Geneva Smith

Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) help motivate player engagement with narrative-driven games. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions to changing situations, which emotion often drives in humans. Therefore, giving NPCs “emotion” should enhance their believability. For adoption in industry, it is important to create processes for developing tools to build NPCs “with emotion” that fit with current...

Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are a crucial component of narrative-driven games. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions, which is often driven by emotion in humans. The plausibility of NPCs’ “emotions” partly depends on their psychological validity. A Computational Model of Emotion (CME), grounded in emotion theories and/or models from psychology, is an attractive solution. Play-testing believability...

Emergent Narratives (ENs) provide a rich tool for uncovering untold tales when we play video games. They are stories that are not embedded by the game’s author, instead arising from the game’s mechanics (Adams, 2013). This enables the game to create new events for the player to experience, generated from the player’s choices (Louchart et al 2008). ENs, therefore, are...

Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are a crucial component of narrativedriven games, which offer rich player experiences (PX). The quality of these NPCs’ interactions with players motivates continuous engagement with the game, and often re-engagement after players stop playing. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions to changing situations, including those caused by player actions. In humans, this...

Studying and developing systems that can recognize, express, and “have” emotions is called affective computing. To create a Computational Model of Emotion (CME), one must first identify what kind of system to build, then find emotion theories that match its requirements. The relevant literature is vast. This survey aims to help design CMEs that generate emotions—separated into emotion representation and...

Recent Computer Role Playing Games, such as Skyrim and Breath of the Wild, have entranced us with their expansive, complex worlds. However, the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in these games remain lackluster outside of scripted events. This is, in part, because games typically do not simulate NPC emotions. Wouldn’t these games be more interesting, if NPCs reacted more appropriately to the...

We are interested in a systematic understanding the effect of visual scaling — changing the size of the screen, while holding other factors constants — on gameplay. Through examples, we illustrate the effects that arise. We investigate scaling up as well as down, and find that the effects are quite different. We give a first classification of the underlying causes...

Recent Computer Role Playing Games such as Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, have entranced us with their expansive, complex worlds. However, the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in these games remain stale and lackluster outside of scripted events. This is, in part, because game engines generally do not simulate emotions in...

Realistic video game characters are a desirable game component to increase a game’s value. Even if the game’s ending does not change, realistic character behaviours encourage players to replay a game multiple times to see what happens along the way. This is closer to tabletop games where players know the game’s outcome, but still play because no two sessions are...

We present two experiments on large tiled displays used for fast-action gaming. Using a simulated tiled display, we assess the effects of interior bezel size, and configuration in a top-down arcade style space shooter game with many moving objects. Our experiments also investigate the effect of bezel compensation. The first experiment examines bezel size independent of configuration, using simulated bezel...

Many spatial UI systems (e.g., VR) rely on large displays. One method of building large high-resolution displays is to use multiple HD monitors as tiles in a single large display. The downside is the presence of monitor borders – bezels – between each tile in such a display. We present a study looking at the impact of bezel width on...