Agents That Relate: Improving the Social Believability of Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Games

Abstract

Abstract.As the video games industry grows and video games become more part of our lives, we are eager for better gaming experiences. One field in which games still have much to gain is in Non-Player Character behavior in socially demanding games, like Role-Playing Games. In Role-Playing Games players have to interact constantly with very simple Non-Player Characters, with no social behavior in most of the cases, which contrasts with the rich social experience that was provided in its traditional pen-and-paper format. What we propose in this paper is that if we create a richer social behavior in Non-Player Characters the player's gaming experience can be improved. In order to attain this we propose a model that has at its core social relationships with/between Non-Player Characters. By doing an evaluation with players, we identified that 80% of them preferred such system, affirming that it created a better gaming experience.

Playing with Social and Emotional Game Companions

“…Charles [7] argues that player experience and enjoyment can be significantly enhanced when the game character is well designed. Afonso & Prada [1] also discuss that "Social Believability" in games improved the experience. Bailey et al [3] suggest that the character's believability influences the player immersion and thus enhances the game-play experience.…”

Empathy with Non-Player Characters? An Empirical approach to the Foundations of Human/Non-Human Relationships

“…But how does this tie to the topic of empathy with non-player characters 2 ? While previous research into virtual characters in computer games has largely focused on the narrative aspects of NPCs for an increase in believability (Lankoski & Björk, 2007;Afonso & Prada, 2008), or their appearance in terms of believability (Lee & Heeter, 2012), there is a lack of studies that focus on the player's perspective and their interpretations towards non-player characters. Involuntarily, human players build up expectations towards the virtual characters which then would have to be consistently fulfilled (or not).…”

CiF-CK: An architecture for social NPCS in commercial games

“…The mod containing CiF-CK implementation and the Player Scenarios is called "Social NPCs" and was released in the 26th of August (2016), both in Steam Workshop 5 and in the popular mod website: "Nexus Mods" 6 . In the first 40 days after its release it had been played by more than 6 000 different players and more than 70 000 users had visited the mod's web page.…”

“…Unfortunately, most of the NPCs do not exhibit deep social reasoning and most of the times are simply frozen in time, repeating the same action, if any, over and over again [5].…”