Intuition Engine

The Intuition Engine Schematic is an ongoing project that will hopefully develop into an actual gaming platform. I am posting what I have thought of so far so more people can view it and contribute. It is my hope that a community will form around this, and create something that is fun. Profit is nice, but not at the expense of creativity and social connection.

If you are interested in using these ideas please do so. Unless otherwise noted, all pages that has to do with the Intuition Engine is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

This is a living document. Please correct any mistakes, but make sure to discuss any major changes before making them.

About
The Intuition Engine is a way of simulating the complex system of bodily experience. We plan to use it as a game. To understand what we mean by this, a little background might help.

Kefka and maiki were sitting around a vitamin store (where Kefka worked) and talking about the shortcomings of the various games they played. Since they were in high school they had used a variety of outlets for their creativity. From writing short stories to theater to video games, they had seen it all. Since they had gotten computers capable of playing the newest and prettiest RPGs they had experienced a new obstacle to their imagination, the limited range of motion.

Pondering this and many other things (such as emergent systems and artificial intelligence), the two began to formulate a way to represent something barely understood in an empirical manner, but easily examined in hindsight: experience. In most games this phenomena is quantified as points or levels and is then expended to "learn" skills or abilities. Even when they are fantastic or otherworldly, these ranges of motion are consistent with the physics set forth by the game. They are just like what we would call ability or skill (although obviously lacking in variety). However, the means by which we learn new things is much more qualitative. We do not get 300 experience for driving to the store or looking in garbage cans. It is much more incremental than is normally portrayed in video games.

The situation that shed enlightenment on the perplexed gamers' minds came in the form of learning from a book. When you learn something from a book you are taking in the symbols of another person's experience and translating it into something that you can merge with your own experience. How could you portray this in a game? Well, what if the increase in experience was so small, and just a part of a constant stream of change that was flowing with every action (and even non-action)? A book could be written by one character who was sufficiently experienced in some skill, and using a series of variables taking the receiving character into account, a value could be assessed to be added to that character.

This is just for books. When a person walks outside, when they eat, when they raise a sword, shoot a gun, pilot an aircraft, light a stick of dynamite, cut a piece of wood, fetch a pail of water, kiss a loved one, plant a seed, or watch the sun set. All these things would seamlessly contribute to the character in a way purposely inconceivable by the player, thusly turning the quantitative into the qualitative.

With that said, it was an exciting time for Kefka and maiki. They have been working (not particularly hard or often) on creating documentation to describe this and create a game out of it. The result is the Intuitive Engine.

Inner Workings
One approach to doing this is by taking three main categories of attributes and creating hundreds of statistics noting smaller changes, it will be a way of marking growth on a scale that can be used in a number system. These three categories are more of a way to create a human-readable taxonomy to work with when adding to the environment. The three categories are body, mind, and soul. Many gaming systems have been based on these types of attributes, such as the Guardians of Order Tri-Stat system.

Body
The physical body is, of course, covered by the body statistics. The ability to lift objects would be associated with this, as would a person's stamina. While the concept of what the body is may seem easy to understand it should be noted that it does not, as a single noun, accurately contain the nature of all bodily functions.

As an example, compare a runner with a weight lifter. The lifter has great upper body strength without having to develop the stamina of a runner. Not only do they focus on separate functions, even when they train the same way the specialize on different parts. As a runner has no need for upper body strength they train the appropriate muscles. So, while "body" is a good base category, it is far from being specific enough to describe even only two people.

Mind
The mind is a very interesting thing to describe in game terms. We will attempt to describe an object of philosophical debate since history and curiosity met. Instead of all that, let's examine what we can emulate inside a game.

Mind is very often represented as intelligence, which in turn addresses various abilities, such as the capability to learn new things or how much a character can remember. Spellcasting and technical professions make use of it in this manner. With a high intelligence you are able to learn easier, and even more than a character with a lower "score". Memory, adaptability, and perception are all covered by intelligence. We will break these up even more minute traits to allow for a vast amount of combinations of intellectual power.

Soul
If the mind is difficult to explain, and thus convert into gaming terms, then the soul is impossible. While a few traits will reflect the condition of the soul to a certain extent, it will mainly be left up to the player to be the character's "soul".

Again, these are just terms to help understand what different variables in the game represent at a very basic level, and are completely abitrary. In our mind the game will contain hundreds, perhaps thousands of attributes that could fall in any, all, or none of these categories.