Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

Platformer level design for player believability

Player believability is often defined as the ability of a game playing character to convince an observer that it is being controlled by a human. The agent's behavior is often assumed to be the main contributor to the character's believability. In this paper we reframe this core assumption and instead focus on the impact of the game environment and aspects of game design (such as level design) on the believability of the game character. To investigate the relationship between game content and believability we crowdsource rank-based annotations from subjects that view playthrough videos of various AI and human controlled agents in platformer levels of dissimilar characteristics. For this initial study we use a variant of the well-known Super Mario Bros game. We build support vector machine models of reported believability based on gameplay and level features which are extracted from the videos. The highest performing model predicts perceived player believability of a character with an accuracy of 73.31%, on average, and implies a direct relationship between level features and player believability.We would like to thank all participants of the crowdsourcing experiment. This work has been supported in part by the FP7 Marie Curie CIG project AutoGameDesign (630665).peer-reviewe

Close Reading Oblivion: Character Believability and Intelligent Personalization in Games

This paper investigates issues of character believability and intelligent personalization through a reading of the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Oblivion’s opening sequence simultaneously trains players in the function of the game, and allows them to customize their character class through the choices and actions they take. Oblivion makes an ambitious attempt at intelligent personalization in the character creation process. Its strategy is to track early gameplay decisions and “stereotype” players into one of 21 possible classes. This approach has two advantages over a less adaptive system. First, it supports the illusion of the game world as a real world by embedding the process of character creation within a narrativised game-play context. Second, the intelligent recommendation system responds to the player’s desire to believe that the game “knows” something about her personality. This leads the players to conceptualize the system as an entity with autonomous, humanlike knowledge. Through the analysis of multiple replayings of the opening sequence, this paper considers ways in which Oblivion both succeeds and fails at mapping player behaviour to appropriate class assignments. The paper documents places where the dialogue between player and game breaks down, and argues for alternative techniques to customize the play experience within the desires of the player

An Emergent Framework For Realistic Psychosocial Behaviour In Non Player Characters

This paper introduces a framework for emergent psychosocial behaviour in non player characters in video games. This framework uses concepts behind emergent gameplay to support the mechanics of designer-defined psychological and social concepts, undefined circumstances, and emergence. Based on this framework, a prototype system has been developed. This prototype has been evaluated for realistic emergent behaviour, and has been shown through experimentation to succeed in supporting emergent psychosocial behaviour. The work to date on the framework is encouraging and quite promising for continued work in this area in the future

Automated state of play: rethinking anthropocentric rules of the game

Automation of play has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. This article proposes to look at AI-driven non-human play and, what follows, rethink digital games, taking into consideration their cybernetic nature, thus departing from the anthropocentric perspectives dominating the field of Game Studies. A decentralised post-humanist reading, as the author argues, not only allows to rethink digital games and play, but is a necessary condition to critically reflect AI, which due to the fictional character of video games, often plays by very different rules than the so-called “true” AI

Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games (Dagstuhl Seminar 12191)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12191 "Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games". The aim for the seminar was to bring together creative experts in an intensive meeting with the common goals of gaining a deeper understanding of various aspects of artificial and computational intelligence in games, to help identify the main challenges in game AI research and the most promising venues to deal with them. This was accomplished mainly by means of workgroups on 14 different topics (ranging from search, learning, and modeling to architectures, narratives, and evaluation), and plenary discussions on the results of the workgroups. This report presents the conclusions that each of the workgroups reached. We also added short descriptions of the few talks that were unrelated to any of the workgroups

WRITING FOR EACH OTHER: DYNAMIC QUEST GENERATION USING IN SESSION PLAYER BEHAVIORS IN MMORPG

Role-playing games (RPGs) rely on interesting and varied experiences to maintain player attention. These experiences are often provided through quests, which give players tasks that are used to advance stories or events unfolding in the game. Traditional quests in video games require very specific conditions to be met, and for participating members to advance them by carrying out pre-defined actions. These types of quests are generated with perfect knowledge of the game world and are able to force desired behaviors out of the relevant non-player characters (NPCs). This becomes a major issue in massive multiplayer online (MMO) when other players can often disrupt the conditions needed for quests to unfold in a believable and immersive way, leading to the absence of a genuine multiplayer RPG experience. Our proposed solution is to dynamically create quests from real-time information on the unscripted actions of other NPCs and players in a game. This thesis shows that it is possible to create logical quests without global information knowledge, pre-defined story-trees, or prescribed player and NPC behavior. This allows players to become involved in storylines without having to perform any specific actions. Results are shown through a game scenario created from the Panoptyk Engine, a game engine in early development designed to test AI reasoning with information and the removal of the distinction between NPC and human players. We focus on quests issued by the NPC faction leaders of several in-game groups known as factions. Our generated quests are created logically from the pre-defined personality of each NPC leader, their memory of previous events, and information given to them by in-game sources. Long-spanning conflicts are seen to emerge from factions issuing quests against each other; these conflicts can be represented in a coherent narrative. A user study shows that players felt quests were logical, that players were able to recognize quests were based on events happening in the game, and that players experienced follow-up consequences from their actions in quests

Mechanically Derived Narrative through Perception of Video Game Characters

In this research paper composed for WRTC 200: Introduction to Studies in Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication, Cappo uses industry-related articles and academic studies to demonstrate how various interactive design choices in video games serve to influence the impression players feel toward a game\u27s world and its characters. Thorough and analytical, the piece serves as a guiding example of how interactive elements of a video game can work constructively with its storytelling to create an enjoyable and immersive experience

On Making Good Games - Using Player Virtue Ethics and Gameplay Design Patterns to Identify Generally Desirable Gameplay Features

This paper uses a framework of player virtues to perform a theoretical exploration of what is required to make a game good. The choice of player virtues is based upon the view that games can be seen as implements, and that these are good if they support an intended use, and the intended use of games is to support people to be good players. A collection of gameplay design patterns, identified through their relation to the virtues, is presented to provide specific starting points for considering design options for this type of good games. 24 patterns are identified supporting the virtues, including RISK/REWARD, DYNAMIC ALLIANCES, GAME MASTERS, and PLAYER DECIDED RESULTS, as are 7 countering three or more virtues, including ANALYSIS PARALYSIS, EARLY ELIMINATION, and GRINDING. The paper concludes by identifying limitations of the approach as well as by showing how it can be applied using other views of what are preferable features in games