Enforced Agent Behavior

The game takes a control of certain or all actions from a player in order to maintain the character’s personality.

Enforced Character Behavior is used to maintain character personality by limiting the player’s choices or taking control way from the player.

Examples

——Example: Dialogue systems of games ——Example: Thief: Deadly Shadows (Ion Storm, 2005) uses goals and game system enforce certain behaviors. Goals are used to make sure that a player will steal valuables. Game system, in general, will promote sneaking over fighting.

Call of Cthulhu (Monroe, Petersen, 2004) introduced rules for insanity. When the insanity check is failed, if the character sees some horrific monsters or heinous acts, the character, for example, freezes or flees despite the player’s will.

Using the pattern

Enforced Character Behavior can be introduced with Cut Scenes (Björk, Holopainen, 2005) portraying player character and Predefined Goals (Björk, Holopainen, 2005). Also using predefined functions and Limited Set of Actions1 (Björk, Holopainen, 2005) and Trait Regulated Behavior are forms of Enforced Character Behavior.

Consequences

Enforced Character Behavior takes some control from the player to maintain the character’s personality. However, the pattern can conflict Roleplaying (Björk, Holopainen, 2005) if the character design is not transferred consistently to the gameplay.

Relations

——Instantiates: Character Defining Actions ——Instantiated by: Cut-scenes (Björk, Holopainen, 2005), Predefined Goals (Björk, Holopainen, 2005), Limited Set of Actions (Björk, Holopainen, 2005), Trait Regulated Behavior ——Modulates: Character (Björk, Holopainen, 2005) ——Potentially Conflicting with: Illusion of Influence (Björk, Holopainen, 2005), Role-playing (Björk, Holopainen, 2005), Freedom of Choice (Björk, Holopainen, 2005), Player Designed Character

History

An updated version of the pattern Enforced Character Behavior, first introduced in Lankoski 2010.