Exploring systemic social interaction

About micro social simulation

Social simulation research asks if we could create systems for social interaction, much like games employ systems for physics, combat, and character development. Such systems could give audiences greater experiences of agency and responsibility, enable unexpected emergent outcomes, and provide another place for meaning to be inscribed in interactive experiences.

In EIS, we researched moment-by-moment, conversation-level social simulation for small numbers of characters. That is the focus of this page. We also, as covered on another page, researched simulation at the level of lifetimes for hundreds of characters.

Our first major exploration of "micro" social simulation was in the game Prom Week and its accompanying AI system, Comme il Faut (or "CiF"), both primarily developed by EIS members Josh McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel, and Aaron A. Reed. Prom Week is set in the time leading up to an end-of-year dance at a U.S. high school. Each character has their own personal characteristics and desires, but these are defined against an elaborate set of rules and beliefs that determine "normal" behavior in its fictional high school. The audience interacts with Prom Week by selecting pairs among the characters, examining what actions they most wish to take with one another, and choosing which actions to attempt. Each potential action has the goal of changing the social state in some way — one desired by the initiating character — which may succeed or fail. In either case, each attempt results in a short scene, which will play out differently depending on the specifics of the world history and character relationships.

Each scene also has a number of effects. These effects include changing the characters' relationships with each other, giving one or both characters temporary statuses that may change how future exchanges unfold (e.g., personally "embarrassed," or "angry at" a particular character), recording events in the ongoing history of the world, and triggering events based on patterns in the world state and character relationships. As a result, players can explore a wide range of possible social worlds, make important events happen in the lives of the characters, and fulfill (or ignore, or subvert) some of the character-specific goals presented at the start of each level — the last of which will determine the shape of the ending to that character's story presented at the close of the level.

Because Prom Week was a complete piece, released publicly in 2012, we were able to learn a number of things from the public reaction. One was that some players did experience the sense of responsibility we sought. For example, in Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Craig Pearson wrote, "I presumed I'd need to be nasty, but that route got me nowhere. Not that it wouldn't have worked, and horribly it makes me want to see if I could destroy Buzz, but I won the game by accidentally being nice and friendly. So now I feel bad and impressed, and want to play it all over again."

On the other hand, we also learned that Prom Week's extremely open-ended story structure doesn't guarantee a sense of developing narrative. Alex Mitchell describes his experience with Prom Week this way: "What I was beginning to understand was the correspondence between character actions and changes in character relationships within the social simulation, changes that lead towards achievement of the goals set by the system. There is, however, no modeling or representation here of any story structure." While some social physics systems may not desire to provide players the sense of a developing narrative, we also believed that our approach was one that had the potential to enable experiences that combined a set of story possibilities with audience agency.

Responding to the potential desire for more directed narrative, which was visible among some players of early Prom Week versions, EIS members Anne Sullivan and April Grow built a prototype system called Mismanor in parallel with the completion of Prom Week. Mismanor is a historical fantasy, set in a countryside home, where the focal/player character has been invited to an upper-crust dinner party. The end of the evening inevitably reveals that some of the characters are members of a cult, and the player character has not been invited to dinner for entirely innocent reasons. The Mismanor experience is further structured by quests, which different characters may offer the player character based on the current state of the social world, and which have as their endpoints the achievement of certain social states — which may be arrived at in many ways.

This experience required two new technology systems: CiF-RPG and Grail GM. CiF-RPG extends the CiF system (developed alongside Prom Week) to account for differential knowledge (as opposed to everyone knowing everything, in Prom Week's high school) and the movement and manipulation of objects. Grail GM dynamically decides what quests to offer, and which characters to offer them through, based on the past progression and current state of the social world. This prototype convinced us that social physics could provide much more range of possibility than is typical in a more directed narrative, together with a sense of responsibility. Our belief was borne out two years later, when Emily Short published Blood & Laurels, a much more complete work (compared with Mismanor) created using the Versu social simulation tools on which she and Richard Evans collaborated.

Further work in "micro" social simulation included Samuel, Reed, and EIS student Paul Maddaloni's development of a JavaScript framework that embodied a number of the lessons learned through our research: Ensemble. This was followed by EIS student Shi Johnson-Bey's framework for creating social simulation-driven visual novel experiences in Unity: Anansi (which is discussed further under choice-based narrative).

There was also further work led by Mateas, with which I had little involvement. This includes the prototype Scheherazade's Tavern (created by Rehaf Aljammaz and Elisabeth Oliver) and its successor, Crosston Tavern (created by Oliver on her own), which cast the player as a barkeep tending the emotional lives of a simulated village, one barroom conversation at a time. Our "zoomed in" social simulation work also became a basis for DARPA's Strategic Social Interaction Modules program, the European Union FP7 project SIREN, and survival game research carried out in partnership with Microsoft Studios.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin