The monkey business on SS13

[Frank_Stein]

I'd recommend against making monkeys get angry without a player pissing them off, otherwise people are going to complain and the whole thing will get shitcanned like a certain other gameplay mechanic.

I'm so-so on this. I agree that a monkey shouldn't default be angry at a player, but I do think they should be capable of getting upset from stimuli not dependent on player interaction. For instance, if one monkey out of boredom were to toss something at another monkey, that monkey should get upset at that monkey. If a player were to give food to one monkey and not the other, it should get upset at both that player and that monkey.

Not that the monkey being upset would necessarily mean it would become violent. It could just become more irritable and make more noise/refuse to cooperate with the player until it's appeased.

While we're on the topic, do you think it would be feasible to include training into monkey AI? As in, you could use conditioning though positive and negative reinforcement to train a monkey to accomplish a task? Mechanics could build a Skinner box of sorts with components, eventually training monkeys to operate machinery.