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Coincidence : I'm working remotely nowadays, and I was asked to include more
smileys in my messages. I sounded a bit harsh or cold. It made me think some
more about non-verbal communication online. And how constraints on
communication can lead to more meaningful interaction.
I'll throw some more references of interesting communications methods.
Journey : a (amazing) game in which you meet fellow player(s), and can only
communicate through a single emote. You can help each-other and play together,
but can never do harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)
The endless forest is kinda similar but without the gameplay. You can move
around, meet other players, and roar. It's self-described as 'MMO screensaver'
which is somewhat accurate.
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/
I've recently been told about 'captain blood', a 1988 Atari game that presented
a dialog system based on icons. You could send a list of icons and the NPC
would answer. It obviously made the dialogs less rigid than picking from a list
of answers, and easier to parse than a full-fledged human language. The list is
quite impressive, and the feeling of actually discussing with an alien worked
all-right.
http://bringerp.free.fr/RE/CaptainBlood/scripts.php5
Reach out if you have more.
As I said, I'd be interested in creating something out of it. Like any geek, I
just want to start coding right away, but this time I want to know where I'm
going first.
So let's write some goals first.
I want to create a system, that works on a computer and allows meaningful
positive interaction between humain. With 'meaningful' loosely defined as "made
me feel something" or "moved me".
Fellow RTC user sloum reached out via mail and we discussed the topic a bit,
here is an extract of the questions I want to answer.
The first step is to design something that works at least on paper. My
main questions at the moment are :
- how do you foster the adequate mood around the program ?
- can you do it with a CLI/TUI ? How ?
- can it be graphical too ?
- can user see their own messages ? How to allow/prevent it ? Auth ?
- how many messages can you read ? Send ? What size ?
- is there some kind of moderation ? A forbidden word list ?
- is some kind of delay needed ? (To support slow-computing and
thoughful writing) When ? How ?
- are minimal feedback (stickers/likes/...) allowed ? How ?
So basically, 'how does it work' as a system. But the main question is 'why
would it work' ? No need to start coding if I'm not convinced it will fulfill
its goal.
Video game are a special beast. Endless Forest and Journey work wonders at
creating a real human connection, but have a lot of specifics. You might have a
single emote, but you can also move your character around. That adds a lot of
meaning. The art (visual and audio) heavily influences the mood too.
Sloum also nailed a key point about expectation and timing. At the surprise of
no-on one RTC (dubbed the *slow* network) pacing is a great tool to influence
mood.
So far the design I have in mind goes like this.
Given a single user 'Alice'.
Alice can see at most one different message per day. When launching the
program, she is presented with a DISCLAIMER, for a SHORT_TIME. Then she is
shown an anonimized SHORT_MESSAGE from another user. She can write a
LONGER_MESSAGE to reply to the original sender. When done, the message is
displayed during SHORT_TIME before she can either confirm it or edit it again.
Can be a local python script here on RTC, with identification based on
username. Later made available through ssh ?
DISCLAIMER : can be a reminder to be nice/that real humans are on the other
end/etc.
SHORT_TIME : around 3-5 seconds
SHORT_MESSAGE : about 100-200 characters
LONGER_MESSAGE : about 500-1000 characters
Is there a limitation to original posts one can send ?