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been established with a high degree of confi dence, the system might kick
off a specifi c scenario by presenting a tailored exposition or
inciting incident
.
Mateas' thesis regarding new lines of causation (Mateas 2004) submits
that an interactor's intentions form a new vector of formal causality, and
I asserted earlier in this chapter that the interactor's intention may be un-
derstood as part of the end cause—that is, what the interactor desires at
the end of the day. But there are subtleties in the domain of intention and
motivation that make their infl uence on causality even more slippery to
pin down. The overlapping nature of the interactor as a person and also an
agent (character) in a mimetic context creates complexity.
Let's work through a few examples. As a person, I want to create a
budget plan for my household. As an agent (or character), I wish to use the
affordances of my application(s) to do so in a clean and effective way. As
a person, I begin to discover dependencies and categorical subtleties that
I have not foreseen. Perhaps I have categorized both household products
and food together as groceries, or perhaps I have remembered that sales tax
has an impact on my income tax, but I have not recorded where I bought
certain items and which sales taxes they have been subject to. As an agent,
I recognize that I can't meet my goal with mushy categories and incom-
plete data (change in thought). As a person, my goal changes to create a
more precise set of categories and to fi gure out how to do better accounting
of sales tax. At this point, I revise my motivation from planning a budget
to creating a better record and understanding of what I am spending now
(change in end cause). As an agent, instead of a planner, I am now a re-
searcher and record keeper (change in character). I fi nd myself dealing with
different affordances to take different actions for different goals.
Several things are going on here. On the face of it, we have a relatively
simple state machine. The subtlety is how a stalled state on the part of the
agent (thought) causes the person to change their end cause as an interac-
tor. A change in the
purpose
of the activity will change its
plot
(the whole
action). That exerts a
formal
force on the
“character”
of the agent—its traits
and predispositions—in order to produce appropriate actions.
Character serves as a constraint system in rather a different way in a
multiplayer online game. If, as in
LotRO
, a character with a particular voca-
tion needs to fi nd folks whose talents and possessions lead to fruitful ex-
changes and group actions, then the character's needs constrain the player
to behave in certain ways—to fi nd things to trade, to become more visible
to potential partners (reputation), to show oneself to be trustworthy, and
so on. In
WoW
, the PvP (Player versus Player) realm assumes combat as
