upon your actions. Time between the actual run of one game transaction and the next would be like when you were reading the manual on how to play or you notes or when you decided to go to bed at 3 am.

This game will probably have to be run as "unregulated burst real-time transactions" because most players at home won't have a true real-time clock for a reference signal to run the simulation in a regulated (true real-time) mode. Plus, operating systems and other tasks would make balancing the task loads impossible. Additionally, play over the internet via some streaming data scheme would be at the mercy of the connection available to the user.

A Profitable Venture

This would be a game in which you pay a small fee to get access and "a life." The idea is that for the fee you get access and you begin with a game identity associated with some kind of unique identifier. This way you will, hopefully, be limited/encouraged to running only one game (unless you have an unlimited budget). Why? The game design will be such that you will learn about it, while it learns and adapts to you. The premise is that no two games or players will be played the same. Each facet leading to the game outcome will be unique.

Certainly this may sound like a tall order to design and develop but at least it will be a healthy alternative to the Doom or Quake M.U.D.s that lead people down the stimulus- response path to game play (i.e. Salivating Dog). Not to forget the desensitization to violence that may be leading our society toward a premature end. The point of games should be learning to appreciate and master something of value in life, as well as have fun.

Continued on Game Environment