Skip to main content

Actor Bots

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Believable Bots

Abstract

In many recent computer games there has been an increased use of Non-Player Characters as quest givers, tradesmen, members of the general public and as quest companions for the players. All these roles call for intelligent bots that can give the player an engaging experience by adjusting and adapting to the players’ style of play. They need to behave as actors in a virtual improvisational theatre. They need to perform in a manner that the player finds believable and engaging so that the player becomes sufficiently immersed in the interactive drama and keeps coming back for more. The bot’s intelligence needs to be both robust to respond to player actions and sufficiently complex to handle character traits, emotions and complex decision making that resembles that of a human player. A balance needs to be maintained between the bots’ believability and their entertainment value for the player, as these two goals may be at odds in some situations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Arinbjarnar, M., Kudenko, D.: Schemas in directed emergent drama. In: Proceedings of the 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS08), Erfurt (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Arinbjarnar, M., Kudenko, D.: Duality of actor and character goals in virtual drama. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Amsterdam (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Arinbjarnar, M., Kudenko, D.: Bayesian networks: real-time applicable decision mechanisms for intelligent agents in interactive drama. In: Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), Copenhagen, Aug 2010

    Google Scholar 

  4. Aylett, V., Dias, J., Paiva, A.: An affectively driven planner for synthetic characters. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS06), UK (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ball, G., Breese, J.: Relating personality and behavior: posture and gestures. In: Paiva, A. (ed.) Affective Interactions, pp. 196–203. Springer, Berlin (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bioware. Newerwinter nights. http://nwn.bioware.com/ (2002)

  7. Bohus, D., Horvitz, E.: Dialog in the open world: platform and applications. In: Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Multimodal interfaces (ICMI-MLMI ’09), pp. 31–38. ACM, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Choi, D., Konik, T., Nejati, N., Park, C., Langley, P.: A believable agent for first-person shooter games. In: Proceedings of the Third Annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, pp. 71–73. AAAI Press, Stanford (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Sony Computer Entertainment. Heavy Rain, http://www.heavyrainps3.com/ (2009)

  10. FASA. Star trek: The role playing game (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Flaubert, G.: Madame Bovary. France, Paris (1856)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Freytag, G.: Technique of the Drama. Benjamin Blom, New York (1863)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Goodman Games. Etherscope, http://www.goodman-games.com/etherscope.html (2006)

  14. Glymour, C., Danks, D.: Reasons as causes in bayesian epistemology. J. Philos. 104(9), 464–474 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Gmytrasiewicz, P.J., Durfee, E.H.: A rigorous, operational formalization of recursive modeling. In: International Conference on Multiagent Systems, pp. 125–132 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Gorman, B., Thurau, C., Bauckhage, C., Humphrys, M.: Believability testing and bayesian imitation in interactive computer games. In: From Animals to Animats 9, vol. 4095, pp. 655–666. Springer, Berlin (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Gygax, G.: Dungeon Module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands—Introductory Module for Character Levels 1–3. Berkeley Top Line Distributing, Berkeley (1980)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Hall, L., Woods, S., Aylett, R., Newall, L., Paiva, A.: Achieving empathic engagement through affective interaction with synthetic characters. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interfaces, pp. 731–738. Springer, Berlin (2005) (LNCS 3784)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Horvitz, E., Paek, T.: A computational architecture for conversation. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on User Modeling (UM’99), pp. 201–210. Springer, New York (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Le Hy, R., Arrigoni, A., Bessiere, P., Lebeltel, O: Teaching bayesian behaviours to video game characters. Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Elsevier) Special issue: Robot Learning from Demonstration, 47, 177–185 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Dias, J., Paiva, A.: Feeling and Reasoning: A Computational Model for Emotional Characters. In: 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2005), pp. 127–140. Springer, Berlin (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Jensen, F. V.: Bayesian Networks and Decision Graphs. Springer, Berlin (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Juul, J.: Games telling stories? Int. J. Comput. Game Res. 1(1) (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Koller, D., Pfeffer, A.: Object-oriented bayesian networks. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 302–313. San Francisco (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Linden Lab. Second Life, http://secondlife.com/, June (2008)

  26. Lagnado, D.A., Waldmann, M.R., Hagmayer, Y., Sloman, S.A.: Beyond covariation: cues to causal structure. In: Gopnik, A., Schultz, L. (eds.) Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation, 1st edn. Oxford University Press, USA, (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Laurel, B.: Computers as Theater. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Boston (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Laws, R.D.: Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. Steve Jackson Games, Austin (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Lin, Y., Druzdzel, M.: Computational advantages of relevance reasoning in bayesian belief networks. In: Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-97), pp. 342–35. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Bethesda Softworks LLC. Fallout 3. http://fallout.bethsoft.com/index.html (2002)

  31. Magerko, B.: Story representation and interactive drama. In: Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference (AIIDE) (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Magerko, B.: Player modeling in the interactive drama architecture. Ph.D. thesis, The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Mateas, M.: Interactive drama, art, and artificial intelligence. Ph.D. thesis, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Technical Report CMU-CS-02-206 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Mateas, M., Stern, A.: Build it to understand it: ludology meets narratoloy in game design space. In: Proceedings of the Digital Interactive Games Research Association Conference, Vancouver. Included in the Selected Papers volume, June 2005

    Google Scholar 

  35. Mozgovoy, M., Umarov, I.: Building a believable agent for a 3D boxing simulation game. In: 2010 Second International Conference on Computer Research and Development, pp. 46–50. May 2010

    Google Scholar 

  36. Nash, J.: Non-Cooperative Games. Ann. Math. 54(2), 286–295 (1951)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Oxford, English: and Dictionary. Oxford University Press, Oxford English Dictionary (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Paiva, A., Dias, J., Sobral, D., Ayllet, R., Sobreperez, P., Woods, S., Zoll, C., Hall, L.: Caring for agents and agents that care: building emphatic relations with synthetic agents. In: Proceedings of the Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS), ACM Press, UK (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Pizzi, D., Cavazza, M.: Affective storytelling based on characters’ feelings. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Arlington, Nov 2007

    Google Scholar 

  40. Pizzi, D., Charles, F., Lugrin, J., Cavazza, M.: Interactive storytelling with literary feelings, In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), Lisbon, Sept 2007

    Google Scholar 

  41. Riedl, M.O., Saretto, C., Young, R.M.: Managing interaction between users and agents in a multi-agent storytelling environment. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Schiesel, S.: Dungeon masters in cyberspace. The New York Times (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  43. Schiesel, S.: Gary Gygax, game pioneer, dies at 69. The New York Times, 157(54240) (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Swartjes, I., Vromen, J.: Emergent story generation: lessons from improvisational theater. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Arlington, Nov 2007

    Google Scholar 

  45. Swartjes, I., Vromen, J., Bloom, N.: Narrative inspiration: using case based problem solving to support emergent story generation. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, Goldsmiths, University of London, June 2007

    Google Scholar 

  46. Tencé, F., Buche, C., De Loor, P., Marc, O.: The challenge of believability in video games: definitions, agents models and imitation learning. CoRR, abs/1009.0451 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Tenenbaum, J.B., Griffiths, T.L.: Structure learning in human causal induction. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 13, 59–65 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  48. Thue, D., Bulitko, V., Spetch, M.: Passage: a demonstration of player modelling in interactive storytelling. In: The Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AAAI Press, Palo Alto (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  49. Ubisoft. Assassin’s Creed II, http://assassinscreed.uk.ubi.com/assassins-creed-2/ (2009)

  50. GSC Game World. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., http://www.stalker-game.com/ (2009)

  51. Young, R.M., Riedl, M.: Towards an architecture for intelligent control of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Jan 2003

    Google Scholar 

  52. Young, R.M., Riedl, M.O., Branly, M., Jhala, A., Martin, R.J., Saretto, C.J.: An architecture for integrating plan-based behavior generation with interactive game environments. J. Game Dev. Vol. 1 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  53. Zhao, R., Szafron, D.: Learning character behaviors using agent modeling in games. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE-09), pp. 179–185, Oct 2009

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria Arinbjarnar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Arinbjarnar, M., Kudenko, D. (2013). Actor Bots. In: Hingston, P. (eds) Believable Bots. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32323-2_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32323-2_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32322-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32323-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics