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Collaborating Authors

 Treanor, Mike



Social Play in Non-Player Character Dialog

AAAI Conferences

Non-player characters in games generally lack believability and deep interactivity. The AI system Comme il Faut begins to tackle this by modeling social state and behaviors for game characters. The player initiates social exchanges and the dialog and outcome are generated and displayed in their entirety. In this paper we present a model called social prac-tices to extend Comme il Faut. Social practices increase the playability of social play by modeling social interactions at a more granular level and adding interactivity at each stage. This model also moves away from dialog trees to a more modular form of authoring to support the additional com-plexity.


Comme il Faut: A System for Authoring Playable Social Models

AAAI Conferences

Authoring interactive stories where the player is afforded a wide range of social interactions results in a very large space of possible social and story situations. The amount of effort required to individually author for each of these circumstances can quickly become intractable. The social AI system Comme il Faut (CiF) aims to reduce the burden on the author by providing a playable model of social interaction where the author provides reusable and recombinable representations of social norms and social interactions. Motivated through examples from an in-development video game, Prom Week, this paper provides a detailed description of the structures with which CiF represents social knowledge and how this knowledge is employed to simulate social interactions between characters.


The Prom: An Example of Socially-Oriented Gameplay

AAAI Conferences

The Prom is a game where the player manages the social life of a group of high school students and creates the situations from which dramatic, thought provoking or at least funny stories can unfold. The setting of The Prom involves a group of alternative high school kids (e.g. Emos, Goths, Geeks, etc.) and their dramatic lives as they prepare for the upcoming school prom. Through creating friendships, making people become enemies, controlling who gets to be in the "in" crowd and much more, the player can shape the social world of the characters. Each character has a distinct personality represented by interests (e.g. what bands they like), needs (e.g. a character may need to demonstrate a certain degree of dominance over others), traits (e.g. being a particularly jealous person), social networks (e.g. to what degree a characters like, are attracted to or respect one another) and social status (e.g. who is dating who).The social artificial intelligence system Comme il Faut ( CiF ) drives this gameplay experience by simulating per character needs and traits, social statuses, social networks, social history and most importantly to gameplay, the outcomes and effects of social games. CiF is a playable computational model of social interactions designed specifically to allow autonomous characters to play social games. By giving player controls to navigate a social, rather than physical, space, The Prom is being created to demonstrate how CiF and social games can create a practically limitless numbers of possibly compelling stories and gameplay.