Daaaaang this technical breakdown is incredibly fascinating, especially in the differences between the male and female versions.  I had never poked into the code for it before.  The split between the male and female versions poses a really specific problem that the site addresses which is that it would be incredibly hard to alter the game to allow for homosexuality.  It would either mean merging the two versions somehow or creating entirely separate versions for homosexual characters).  A huge pain all around.
 
I am a huge fan of Alter Ego though.  I've played through it several times since I've heard about it.  I bring Alter Ego up a lot in conversations about decision-based games in particular.  What I like about Alter Ego that a lot of conversation/decision-based games don't do is that it obscures the results based on your options.  To paraphrase Keith Malley, the options in most games are "a) fuck you i don't need you b) i'll do whatever you want you can walk all over me c) i'm going to do the right thing and compromise can be good".  You can tell what the results of your choices is going to be and instead of choosing the choice you think most represents how you would respond you choose the choice that you think will get you the response you want.  Alter Ego however doesn't make things as obvious.  If you try to the play the game and make choices with the results in mind you will repeatedly be disappointed or frustrated.  The choices you make don't always have the outcomes you expect, especially in scenarios where other people are involved.  After all, you can only account for your own actions, not the actions and thoughts of others.  Also, there are some choices that will work one way in one playthrough but work differently in another.  You end up having to just go with your gut feelings instead of trying to manipulate the entire game world and I really like this.  I wish more decision-based games would do this.  
 
Your decisions in Alter Ego also affect you in ways that aren't always transparent.  I mean iirc you can check your stats at any time but when you go through each event it doesn't always say "SELF ESTEEM -4 POINTS  TRUSTWORTHINESS +2  YOU NEED A TRUSTWORTHINESS OF 10 POINTS TO GET YOUR MOM TO LET YOU GO TO THE CONCERT" or whatever.  It allows these factors to be a bit more abstract and as a result a bit more realistic.  After all, seeing "I have a trustworthiness of 10 so I'll be able to do x but need two more points in y" is making you think too hard about meaningless numerical stats and less about what this means in terms of a character.  Unless you're constantly checking up on them then you aren't seeing these stats or really thinking about them, you're just playing the game and experiencing different events and their outcomes.  That's just really refreshing to me.  I mean, right now I'm playing Persona 4 and I really enjoy it but it totally lacks that layer of abstraction.  The game will flat out tell you if your Courage Numbers(tm) are too low to do something and won't let you even attempt it and fail at it.  It just tells you "nope your numbers are too low pick something else!!!" and the choices you make primarily have no effect on anything.  I think that the whole point of decision-based gameplay should be making choices and having those choices mean something.  The choices should have meaningful effects.  At the same time, those choices shouldn't be made in a manipulative way in an attempt to get the outcomes you want.  The choices should be made based on your own judgement of the situation.  So if Alter Ego is nothing else, I think it's an excellent example of doing decision-based gameplay in a way that is not easily manipulated with enough abstraction to make it feel very organic.

Yeah!  The idea of a game world's actors existing and acting independently of the player is something I'm incredibly interested in.  The vast majority of games are player-centric, which I suppose is because of many games functioning as escapist fantasies.  The player is the hero of the story (even if they have no heroic qualities) so everyone revolves around this hero.  That's something very boring to me.  I love the idea of games where other characters are doing things that don't involve you.  Seeing characters interact in the background, finding out about their interactions after the fact...later versions of The Sims added this with http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Story_progression]story progression[/url], where essentially Sims in your neighborhood outside of the household you're currently controlling will have all the typical Sims interactions independently of you.  So, while you're controlling one house, NPC Sims will be talking, building/destroying relationships, marrying, having children, adopting pets, etc.  It makes the world feel a lot more alive than a game where, say, NPCs are just standing around waiting to be interacted with.  Even in Animal Crossing the animals will occasionally interact and make each other happy or put each other in bad moods.  Ultimately it breaks down into two very different kinds of gameplay.  You can have a world where actors interact independently of you which is more organic, or you can have a world where actors' behavior depends entirely on the decisions of the player, which is more controlled.  They offer entirely different gameplay experiences.  Story progression can be toggled on and off in The Sims and I think that is what most separates the ways people interact with the game.  With story progression on you get an experience where you're interacting with a world that you only have minor influence in (total influence over your household but only a household's worth of influence over the world as a whole).  But a lot of people turn this off because they want to construct a specific narrative within the world--having certain people be in certain types of relationships, that sort of thing.  I think having both types of play in the same game is fascinating.  But I also think that within the game industry as a whole there's a trend towards the latter.  If you look at games like Mass Effect or Fallout: NV you can more or less consistently make the same decisions in the game and get the same outcomes.  It's a very controlled environment in which you can construct a specific narrative.  So I guess the point in all of this rambling is that I really want to see more games where the player doesn't have control over the narrative.  I mean I guess that's also what the Real Lives games were all about.  Sure, you got to make some decisions, like what sort of job you wanted and whether or not you wanted to date someone--but ultimately there was very little about your life that you had control over.  To me it's really engaging to interact with a world in which you don't have full control over your own narrative.
 
As for the technical end of your post, I absolutely agree that if anyone was going to make any serious updates to Alter Ego it'd be best to totally recode it and combine the two games into one.  I'd actually really like to see a fully updated version of the game, like...a totally modern rewriting.  More gender neutral (or at least equal), less heteronormative and US-centric, updated technology, that sort of thing.  After all, the game has been out for almost 30 years now, I'd be interested to see how a 2013 version of Alter Ego would look and I'd be interested in it having input from a variety of modern psychologists and sociologists.
 
By the way, I'm really digging your deconstruction of the coding end of this!  I'm really interested in the technical aspects of games like these but I had never gotten around to looking at Alter Ego's code myself before.

this is a super interesting thread

yeah, super interesting stuff up in here! denzquix you are a cool person and i very much enjoy your posts :> the differences in the male and female versions of this game are intriguing :o i played this game a couple times (once female, once male) after seeing Vellfire's endorsements of it a while ago, and i basically agree with all her thoughts about it. it's a great execution of decision-based gameplay, but i would love to see an updated version with more freedom. i wish i was more able to maintain motivation to work on my own game development projects, because i've had several game ideas that play off of the concepts discussed here...

The money/job system was always the weak point for me. (Relationships too, but I usually forget about those until I'm old, when I quick marry the first guy who comes up after two dates because the game says I should.) I assume some of the things you do when you're a kid affect your frugality later, but I'm always super frugal and then as an adult with zero assets spend barely within my income (or in old age beyond it, but within my means, I guess, since I usually invent a new bean dip or something to get a ton of money). The job system's requirements are also pretty fuzzy. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the code for those areas.

I would say that that other life-sim (Real Lives?) where you have less control over your characters than their circumstances at birth is probably better as far as money systems and context go, but it's not really as engrossing, just interesting. It's more of a spreadsheet where some cells have tuberculosis/military coups

It's also really neat to see the many branching paths that I never, ever take because I'm always trying to get the best stats instead of inhabiting a character much different from my own. I do like that other characters are temperamental and petty and get deeply hurt when I am too much of a stick-in-the-mud to skip school so my friend-group can go shopping, but as far as I know there aren't really developed characters beyond you and I guess your parents. It seems like every friend interaction is with a different person, and apart from one or two traits which may increase the likelihood of their being a jerk, any boy/girlfriend is pretty much the same.

i will play all of these

Okay now I'm gonna have to find that Famicom version while I'm here in Japan.

Okay now I'm gonna have to find that Famicom version while I'm here in Japan.

 
 
Your in japan luck wish I had money.