Our Research

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...

Digital media has created more opportunities for stories to be interactive, allowing the user to participate in plot events and even change the direction of a story. Interactivity can make stories more engaging however if the plot can change as a result of user input then the story becomes non-linear. The resulting system is known as a potential narrative because...

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...