Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The goal, therefore, is to construct an equation that reflects this relationship. Is
that equation linear? Exponential? Does it approach an asymptote at some point?
What is that asymptote?
It's worth stressing (and believe me, we will stress it repeatedly over the next
200+ pages) that the only thing we should have to consider at this point is the rela-
tionship between the threat level and our perceived morale. All the other consider-
ations that are present in our model have been included already. At any point in the
process, we should be able to trust our underlying assumptions and decisions that
we made based on them. If we find ourselves questioning the validity of either of
these two factors—or, worse yet, making accommodations for them—then we
need to return to the previous levels and address our misgivings there.
If we have done our work properly to this point, and if we find a relationship
between our last two factors, then the result of that last step would provide us with
the decision utility that we need to determine whether we should attack, hide, flee,
faint, or simply suffer a massive psychological trauma and collapse into a quivering
pile of wimpiness. By using MAUT on our nine factors, we have reduced a relatively
large state-space into a single decision.
Yes, I know that we have provided no fun specifics yet. We're all dying to see
real numbers and formulas! Don't worry. We'll get there—in Ryan Seacrest's pop-
culture staple—“after the break.�
As we saw in our musings about both the dining out and engagement decisions, there
is a lot of undefined “wiggle room� in how we could determine the weights of and
associations between the factors. Much of the problem is due to the very fact that
we are trying to quantify ideas that are not necessarily quantifiable.
The effect of this problem often becomes exposed when people are polled
about something that should be common knowledge. Even when faced with the
exact same situation, different people can come away with different views on what
something actually is. This is not a surprise to any of us; we have all experienced it.
Differences in perception, understanding, and opinion are the staple of crime
dramas, romantic comedies, and reality shows alike. It isn't that we all just come to
different conclusions; often we are all working with a completely different set of
perceived
facts or
conceived
understanding about the situation. It is these differences
in the
input
of data that start to skew the subsequent processing of that data for pur-
poses of making decisions. In short, we are using different measuring sticks.
