Romeo and Juliet Game Post-Mortem

An anonymous reader writes "Gamasutra is running a post-mortem on an interactive love story that was written by students. They were attempting a solution to the game designer's challenge from the GDC 2004. From the article: Interaction with video games is currently done at an almost entirely rational level. The player may react to a game emotionally, but the game will never know about it, and thus, never respond to it. We wanted to change this, and have the player interact with the game solely through his own emotions."

Comments

The interface has me fascinated..

[Myself]

More so than just the idea of painting, is the fact that it's essentially a gesture interpretation system. If the game is decent at figuring out what you're thinking based on the way you move the mouse, maybe it'd be able to interpret other body motion too, if given the appropriate input devices.

I'm thinking specifically of the motion trackers used in the CAVE system. It's one thing for a virtual character to mimic your movements without understanding them, which has been done for years. It'd be a big step for the character to make inferences about your emotions based on how you stand or move.

The obvious pitfall here is that, after interacting with such a game for a long time, people might forget how to use the expressions that the game doesn't understand or react properly to. It's easy to keep a mental separation when the interface is very different from regular human interaction, like a keyboard. I like to think that most of us don't vocalize "lol" on a daily basis. But as the interfaces get closer to regular life, will the line blur enough to throw us off?