Re: Removing personality from Diplomacy? From: hack@l44c4-2.jsc.nasa.gov (Edmund Hack) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 15:53:58 +0000 In article <CL8p0t.6EI@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu>, Greg Lindahl <gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> wrote: >In article <2jnci4$rmm@gap.cco.caltech.edu>, >Keith Schneider <keith@cco.caltech.edu> wrote: > >>Or, we could attempt to somehow remove the players' >>personalities from the game. >> >>To do this, we would need to develop a standard set of negotiating >>tools that all players would be required to use. That is, when >>corresponding with the other players, each player would be required >>to choose from a menu of messages. This would in effect "sanitize" >>the negotiations process. > >This was done 5+ (?) years ago by a commercial play-by-mail wargame >company. They called the result CODASYL (or something that one would >confuse with a database standard, I can never keep long acronyms >straight). It was called CorGaSyL (Correspondence Game Symbolic Language) and was an interesting idea that was probably too hard to use for most gamers. It had a restricted set of nouns, verbs and adjectives. What was interesting was a set of emotional modifiers that allowed you to vary the "tone" of the messages. You were severly restricted in the number of characters of CorGaSyL you could input each turn, so diplomacy would have been slow. The game had no other striking features that I remember. It was a simple "expand and conquer" type of game. At one point the GM dropped the restriction on correspondence and allowed full diplomacy. One other problem - the PBM game market is relatively small and it was probably not too hard to find someone in your game. Except for "anonymous" variants of long running games (i.e. Starweb), I don't know of an anonymous PBM that has survived for very long. >I saw it written up in Flagship, I think. The designer >thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't know if >his customers considered it to be a plus or a minus. It's certainly a >nice extension of the concept of anonymous gaming. Yeah. I even thought of writing a parser and generator for the language in Lisp, but since I didn't think that the game itsself was worth playing, I never did. > >I've cross-posted to rec.games.pbm on the off chance that someone >there remembers any more details. In a file somewhere in my attic, I probably have the rules. If I ever go up there, I might dig it out and post about it. Referenced By Up