Building a Dynamic Social Community with Non Playable Characters

A challenge faced by the video game industry is to develop be-lievable and more intelligent Non-Playable Characters (NPCs). To tackle this problem a low-cost and simple ap-proach has been proposed in this research, which is the devel-opment of a gossip virtual social network for NPCs. The net-work a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Perrie, Justin, Li, Ling
Format: Journal Article
Published: Denshi Jouhou Tsuushin Gakkai 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/32534
Description
Summary:A challenge faced by the video game industry is to develop be-lievable and more intelligent Non-Playable Characters (NPCs). To tackle this problem a low-cost and simple ap-proach has been proposed in this research, which is the devel-opment of a gossip virtual social network for NPCs. The net-work allows simple individual NPCs to communicate their knowledge amongst themselves. The communication within this social network is governed by social-psychological rules. These rules are categorized into four types: Contact, whether the NPC are within a contactable range of each other; Obser-vation, whether the NPCs actually want to talk to each other based on their personal traits; Status, the current representa-tion of the NPCs; and Relationships which determines the long term ties of the NPCs. Evaluations of the proposed gos-sip virtual social network was conducted, both through statis-tical analysis and a survey of real users. Highly satisfactory results have been achieved.