Another flight of fancy of me, a fellow who promises the universe and delivers another week of base procrastination: I've been playing Sims 3 with my spare time over the past couple days. I'm not a pathological liar, I don't mean to leave the good people of the BYOND community strung out to dry, but the habit of frittering away entire days to these things is a slippery beast to wrestle off my back indeed.

Foomer's probably right, I just need to go with the flow. These are labors of love we're crafting here - think of them as an unpaid job, and naturally the attraction to do them will wane. Think of game creation as a game in and of itself, and (for the gamer) the motivation comes naturally. Skewing my motivations with a minor subterfuge of perspective is a minor insanity compared to the larger insanity of gross procrastination by habit I seem to have adopted.

Another flow I should be going with is this: I've a greater-than-usual interest in artificial intelligence. Even my earlier designs already have the important backbone of any in-depth artificial intelligence drive: the movement queue, a device I can see used even in The Sims. A great deal of my conceptual work has been in developing exactly this: bigger and better artificial intelligence engines.

In the excellent discussions on the Seeking The Dynamic Content Holy Grail entry, that was the unexpected spoils of our discussion. We started talking about dynamic quest generation engines, and we ended on a very interesting tangent: if your world is fleshed out enough, quests happen naturally. Particularly, on the parts where the world isn't able to resolve its problems on its own. This is the true role of a hero - troubleshooters seeking fortune and glory, but mere troubleshooters nonetheless.

The appeal I've had for Sims 3 lately has been in observing this mechanism in action: this is the heart (or some major internal organ) of The Sims franchise. Our poor little rank Sim AIs can only do so much based off their tables and environmental awareness. The players, as disembodied guides, slip in and patch things up to a smooth-running virtual household. (Then, once you're bored of that, you may do the opposite: make their lives a living hell.) Being the AI's troubleshooter becomes the game the players play.

So, why not do the same thing with an online RPG, hmm? I don't care if it's Dragons or Lasers, if we move our interface to the level of being an individual character in a game world whose unique powers are perfect for allowing helpless NPCs to bridge their issues, it becomes the game. What's more, that joyous sensation of watching an NPC scrabble around baking bread (an Ultima 7 delight) comes back, perhaps even stronger than before.