Experiences change people.

But what do they change? If a person is created from their experiences, how do you define what that creation is?

So far, in this experiment, a personality is defined by two lists – Love, and Trust.

As a person lives their life, meeting and interacting with other people, the person adds these acquaintances to their lists, and changes the opinion that they have of that person either positively or negatively, depending on what kind of experiences they have with that person.

Importantly, when you have an experience with a person, not only do you change their index’s value, but you change the value of the indexes that relate to them – their family, their faction, and finally, “people” as a whole.

Therefore, if the sum total of experiences you’ve had in your life cause your “people” value to be negative, your initial opinion of a stranger will be negative – however, as you learn other details about them – if they’re in a faction you have had good experiences with, or if they are nice to you and increase the value at their personal index to positive, then you may warm to them over time.

As an example, one of the current experiences that exist in the database is “lied to”. This experience changes your love of the person by a value of -1, and your trust of the person by -5. However, it also changes your trust of people in general by -0.2. If you are lied to often, your distrust of people will increase so much that you will start to spurn people who care about you and are legitimately trying to earn your trust.

The distinction between love and trust is probably debatable. However, from a narrative perspective, it is undeniably important for a character to be able to love someone they don’t trust (a mother’s love for her wayward son), and to trust someone they don’t love (a faction leader’s grudging respect for the honor of a rival).

At the moment, these lists only include the love and trust a character has for other characters, or for groupings of characters. Possibly, these lists could be extended to places (“the city”, “the forest”), concepts (“the dark”, “money”), or actions (“combat”, “lying”). For simplicity’s sake, however, I’ll hold off on this until some other core AI systems have been fleshed out.