Memory and Naming Individuals

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Nixit
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Memory

Postby Nixit » Sun Nov 07, 2004 10:43 pm

I think it's kind of fake when someone you briefly meet and you get their name, and then you see them 10 years later, you still know who they are. It might be kind of hard to program, I'm not sure, but it would make more sense if you could forget who somebody is after a while.
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Postby Jos Elkink » Mon Nov 08, 2004 1:02 am

That is hard to program, indeed ;) ...
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Postby Nixit » Mon Nov 08, 2004 3:43 am

I see...
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Postby west » Mon Nov 08, 2004 7:39 am

I think it works. Just because you know their name doesn't mean you know anything else about them. It leads to different sorts of memory problems altogether than we have IRL
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Postby Nixit » Mon Nov 08, 2004 10:42 pm

I suppose... but if someone is wanted and he gets away for a really long time, IRL you would probably forget who he is. Just a thought.
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Postby SekoETC » Mon Nov 08, 2004 10:48 pm

With one character, I have started changing the names of people she meets into "a slightly familiar voice", if I cannot remember anything about that character. Sometimes also "<CANTR_CHARDESC> location date" if she does not know the person well enough to remember the name, but vaguely remembers where they met last time.
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Postby Pirog » Mon Nov 08, 2004 10:58 pm

If I see a name I can't place I usually treat it like my character recognizing them but not knowing who they are...
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Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby Wolfsong » Wed Aug 03, 2011 12:13 am

This has been mentioned before, but really didn't get much of anywhere in terms of discussion: Memory.

Essentially, I want the same thing as what that original poster did - making name memorization limited in some fashion. The problem remains that it'd be difficult to program - or, at least, difficult to decide /how/ to program it. The actual programming itself would probably be quite easy, but that's hard to say for certain as I don't know exactly how primitive Cantr's codebase actually is, or how skilled its coders actually are. However...

Proposal One:

Characters have a 150 cap on naming individuals. (Number torn from this article: News.com.au: Human Brain can Only Handle Up To 150 Facebook Friends - Professor Robin Dunbar.) Once they hit this limit, they are not prevented from naming characters. However, each new name has to replace a character already named. To do this, a system needs to be in place to record how often a character is in close proximity with another character they have named. Those the character interacts with frequently are not name replaced, but those relations that the character interacts with only sparsely (example: met once on a trading trip to another island and has never seen since) are liable to be replaced by these newly 'named' characters. Thus it would be possible for people to run away from a past life, and decades later return without having to worry about Joe the Old Town Leader Guy suddenly waking up, pointing at them, and screaming, "It's Ethan the Pig Thief!"

Why would this be a good thing? Note in that article, he said 150 "meaningful" relationships. That's friends, people you interact with frequently, etc. These are the people who would have names in the 'name' box on the character page. The 'personal description' box would remain untouched. Now, it'd be a good thing because it would add to the realism and "sim" aspect of this game that I hear people gush about all the time - Cantrians might live forever, but they aren't gifted with the ability to remember everything always. If a clever thief manages to pull off a heist in a town, flees the town, and returns years and years later, he still runs the risk of someone recognizing him - but it's not a 100% chance. His physical description will remain (barring CRBs) mostly the same - you can't change your eye color or your facial features, and there's always the chance someone wrote a little blurb about him in the personal description box ("This man killed my father. He has six fingers.") but they won't notice his name immediately on entering a town, or on leaving. (Unless, of course, they hadn't named a lot of people, and he was still in their 'memory' after all.) This would also sharpen the divide between young and old - old people run the risk of forgetting faces, because they've lived a long time and probably met a lot of people. Social characters would also run this risk. New characters, however, could find themselves useful in a town with established leaders simply because faces would be fresher in their minds. The reverse is also true, though: established characters might not concern themselves with the names of random newspawns until those newspawns befriend the character, or prove themselves a member of the town, organization, group or etc.

When a named individual dies, they remain known to the character until being buried, or until (having spent so long away from the character that they're replaced by another name) they are forgotten. This would also mimic corpse rot - if you stumble on the body of your only days dead lover, you'll probably recognize them. But if your best friend wanders off and you don't see him for 50 years, and then stumble on a corpse in the woods, you won't know it from Adam.

Furthermore, previously named characters could potentially have their name replaced by "A Vaguely Familiar Person", "Someone You Once Knew" or something similar, to remind the character that this stranger's face is familiar, but they just can't quite place it.

Proposal Two:

All of the above, except the part where I wrote about the 150 limit being decided by time away from the character doing the naming /and/ the amount of people named. Instead, remove the 150 limit entirely, but keep the "time away from character" factor - you can know as many people as you like, but those you've not seen in 10 or so years fade from memory to become "A Vaguely Familiar Person" (may be easier to code.)

Basically:

+ A 150 cap on naming individuals based on most time spent away from the character OR a decay rate of named individuals based on time spent away from a character without any cap. The first would (probably) mostly skew to the Polish side of things. The latter way would be more fair to all language groups.

+ Example of Above, Proposal 1: Jon knows tons of people from traveling about. He meets Danny. But when he meets Danny's friend, Betty, he loses the saved name of a Spanish fellow he once met 30 years ago by the name of Jose.

+ Example of Above, Proposal 2: Over time, Jon gradually forgets the name of that one guy he met once in that harbor for an hour or two before sailing away to a new island.

+ This would only affect the Name Box in the Character Screen. The Personal Description Box would be untouched. (Or, if you'd like, you could remove what's in the Personal Description Box, too.)

+ Characters would still be recognizable by Physical Description and (potentially) Personal Description.

+ Characters could still be somewhat recognizable if their names weren't simply reset, but changed to "A Vaguely Familiar Person", "Someone You Once Knew" or etc.


(Note: The highest average number of individuals a character has named is 126 for English characters, and 268 for Polish characters [numbers taken from the Statistics thread]. If you factor in all English characters, or all Polish characters, undoubtedly these numbers would change drastically - ie, go way way way down. The 150 cap could be adjusted up or down because of this.)
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Snickie
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby Snickie » Wed Aug 03, 2011 1:43 am

Problem: People can save "names" in the personal description box.
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby muidoido » Wed Aug 03, 2011 1:45 am

I guess the personal description would vanish with all the other memories...
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viktor
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby viktor » Wed Aug 03, 2011 8:52 am

personally i'm not fond of a naming cap, if someone wants their char to have a cruddy memory on names, they can roleplay it. there's nothin wrong with remembering every face you meet, there are some people really like that neways, at least as it we have the leeway to chose to be forgetful.
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby Doug R. » Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:04 am

+1 @ Viktor
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby gejyspa » Wed Aug 03, 2011 11:54 am

And then, there's the arbitrariness of it. Some people who you've traded some potato for ivory with 10 years ago, and then they left on their boat, sure, you probably won't remember them. But I guarantee you, the guy who kept you locked up in a machine shop for a decade and that went away, you would remember him for a century.
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby EchoMan » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:22 pm

Merging two topics. If a topic already exists in any of the suggestion forums, please use the existing topic.
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Re: Memory and Naming Individuals

Postby IvanicDiazinum » Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:53 pm

gejyspa wrote:And then, there's the arbitrariness of it. Some people who you've traded some potato for ivory with 10 years ago, and then they left on their boat, sure, you probably won't remember them. But I guarantee you, the guy who kept you locked up in a machine shop for a decade and that went away, you would remember him for a century.


+1

I'm against any sort of naming cap. I see memory loss roleplayed perfectly well all the time, sometimes because the player is actually unable to remember who a particular char is and sometimes because they feel that char should have forgotten. No need to hardcode it and it would lead to problems like them forgetting someone who was extremely critical in their past and would not likely be forgotten IRL.

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