Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
things. The learning process must not be too long (or the player will get frustrated
and think his pet is stupid) or too short (or the player will run through everything
he can teach it very quickly). Tamagotchi are exceptions to this principle, because
they are very inexpensive and are intended only to provide simple interactions, not
gameplay. Tamagotchi also showed that players don't necessarily need rich graphics
to develop an emotional attachment to an artificial pet.
NOTE
Software toy
is
a term coined by Will
Wright, designer of
the original
SimCity
,
for entertainment soft-
ware that you just play
around with, without
trying to defeat an
opponent or achieve
victory.
This quality of rich artificial intelligence distinguishes artificial pets from other
kinds of A-life, in which individuals have simple rules but the population as a
whole develops emergent properties. Artificial pets, on the other hand, can have
properties that appear only after they have been around for a while, but typically
these are preprogrammed and are not truly emergent.
Because an artificial pet doesn't present much of a challenge or impose a victory
condition (apart from training it to do something specific), it's really a
software toy
rather than a game. In
Nintendogs
, shown in
Figure 20.1
, you can see two puppies,
both eating from the same bowl. The game takes advantage of the Nintendo DS's two
screens, one of which is touch-sensitive so that you can “pet” your dog. An artificial
pet exhibits a large number of behaviors that the player sees repeatedly and others
that occur more rarely. Part of balancing such a game—making sure that the player
doesn't get bored with it—is making sure that these rare behaviors occur often enough
that the player does get to see them but doesn't take them for granted
.
FIGURE 20.1
Nintendogs
from
Nintendo
