Contextual Relational Intelligence
How experience becomes persistent character state.
What a character experiences can become memory, belief, expectation and relationship state. New events can reinforce that state, contradict it or change what happens next.
01 The shape of it
Where a character's state sits.
Between what the world did and what the character does, there is a place the individual keeps what it knows. That place is Contextual Relational Intelligence (CRI).
The game knows what happened. CRI keeps what each character knows.
The game runs an event and knows all of it. Only part of that event reaches any one character, and that part is the only thing it has to go on. What reaches it becomes state it keeps, and that state shapes the response the game gets back.
Everything else on this page is that path, in one recorded day, with the readings the game itself wrote at each step.
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Game world
What happened The game runs an event. It knows the whole of it. -
CRI
What this character saw Only part of the event reaches this individual. That part is its evidence. -
CRI
What it remembers and believes The evidence becomes character state that persists, and later experience can revise it. -
Game world
How it responds The state shapes what the character does next, and the path back is inspectable.
Connect an LLM Optional. A model can read the character’s state and put it into words. The persistent state stays in CRI.
02 Belief
She thought she was the fast one. Experience changed her mind.
Astra’s belief grows from her escapes. Being caught makes her question it.
From the log
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117.3 s
The belief forms
Three legs won, and she holds the belief that she is the fast one.
- conviction 3
- doubt 0
- held yes
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120.3 s and 123.3 s
What happened
Astra is caught. Astra is caught again.
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123.3 s
She drops the belief
Two catches in a row, and she no longer holds it.
- conviction 0
- doubt 0
- held no
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123.3 s
Ember forms no belief
Two legs won, two catches in a row, and he never holds it.
- conviction 2
- doubt 0
- held no
The first catch introduces doubt. The second changes her mind. Ember escapes two times but never forms that belief, so the catches have a different meaning for him. Every reading above comes from the same recorded day.
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Belief
A character that has come to believe something about itself reacts when the world contradicts it, remembers the day, and lets the belief go; a character that never formed the belief does neither.
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Expectation
A character can hold an expectation, discover it was wrong, and be changed by that.
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Action, designed and tested, validating
A character would act on what it believes about someone else, then find the world has moved on and adjust rather than pretend.
03 Words
Give the words a point of view to express.
CRI keeps the character's changing state separate from the language layer, so the same character can be expressed in different ways.
Astra says nothing at the second catch. Her belief still changes, and the event enters her life story.
The current Luminids path uses grounded authored expression. Future model connectors can use the same state for richer language, while the persistent character record stays in CRI.
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Expression
What a character says is assembled from what it has actually lived, and it stays silent rather than claim something it cannot support.
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Model connectors designed, not built
A defined seam that would let a language model express the character using facts and state supplied by CRI, while the persistent character record stays in CRI.
What the log recorded at the second catch, 123.3 s
- Spoken line
- None. She said nothing.
- Life story line
- "The day the fast one got caught"
- Reaction played
- yes
- Belief held after
- no
04 The design in another situation
One thunderstorm. Three different points of view.
Imagine Astra seeing Quill caught outside while Barnaby sees nothing. Their accounts should reflect what each experienced. This illustration shows the design.
05 Watch it run
Watch the experience become part of her story.
Follow the chase, then remove Astra’s belief and compare her response.
The same escapes. The same catches. A different response when she no longer holds the belief.
