I am having a dilemma regarding the whole conversation minigame thing. This is a problem I am not under pressure to figure out immediately, but the sooner I can come up with a solution, the happier I’ll be.

The conversation simulation is intended to be a high level look at how conversations might be modeled. My goal is to experiment and look for a way that communication within the situation can be rendered as simulation and as gameplay. I firmly believe that conversation is best modeled in this way. However, it is necessary to account for both internal variables as well as contexts. Context and situation are of utmost importance, because a change in situation can lead to dramatically different notions of what is appropriate in a conversation. However, attempting to include too much can lead to a disasterous path of modeling and simulating cognition, which is something I know well enough to avoid. So, the question is how much simplicity is acceptable: what is the minimum of context and variables that are needed to get by.

Below are some notes regarding how to understand how a spoken utterance (which I call discourse action, or simply DA; I should really follow Goffman and call them “moves”) is understood and responded to by the listener. There are 6 main pathways where interpretation or transformation between state, context, and DA parameters takes place. State exists in three major locations: the parameters of the DA, the state of the characters (moods and attitudes), and the state of the conversation itself (status, registered etiquette of the characters). Even distilled to these three spaces, the interdependence of the parameters is dramatic.

What I need to figure out is how to either implement the six processes (five really, because the first is done), or how to simplify the overall model so that this level of complexity is not necessary.

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