The legendary dwarf fortress. I would like to know what they mean when they say agents are informed of their circumstances. Is there like a layer that describes every scene in english so the LM gets to answer? What's funny to me is how it basically a village of superficial liers, but they are allways nice to eachother. I doubt little Eddy has commited a single note to memory by now
. But yes that's what I said elsewhere once: if you just want to fill a procedural world with credible actors, it probably suffices to inform the LM of the scenery so it can
LARP away. Give it a "dialectic module" so it can ask itself questions - WWJD basically lol - so it can work itself down the steps of a given procedure. All in text, hypothetically so to say. But if it can enunciate the proper steps, at the right moment, conjugated to sound like individual (separate) actor(s), if prompted...
My personal convictions about
ugh this is going to be a pretentious neologism... chronophenomenologics
(sorry I tried to have this debate once before I just can't give it the same energy twice, you're going to have to bear with me)... make it quite intuitive to me: you don't need to believe that decisions are taken before the ego steps in to justify them afterwards (more or less according to Schoppenhauer) for it to work in this context. It's quite similar to how we can't
actually really tell for ourselves. A world where everybody exclaims their current course of action would ruin any suspension of disbelief. If they get prompted by the player or certain events in the log only, that is good enough actually. Kinda what they be doing atm. Minus the dialectic, the answer to a prompt is allways kind of definitive.
It's particularly cool if whatever happened causing the game to start makes their past irrelevant, secluded from the game environment. Then they get to make up whatever background stories they want.
But also more broadly, just the fact to have a companion type, friendly npc that helps you, with whom you could discuss whatever (what will you do when we x? after all we went through do you think the gods have forsaken us? ever wondered what's behind that mountain? what do you do when we are not questing?) could be hell of neat. If it's in a contemporary setting you might even discuss IRL more broadly with it.
I think there might be a little goldrush once a LM can comfortably run locally on a midtier gaming pc: there are a bunch of gameconcepts that can revolve around the LM specifically, where there rest of the game can basically be copy pasted from existing inspiration sources, its basically just what they did in the experiment in the article + a game engine that allows more actions.