Dustin Freeman: Simulating History as You’re Living Through It
25Simulating History as You’re Living Through It AKA Everyone is a Bunch of Concerns in a Trench Coat
In procgen games, we often make simulated histories, or when the player dies, have them wake up in the world a generation later as another character. My struggle was how to make world changes feel meaningful. During the deep isolation of the pandemic, I came across a model used in therapy called Internal Family Systems, a technique to view oneself as a being of several parts, each of which have their own needs.
I’ve translated this notion of parts into an AI system called Concerns, where each being in the world is a body with a collection of concerns with individual weights. From this talk, my hope is we can expand our idea of how we can make simulated histories feel playable, and the implementation of AI behaviour in immersive sims, aiming for empathizable and interesting instead of optimal.
Lead-in music generated by Sonat Uzun.