7.2. Liveliness

| Chapter 7: Other Characters |

| 7.2. Liveliness

A character who sits still in a chair and does nothing is much less convincingly alive than one who seems to be pursuing some sort of personal agenda. There are all sorts of ways to achieve this, but the least challenging is by introducing some random change to descriptions, and by giving a character some very simple routine behavior to carry out.

For instance, we'll often want the characters in a room to be described doing different things every time we look at them. Camp Bethel shows how this may be done.

Every turn rules lend some sprightliness to otherwise-silent characters, as well:

> Every turn when the player can see Mrs MacGillicuddy:
> say "Mrs. MacGillicuddy vacuums around [a random fixed in place thing which is in the location]."

We might expand on this by providing a whole table of things for Mrs MacG. to cycle through, or a text variation effect that gives her different activities every turn, as in

> Every turn when the player can see Mrs MacGillicuddy:
> say "Mrs. MacGillicuddy [one of]vacuums around the furniture[or]tries to remove gum from the underside of the desks[or]causes a racket by testing the smoke alarm[or]makes a pointed comment or two about them as sit by idly while someone works her fingers to the bone[as decreasingly likely outcomes]."

This is no great innovation in characterization by itself, but it does at least remind the player that the character is alive and moving about, even when he isn't paying attention to her.

Annoyotron Jr demonstrates a character who actively tries to get our attention, and whose routine of behavior changes just slightly if we show signs of having reacted to him.

Lean and Hungry implements a classic thief, a character who doesn't interact with the player much except to pick up valuable objects he finds left around the map. Later we will see rather more advanced ways to make characters act on their own goals and plans, but this kind of simple behavior is easily rigged as part of an every turn rule.

Finally, Text Foosball extends the every-turn-rule idea to create an opponent who joins us in a randomized game of table soccer.

With animal characters, this kind of repetitive, semi-random behavior is often adequate: we don't expect animals to talk, or pursue steady goals, or to take an interest in what we do in their presence (unless it involves a food they like to eat).

For people, we are likely to need an assortment of additional techniques.

See Animals for a domestic cat and dog

67
| Example Camp Bethel Creating characters who change their behavior from turn to turn, and a survey of other common uses for alternative texts. |
WI

"Camp Bethel" Camp Bethel Kitchen is a room. One use for text alternatives is to change the description of a room after first visiting. We've already seen, in the example "Slightly Wrong", how to do this with "[if visited] ... [otherwise] ... [end if]". But since the first description is printed once and the second description on all subsequent occasions, we could equally well write The description of Camp Kitchen is "[one of]You've never been into the kitchen before, though you've spent many an hour in the dining lodge. The place is larger than you would have expected, and it has none of the fake rustic touches of the rest of the camp[or]A tidy, efficient industrial kitchen, without any of the kitsch rusticity found elsewhere[stopping]." We might also want to liven up the behavior of people and animals, who are probably not doing the exact same thing every time we glance in their direction. There are more complex techniques for modeling the behavior of characters, as we will see in the chapters on Advanced Actions and Activities; but if we just want some textual variety, we might write something like: Jeremy is a man in the Camp Bethel Kitchen. "Jeremy stands at his station, [one of]peeling white onions[or]briskly dicing onions[or]chopping celery[or]peeling carrots[or]tying fresh herbs together with string[or]putting all the vegetables into a large stock pot[or]watching over his boiling vegetable stock[cycling]." And since (textual variation or not) we do want the player to be able to see all these objects: Jeremy carries white onions, celery, carrots, and herbs. Jeremy's station is scenery in the kitchen. It is a supporter. Jeremy is following a sequence of actions to do an implied task (still somewhat robotically, but it will do for now). Animals might be a bit more capricious, though: Fluffy is an animal in the Camp Bethel Kitchen. "[one of]Fluffy is chasing its tail[or]Fluffy is staring out the window[or]Fluffy is rubbing itself against your leg[purely at random]." A housefly is an animal in the Camp Bethel Kitchen. "A large housefly [one of]lands on a countertop[or]flies around noisily[or]circles Jeremy's chef hat[at random]." The housefly's description is merely "at random" rather than "purely at random" because we want to show it doing a different thing each turn, whereas Fluffy could plausibly stare out the window for five turns in a row. There are more complex ways to change and override the initial descriptions of people and things; if text alternatives do not get us far enough, we can turn to the "rule for writing a paragraph about," documented in the Activities chapter. Another frequent use of text alternatives is to give characters a bit of variety in things they're likely to say many times in the course of a game: Instead of telling Jeremy about something: say "Jeremy looks [one of]surprised[or]intrigued[or]nonplussed[at random]. '[one of]You don't say[or]That's very interesting[or]Do go on[or]I wish I'd known that sooner[at random]!'". Or, with somewhat more complexity: Instead of asking Jeremy about something: say "'[one of]Sorry,[or]I'm afraid[or]Hm,[at random] [one of]I don't know much about that[or]you've got me there[or]I haven't the faintest[at random],' Jeremy [one of]drawls[or]replies[or]comments[or]exclaims[at random]"; say "[one of][or] huskily[or] throatily[or] silkily[or] in a deep manly voice[as decreasingly likely outcomes]." Notice that, in that last line, our first option is entirely blank. If we put nothing as an element of the text alternatives list, this means that printing nothing at all is a viable alternative. In fact, we've made this the most common probability out of the decreasingly likely outcomes, so that five times in fifteen, or a third of the time the text is run, there will be no modifier printed at all. Test me with "look / g / g / g / ask Jeremy about his feelings for me / ask jeremy about his amnesia / tell Jeremy about my unborn child". As this example (alas) reveals, text alternatives will not go all the way toward making our characters into compelling conversationalists; we will have to wait until we know more about Actions. But at least we have abolished the default responses, and given Jeremy a touch of personality, however witless.

153
| Example Annoyotron Jr A child who after a certain period in the car starts asking annoying questions. |
WI

76
| Example Lean and Hungry A thief who will identify and take any valuable thing lying around that he is able to touch. |
WI

140
| Example Text Foosball A game of foosball which relies heavily on every-turn rules. |
WI

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