Incorporating autonomy and intelligence into virtual worlds to build an engaging virtual environment for applications such as serious games is becoming more desirable. There are challenges in integrating these systems including concerns with synchronization, communication, monitoring, efficiency, and control. This paper presents an approach to integrating a virtual world engine with a multiagent system platform through the creation of an interface between them. We show the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach through developing agents controlled non-player controlled characters (NPCs) in Open Wonderland and purposeful communication channels among agents using Jason AgentSpeak.Keywor ds: Virtual Worlds  Multiagent Systems  Integration  Serious Games 1 Intr oduction Virtual Worlds (VW) are 3D graphical environments that provide multimedia, engaging, and immersive user experience. They can provide more dimensions than physical environments, more social nuanced ways for people. Multiagent systems (MAS) encompass distributed problem-solving applications; such as network management has a focus on inter-agent communication, coordination, and negotiation. Recently, researchers in VW community have adopted MAS as they are well suited to application domains where virtual entities, called agents, are self-directed and can actively pursue their goals within an environment that they can interact with, including interactions with other agents that are also in pursuit of their own goals. Agents are ideally suited for modeling real people -they are active and social, similar to the way people are. Also, agents can be used for modelling nonplayer character (NPCs), keeping track of individual interests, motivations, and goals in game worlds. However, there is not a platform that can help programmers to develop and test agent behaviors in virtual worlds that need autonomy and intelligence and interaction with other agents and the environments.

Incorporating intelligence and social behaviours into virtual worlds for learning is becoming more desirable in making them smart, adaptive, personalized, and therefore, more effective and engaging. Realistic non-player controlled characters (NPCs) are essential of a game world and are making the virtual world more real for players. This is true in video games where more interactive NPCs support the story narrative of a game, making the game more immersive, more convincing, but it is also true in other areas where virtual worlds are used such as business and education, increasing the effectiveness of those environments. Research that has been done with virtual agents and multi-agent systems can be leveraged to create more realistic NPCs through purposeful communication channels, inter-agent interactions and environment-agent interactions for game-based learning applications. This research proposes an approach to controlling avatars with intelligent agents through the creation of an interface between a multi-agent system to a virtual world engine. Basic NPC behaviours controlled by agents using Jason AgentSpeak are used to test the feasibility of the approach. A QuizMASter is designed and illustrated as a proof of concept of the use of such agent controlled avatars in educational context.Keywords-virtual learning environments; multi-agent systems, virtual world, non-player characters, social behavior, intelligent agent, social bots.