Start Your EM(otion En)gine: Towards Computational Models of Emotion for Improving the Believability of Video Game Non-Player Characters

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 development practices.

Psychological validity—the grounding in affective science—is a necessary quality for plausible emotion-driven NPC behaviours. Computational Models of Emotion (CMEs) are one solution because they use at least one affective theory/model in their design. However, CME development tends to be insufficiently documented such that its processes seem unsystematic and poorly defined. This makes it difficult to reuse a CME’s components, extend or scale them, or compare it to other CMEs.

This work draws from software engineering to propose three methods for acknowledging and limiting subjectivity in CME development to improve their reusability, maintainability, and verifiability:

• A systematic, document analysis-based methodology for choosing a CME’s underlying affective theories/models using its high-level design goals and design scope, which critically influence a CME’s functional requirements;
• An approach for transforming natural language descriptions of affective theories into a type-based formal model using an intermediate, second natural language description refining the original descriptions and showing where and what assumptions informed the formalization; and
• A literary character analysis-based methodology for developing acceptance test cases with known believable characters from professionally-crafted stories that do not rely on specific CME designs.

Development of EMgine, a game development CME for generating NPC emotions, shows these methods in practice.