Previous research demonstrates that social experience is a key motivation for continued play in online games. We argue that there is an untapped potential for NPCs to act as social mediators in online games by stimulating social interaction between players. For example, a social mediator NPC could ask in chat, “How is everyone’s day?” to encourage conversations between players. We suggest two potential applications for social mediator NPCs in online games by examining social experiences in two contemporary massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs): Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft.

Believability requires video game characters to consider their actions within the context of social norms. Social norms involve a broad range of behavioral defaults, obligations, and injunctions unrelated to strictly causal reasoning.  Defeasible reasoning involves rationally compelling but deductively invalid arguments, such as reasoning with rules that allow exceptions. This paper investigates having video game characters use defeasible reasoning to consider injunctive social norms when selecting and planning actions.

Culturally appropriate behavior is not genetically programmed, but is instead learned from direct teaching, or by The relevant literature maintains many different definitions observing and interacting with others. For example, language of culture, which vary according to the field of study. Hofstede is one of the primary abstract artifacts transmitted has studied the features that allow us to discern different extra genetically. This paper provides a review of how culturally cultures (Hofstede 2001), defining culture as: appropriate behavior can be achieved in synthetic agents and offers a concise overview of the relevant literature. "The collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people Bates (1994) describes believable characters as those from another" (Hofstede 2001, page 9).

We have constructed a system that supports unscripted social interaction between a player and virtual characters, where the participants pursue internal agendas and respond to one another in real-time.  Our emphasis on unscripted interaction means that the characters must accept dynamically generated performance requests, while our concern with social interaction implies that the characters must interleave performances with an attention to natural flow that encourages social engagement. We present initial work on a performance management mechanism that produces this interleaving.   It initiates and suspends character performances by allocating animation resources to requests via a utility function representing aesthetic concerns.  That function weighs extrinsic factors reflecting the purpose of taking an action against intrinsic ones that concern features of a given performance.  We show, via multiple short videos, that the features are individually material to the aesthetic quality of the result and that the mechanism can produce aesthetically pleasing performances on par with the best hand-generated prioritization scheme. We argue, anecdotally, that the parameters of the model are easy to identify, suggesting that the feature vocabulary is both intuitive and useful for shaping character performances.

In order to use computational intelligence for automated narrative synthesis, domain knowledge of the story world must be defined, a task which is currently confined to experts. This paper discusses the benefits and tradeoffs between agent-centric and event-centric approaches towards authoring the domain knowledge of story worlds. In an effort to democratize story world creation, we present an accessible graphical platform for content creators and even end users to create their own story worlds, populate it with smart characters and objects, and define narrative events that can be used by existing tools for automated narrative synthesis. We demonstrate the potential of our system by authoring a simple bank robbery story world, and integrate it with existing solutions for event-centric planning to synthesize example digital stories.

For young children, adults learning English, or individuals with language disorders, complex narratives are difficult to create and understand.  While narratives can easily be assessed in terms of their lexical and syntactic difficulty, automatically measuring the level of narrative complexity is a challenging problem.  We present and evaluate a preliminary system for assessing narrative complexity, which should help identify suitable texts for readers and assist in narrative skill evaluation.

Interactive narratives suffer from the narrative paradox: the tension that exists between providing a coherent narrative experience and allowing a player free reign over what she can manipulate in the environment. Knowing what actions a player in such an environment intends to carry out would help in managing the narrative paradox, since it would allow us to anticipate potential threats to the intended narrative experience and potentially mediate or eliminate them. The process of observing player actions and attempting to come up with an explanation for those actions (i.e. the plan that the player is trying to carry out) is the problem of plan recognition. We adopt the framing of narratives as plans and leverage recent advances that cast plan recognition as planning to develop a symbolic plan recognition system as a proof-of-concept model of a player's reasoning in an interactive narrative environment. In this paper we outline the system architecture, report on performance metrics that demonstrate adequate performance for non-trivial domains, and discuss the implications of treating players as plan recognizers.

Storytelling can be used by conversational agents in a wide variety of domains to maintain user engagement, both within a single interaction and over dozens or hun- dreds of interactions over time. The majority of agents designed with this ability to date deliver their stories as monologues without user input. However, people rarely tell stories in conversations this way, and instead rely on listener contributions to guide the storytelling process. Corpus-based studies of human-human conversational storytelling have demonstrated greater engagement, in the form of longer stories, when listeners co-construct stories this way. We describe a research framework for the generation and evaluation of co-constructed social stories in the context of task-based conversations, and a study on the effects of degree of user-agent story co-construction on user engagement. We find that users are more en- gaged with storytelling agents that allow them to co- construct stories in a contentful manner by asking ques- tions, compared to co-construction through acknowl- edgments only.

The story is particular medium. However, the discourse layer is not simply a conceptualization of the world of the narrative, with the an ordered subset of elements of the story layer. Genette characters, actions and events that it contains, while the discourse argues that every discourse implies a narrator. In this, the is composed of the communicative elements that participate discourse is an intentional structure through which the narrator in its telling. Research on computational models of "regulates the narrative information" given to the audience, narrative has produced many models of story, based for instance and its representation should include these intentions.

Given a polygon P of n vertices, the method to define a visibility polygon from a single point, q, is a well established Most digital games are goal-oriented; players are given an problem (Ghosh 2007), of time complexity Θ(n log(n)). We initial position and have to reach a certain goal position or use the well known angular plane-sweep algorithm (Asano state within a virtual level. Many generative methods to create 1985) to construct a visibility region V (q), giving us a starshaped such levels have been defined, and are able to create engaging polygonal region defined by the existing edge set, levels (Dormans and Bakkes 2011), while making filtered according to visibility from q. Figure 2 shows such a sure the game's fundamental puzzle structure in terms of region in light purple for point q.