ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an architecture that simulates character knowledge phenomena more deeply than any earlier system has, all in service of a game that is fundamentally about character beliefs, called Talk of the Town. Talk of the Town is an asymmetric multiplayer dwarflike that features character knowledge propagation as a core mechanic. The story that frames gameplay surrounds the death of a very important person in the town in which gameplay takes place. Prior to gameplay, the town is simulated from its founding in 1839, when a handful of families converge on an empty townscape to establish farms, through the death of the central character in the summer of 1979. The game is multiplayer and asymmetric: one player, the lover, controls the lover character and the other player, the family member, controls a member of the deceased person's family. The town is represented as an isometric, tile-based 2D world, spanning nine-by-nine city blocks.
