Enforced Agent Behavior

The enforcement of certain actions in order to maintain or develop an agent’s personality.

Games that have developed characters may have rules to ensure that these characters behavior is consistent to their personality, or that the personality develops in a certain direction. For those characters that are under players' control this may require limiting what actions they can make the characters perform, or taking control way from them.

Examples

The dialogue choices available in games such as the Mass Effect Series or the Witcher gives players' some degree of freedom while at the same time guaranteeing that the responses chosen are in line with the personality of the players' characters.

The Thief Series uses goals and game system enforce certain behaviors. Players that try to complete the game will make their characters steal valuable items since this is dictated by mandatory goals. However, they are further encourage to do similar actions through optional goals, and are not encourage to behave in certain other ways (e.g. killing guards) by the lack of game rewards for engaging in these types of activities.

The roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu has rules for character insanity. When insanity checks are failed, if the character sees some horrific monsters or heinous acts, the character, for example, freezes or flees despite the player’s will.

In Space Alert players decide which actions their characters should perform in one phase of the game, and all the actions are then performed in a later phase without a possibility for players to change them (with a partial exception of being able to correct wrongly selected actions).

Using the pattern

The initial concern with making use of Enforced Agent Behavior is to determine what behavior the Agent should be. Typically this may be to provide Diegetic Consistency (including Diegetically Consistent Dialogues) or maintain Narration Structures (especially concerning Character Development). However, it may also be used to make it impossible to actively act against team mates in games with Team Play.

The easiest way of making sure of Enforced Agent Behavior is to only make those actions which are wanted possible, which comes down to defining a Limited Set of Actions. This set of actions may be enough to sustain the intended behavior if the only interesting part of the personalities one wishes to present is noticeable from actions uninformed by previous events. In these cases the state of the Agents may only need to expressed through use of Avatars, NPCs, or Units. However, for more complex behaviors the development of Characters to keep track of internal states is typically necessary.

There is a clear difference between achieving Enforced Character Behavior depending on if the Characters in question are under players' control or not. Algorithmic Agents and Game Masters are natural choices for guaranteeing Enforced Character Behavior when players are not intended to be directly involved in choosing or performing the actions, i.e. for controlling the behavior of NPCs. However, Zero-Player Games and those using No Direct Player Influence also achieve this as the behaviors are set earlier (typically through Action Programming from a Limited Set of Actions) and then enforced.

Mandatory Goals

For player Characters, two strategies present themselves in how to ensure Enforced Character Behavior: making players perform the action or taking control of their Characters so that a game system can perform the actions.

Limited Set of Actions

Guaranteeing certain actions

Limiting set of actions

Taking over

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

Diegetic Consistency

Exaggerated Perception of Influence

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

Can Instantiate

Diegetic Consistency

History

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