Friendship Game

Arrow keys or D-pad: Move
Left mouse button or gamepad buttons: Shoot in any direction
Right mouse button or gamepad trigger: All Troops On Me
Y: Debug (show invisible objects)
F: Show friendship contingency table
Esc: Quit (kills the applet)

Your mission: head south into the town and kill all insurgents (wearing hoods). You can either fight them yourself, or push a button to call allies to your current position.

The upper green bar is an actor's health meter; the lower one is their trust meter. If an actor sees you shooting their friend, their trust will decrease by an amount proportional to their friendship with the victim. If they see you shooting their enemy, the reverse will happen. When the trust meter is red, the actor will attack you.

The white circle is your "center of friendship". It's the average position of all actors, weighted by their loyalty to you.

This demo was inspired by my observations of politics & social interactions. The way it works is as follows: Actors are part of a friendship network in which nodes are people and edges are trust levels. Whenever one actor interacts with another, the trust level between them increases (if the action is beneficial) or decreases (if it's detrimental). In the demo, you can only take detrimental actions (shooting an actor).

Rather than having a single objective friendship network, each actor has his/her own subjective version, based on what they've observed other actors do to each other. For example, take the case of a double agent. Each side thinks that the agent trusts them more than the other, while the agent may trust one side, both, or neither.

People seem to assume that, in such cases, only one of the subjective friendship networks is the "real" network, and either one side or the other is getting tricked. But I think this misses a crucial fact about these relationships: a double agent is taking real actions that have real consequences for both sides, regardless of what his intentions may be. For example, Klaus Fuchs' sale of secrets to Russia doesn't diminish the value of the work he did for the US. Rather than calling him an American scientist or a Soviet spy, it's more accurate to say that he was an outsider who contributed a great deal to the American atomic bomb program, and a lesser amount to the Russian program.

This is the stuff that compelling stories like Donnie Brasco are made of, but I don't think it makes for a fun video game. Part of the reason we play these is because they aren't as messy as real life, and we can kill zombies and ninjas without worrying about who the good guys and the bad guys are. That's why I haven't continued to work on this project.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, my friendship system is somewhat similar to the "Vertrauungsnetz" (trust network), the system used on the German Wikipedia to judge reliability of articles. The differences are:

A Vertrauungsnetz's trust values are binary (you either trust someone or you don't), whereas Hearts & Minds gives actors a variable trust value between 0-127, combined with a threshold value for certain actions. For example, there is one threshold for obeying someone and another threshold for attacking someone.

Double agency isn't possible in Wikipedia, because everyone's Vertrauungsnetz is visible to everyone else. You can misrepresent your trust network to everyone at once, but not represent it differently to different users. In Hearts & Minds, double agency is possible because only observed actions affect the network. If you shoot someone out of sight of their friends, their friends will not lose trust in you.

Wikipedia takes only direct relationships into account when calculating a user's trustworthiness. In Hearts & Minds, indirect relationships are taken in to account: all actions affect the target directly, and the target's friends indirectly, by an amount proportional to their friendship with the target. If you shoot an actor, his close friends will react as if you had shot them as well, while strangers will be unaffected.