Narrative and games

I was thinking about the solitude of the average platform/adventure game.

I was thinking it would be good to have a second character. At this point you could have lots of interaction between them building up the tension. So for example you could walk into a fairly normal space but then A says 'You look worried', B says 'I've got a bad feeling about this..'

I guess the idea would be to build up the character and the environment by having large amounts of dialogue. The dialogue would be pre-scripted, so the player simply triggers this dialogue by moving from one space to other, doing something, finding something, finding someone, or just spending to long in some space. With a modern DVD (forget blueray!) the potential for having huge amount of general dialogue is significant.

I was thinking about proto-typeing this and thought about how one might implement a character engine. One cheap way might be to pull together a text based adventure. One thing which might be interesting would be to use the speech synthesis options on the mac to create an audio games machine, almost no graphical user interface.

Thinking about it why do most adventure games work in the first person ( you walk down the path , you see a snake.. ) Why not an adventure game more like a book ( Lara strode down the path, lara noticed the snake). I quite like the idea of something that you could capture the text output of which would generate your own a 'book'.

The two other elements I like in an adventure game - use a block world/SHRDLU like interface so you could issue simple instructions ( get red block ) and then the system generates (Lara puts the blue block from the treasure chest and puts it on the ground, Lara opens the treasure chest, lara gets the red block..

I also like the notion of using a language where much description is generated using grammars so you get a little variation with the same central theme. Bu then i like the notion of a patter matching more prolog like language to express the whole thing in.

Perhaps I could do something basic in processing