Week 4: October 24th 2015

The stories generated through the procedural generation of all these virtual people and there relationships need to be believable, but also interesting and bizarre enough to generate interesting quests for the player to attempt. For this post I am running my simulation a number of times to try and find some implied stories based on individual stats.

Here is the bio for James Stokell:

As you can see he currently only has one half-brother called Ethan Snow and his parents Sophia Snow and Barry Stokell have divorced. He's married to Kaitlyn Stokell with no sons or daughters. His only friend right now is Benjamin Snow despite the fact he's been at his job for 3 years and has an especially bad relationship with Sita Lees.

Next I ran the simulation for 13 more years and had a look see how James was getting on...

James now has a son and two daughters, the son of which he named after his Father Barry Stokell. Unfortunately his marrage with Kaitlyn didn't work out and they got divorced, but he also got a second divorce after getting married to Tara. Now he's "happily" married to Elizabeth. He was made redundant from his job when he was 23 but reapplied and got accepted into the same occupation, perhaps in a different department? This actually happened again when he was 32, seems like his boss keeps on trying to get rid of him, but he keeps managing to figure out a way to get his job back. 

Finally I ran the simulation until James died. He lived to the ripe old age of 91. He managed to keep his job at occupation 34 until he was 67 where he was made redundant. However, probably due to his large amount of experience he then became the boss of another company, he retired at 81.

In terms of family he had one more son and two more daughters, however he went through a total of 13 divorces in his entire life. 

Looking the life of Jame's you can imply he was probably good at his job, but potentially had some commitment issues with the amount of marriages he went through. Or perhaps he never did any cheating of the sort, but rather he was just really difficult to live with? Or maybe there was a darker reason? 

From the point James' point of view he could possibly ask the player to find out if his wife is cheating on him. Based on his previous experience he could be overly paranoid, for good or bad reason. Or since his work is so important to him, when he gets made redundant he could ask the player to "dispatch" a boss of another company so he can take their place.

Looking at the bios of other people in the same simulation, most people have a large amount of divorces in their lifetime. So this is an imbalance in the simulation based on the flat value of the "DIVORCE-CHANCE" global variable. I plan to slowly remove many of the global variables in favour of a system which provides some more individual variance.

Stories involving Sims AI: http://goo.gl/OWtJMm