Abstract
The paper reports work to create believable autonomous Non Player Characters in Video games in general and educational role play games in particular. It aims to increase their ability to respond appropriately to the player’s actions both cognitively and emotionally by integrating two models: the cognitive appraisal-based FAtiMA architecture, and the drives-based PSI model. We discuss the modelling of adaptive affective autonomous characters based on a biologically-inspired theory of human action regulation taking into account perception, motivation, emotions, memory, learning and planning. These agents populate an educational Role Playing Game, ORIENT (Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology) dealing with the cultural-awareness problem for children aged 13–14.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Woodcook S. (2000) Game AI: The state of the industry. Game Developer 7(8): 24–32
Castle, L. (1998). The making of blade runner, soup to nuts! In Proceedings of the game developer’s conference (GDC) (pp. 87–97), Long Beach, CA
Orkin, J. (2006). Three states and a plan: The a.i. of f.e.a.r. In Proceedings of the game developer’s conference (GDC), San Jose. Last accessed August 13, 2009, from http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf.
Bates J. (1994) The role of emotion in believable agents. Communications of the ACM: Special Issue on Agents 37(7): 122–125
Picard R. W. (1997) Affective computing. MIT, Cambridge
Thomas F., Johnston O. (1981) Disney animation: The illusion of life. Abbevile Press, New York
Minsky M. (1988) Society of mind. Simon and Schuster, New York
Damasio A. (1994) Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. Gosset/Putnam Press, New York
Moffat D. (1997) Personality parameters and programs. In: Petta P., Trappl R. (eds) Creating personalities for synthetic actors, towards autonomous personality agents. Springer, Berlin, pp 120–165
Jones C. (1989) Chuck Amuck: The life and times of an animated cartoonist. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
Paiva A., Dias J., Aylett R., Woods S., Hall L., Zoll C. (2005) Learning by feeling: Evoking empathy with synthetic characters. Applied Artificial Intelligence 19: 235–266
Core M., Traum D., Lane H., Swartout W., Gratch J., Lent M. V., Marsella S. (2006) Teaching negotiation skills through practice and reflection with virtual humans. Simulation 82(11): 685–701
Tomlinson, B., & Blumberg, B. (2002). AlphaWolf: Social learning, emotion and development in autonomous virtual agents. In First GSFC/JPL workshop on radical agent concepts, pp. 35–45.
Bickmore T., Picard R. (2005) Establishing and maintaining long-term human–computer relationships. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 12: 293–327
Kenny, P., Parsons, T., Gratch, J., Leuski, A., & Rizzo, A. (2007). Virtual patients for clinical therapist skills training. In C. Pelachaud, J. Martin, E. André, G. Chollet, K. Karpouzis, & D. Péle (Eds.), 7th International conference on Intelligent virtual agents (pp. 192–210). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Paris. Berlin: Springer.
Eck R. V. (2006) Digital game-based learning: It’s not just the digital natives who are restless. EDUCAUSE Review 41(2): 16–30
Piaget J. (1972) The principles of genetic epistemology. Routledge and Keegan Paul Ltd, London
Lewin K. (1951) Field theory in social science. Harper and Row, New York
Kanfer F.H. (1979) Self-management strategies and tactics. In: Goldstein A., Kanfer F. (eds) Maximizing treatment gains: Transfer enhancement in psychotherapy. Academic Press, New York
Dias J., Paiva A., Vala M., Aylett R., Woods S., Zoll C. (2006) Empathic characters in computer-based personal and social education. In: Pivec M. (eds) Affective and emotional aspects of human–computer interaction game-based and innovative learning approaches. IOS Press, Amsterdam
Lim, M. Y., Aylett, R., Enz, S., Kriegel, M., Vannini, N., Hall, L., & Jones, S. (2009). Towards intelligent computer assisted educational role-play. In: M. Chang, R. Kuo, Kinshuk, G. D. Chen, & M. Hirose (Eds.), 4th International conference on e-learning and games, Edutainment 2009, Banff, Canada (pp. 208–219). Berlin: Springer.
Mascarenhas, S., Dias, J., Afonso, N., Enz, S., & Paiva, A. (2009). Using rituals to express cultural differences in synthetic characters. In S. Decker & C. Sierra (Eds.), 8th International conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 305–312), Budapest, Hungary. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
Hofstede G. (1991) Cultures and organisations. McGraw-Hill, London
Lim, M. Y., Kriegel, M., Aylett, R., Enz, S., Vannini, N., Hall, L., Rizzo, P., & Leichtenstern, K. (2009). Technology-enhanced role-play for intercultural learning contexts. In S. Natkin & J. Dupire (Eds.), 8th International conference on entertainment computing (pp. 73–84), Paris, France. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.
Rime B. (2007) Interpersonal emotion regulation. In: Gross J. (eds) Handbook of emotion regulation. Guildford Press, New York
Hogan R. (1977) Development of an empathy scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 33: 307–316
Hoffman M. L. (1977) Empathy, its development and prosocial implications. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 25: 169–217
Ho W. C., Dautenhahn K., Nehaniv C. L. (2008) Computational memory architectures for autobiographic agents interacting in a complex virtual environment: A working model. Connection Science 20(1): 21–65
Oliveira, E., & Sarmento, L. (2003). Emotional advantage for adaptability and autonomy. In AAMAS (pp. 305–312). Melbourne, Australia: ACM.
Cañamero, D. (1997). A hormonal model of emotions for behavior control. In VUB AI-Lab Memo 97-06. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Velásquez, J. D. (1997). Modeling emotions and other motivations in synthetic agents. In Proceeding AAAI 97 (pp. 10–15). Menlo Park: AAAI Press/The MIT Press.
Blumberg, B. (1996). Old Tricks, new dogs: Ethology and interactive creatures. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Pezzulo, G., & Calvi, G. (2007). Rational agents that blush. In A. Paiva, R. Prada, & R. Picard (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International conference of Affective computing and intelligent interaction (pp. 374–385). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer.
Izard C. E. (1993) Four systems for emotion activation: Cognitive and noncognitive processes. Psychological Review 100(1): 68–90
Arnold M. B. (1960) Emotion and personality. Columbia University Press, New York
Ortony A., Clore G., Collins A. (1988) The cognitive structure of emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Elliot, C. D. (1992). The affective reasoner: A process model of emotions in an multi-agent system. PhD thesis, Northwestern University, IL.
Reilly, W. S., & Bates, J. (1992). Building emotional agents. Technical Report CMU-CS-91-143, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
Loyall, A. B., & Bates, J. (1991). Hap: A reactive adaptive architecture for agents. Technical Report CMU-CS-91-147, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
Gratch J., Marsella S. (2004) Evaluating a computational model of emotion. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Special issue on the best of AAMAS) 11(1): 23–43
Dias, J., & Paiva, A. (2005). Feeling and reasoning: A computational model for emotional agents. In 12th Portuguese conference on Artificial intelligence (EPIA 2005) (pp. 127–140), Portugal. Berlin: Springer.
Dörner, D. (2003). The mathematics of emotions. In D. D. Frank Detje & H. Schaub (Eds.), Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Cognitive modeling (pp. 75–79), Bamberg, Germany.
Dörner, D., Gerdes, J., Mayer, M., & Misra, S. (2006). A simulation of cognitive and emotional effects of overcrowding. In D. Fum, F. Del Missier, & A. Stocco (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Cognitive modeling. Trieste, Italy: Edizioni Goliardiche.
Sloman, A. (2001, March 21–24). Varieties of affect and the cogaff architecture schema. In Symposium on Emotion, cognition and affective computing, AISB 01 Convention (pp. 39–48). UK: University of York.
Randolph, M. J., & Amy E. Henninger, E. C. (2002, May 7). Interfacing emotional behavior moderators with intelligent synthetic forces. In: Proceeding of the 11th CGF-BR conference, Orlando, FL.
Bratman M. E. (1987) Intention, plans and practical reasoning. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Aylett, R., Dias, J., & Paiva, A. (2006). An affectively driven planner for synthetic characters. In International conference on Automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS2006) (pp. 2–10). UK: AAAI Press.
Marsella, S., Johnson, B., & LaBore, C. (2002). Interactive pedagogical drama. In: Fourth international conference on Autonomous agents (AAMAS) (pp. 301–308). Bologna, Italy: ACM Press.
Dias, J., Ho, W. C., Vogt, T., Beeckman, N., Paiva, A., & André, E. (2007). I know what I did last summer: Autobiographic memory in synthetic characters. In A. Paiva, R. Prada, & R. Picard (Eds.), Affective computing and intelligent interaction (pp. 606–617), Lisbon, Portugal. Berlin: Springer.
Gebhard, P. (2005). ALMA—a layered model of affect. In Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS’05) (pp. 29–36), Utrecht. New York: ACM.
Lazarus R. S., Folkman S. (1984) Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer, New York
Aylett, R., Vannini, N., André, E., Paiva, A., Enz, S., & Hall, L. (2009). But that was in another country: Agents and intercultural empathy. In S. Decker, & C. Sierra (Eds.), 8th International conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 305–312), Budapest, Hungary. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
Bartl, C., & Dörner, D. (1998). Comparing the behaviour of psi with human behaviour in the biolab game. Bamberg: Lehrstuhl Psychologie II Memorandum Nr. 32.
Lim, M. Y. (2007). Emotions, behaviour and belief regulation in an intelligent guide with attitude. PhD thesis, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Squire K. (2003) Design principles of next generation digital gaming for education. Educational Technology 43(5): 17–33 (The Games-To-Teach Team at MIT)
McCrae R. R., John O. P. (1992) An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of Personality 60: 175–215
Nazir, A., Enz, S., Lim, M. Y., Aylett, R., & Cawsey, A. (2009). Culture-personality based affective model. AI and Society Journal. http://www.springerlink.com/content/4x35613r5k55q1q5/.
Enz S., Zoll C., Vannini N., Lim M.Y., Hall L., Paiva A., Aylett R. (2009) Orient—the intercultural empathy through virtual role-play. In: Mukerji S., Tripathi P. (eds) Cases on transnational learning and technologically enabled environments. Hershey, IGI Global, pp 65–88
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lim, M.Y., Dias, J., Aylett, R. et al. Creating adaptive affective autonomous NPCs. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 24, 287–311 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-010-9161-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-010-9161-2