7.10. Character Emotion

| Chapter 7: Other Characters |

| 7.10. Character Emotion

In a complex story, characters may evolve strong feelings about the player. Often we want to hint at the character's feelings through gesture and tone of voice - little things woven into dialogue and action sequences that might otherwise be unchanged. Ferragamo Again demonstrates creating phrases to give all our characters different ways to express their irritation at the player.

Then again, sometimes a discussion might produce quite spectacular results if a character is in the wrong mood. Being Peter shows the bare bones of an implementation in which a character's attitude rulebook is consulted to determine what her response will be - allowing for arbitrarily complicated outcomes.

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| Example Ferragamo Again Using the same phrase to produce different results with different characters. |
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| Example Being Peter A set of rules determining the attitude a character will take when asked about certain topics. |
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Let's say that we're implementing a particularly irrational and volatile character. Some of the time she remains composed; some of the time she reacts with unexpected vehemence for reasons only partly related to what was said. Moreover, her responses are divided between successful and failing outcomes, where success indicates that she's not too upset and failure means that she is distraught; we use this to determine how the rest of the room reacts. "Being Peter" The Drawing Room is a room. "The company is assembled here for champagne. Most of it, anyway: Mary is on the phone to her babysitter, Roger is keeping her anxious company, and Carol doesn't drink. But everyone else." Maggie is a woman in the Drawing Room. The player wears a top hat. Quizzing it about is an action applying to one thing and one visible thing. Understand "ask [someone] about [any thing]" as quizzing it about. Instead of quizzing Maggie about something: consider the attitude rules; say "Everyone waits to see what the reaction will be: [outcome of the rulebook]."; if rule succeeded, say "There is general relief."; otherwise say "Everyone is pointedly silent." The attitude rules are a rulebook. The attitude rules have outcomes she stays calm (no outcome - default), she gets angry (failure), she has a stroke (failure), she is only mildly annoyed (success), and she is elated (success). Here we want Inform to consult every appropriate attitude rule until it gets to some answer; if an attitude rule does not provide a result, the default 'no outcome' will mean that we go on to the next rule, and so on. A subject is a kind of thing. income, love life, and children are subjects. An attitude rule for quizzing Maggie about love life: she gets angry. An attitude rule: if the player wears the top hat, she gets angry. Now, as we saw, the 'no outcome' result will never be returned and printed as Maggie's reaction, precisely because it is "no outcome". Therefore, we provide a final attitude rule which will give her a default response to all statements: The last attitude rule: she is only mildly annoyed. Test me with "ask maggie about love / ask maggie about income / take off hat / ask maggie about income". There are plenty of contexts where we might want named outcomes for clarity but not want to print the results literally afterward.

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