Gossip (video Game) - Social Model

Social Model

The social interactions he chose for this experimental simulation were declarations of affinity (e.g. “I like Fred,” “I hate Jane”). The theory behind the simulation was that people liked those who shared their opinions of others, and were also influenced positively by their friends’ opinions and negatively by their enemies’ opinions. Such declarations, Crawford said, were implicit in many pieces of gossip. He produced the following mathematical model:

where x_a,b is a’s actual opinion of b, x'_a,b is a’s declared opinion of b, l is the listener, s is the speaker, o is the object (the person being gossiped about), k₁ and k₂ are constants greater than 1 (Crawford gave the hypothetical value of 10, but did not specify the actual values used in the game).

The AI characters did not perform discrete interactions with each other. They instead acted as nodes in a web of springs, trying to reduce the tension around them.

One issue that was not addressed was sincerity (the relationship between actual and declared opinion). Also, it did not account for the fact that repeating the same statement too many times would eventually reduce its effect.