Page 239 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

222 Socially Intelligent Agents

2. Design Requirements

Artistically complete. The player should have a complete, artistically whole
experience.
Animated characters. The characters will be represented as real-time ani-
mated figures that can emote, have personality and can speak.
Interface. The player will experience the world from a first-person 3D per-
spective. The viewpoint is controlled with the keyboard and mouse.
Dialog. Dialog will be the primary mechanism by which a player interacts with
characters and influences how the story unfolds. To achieve dialog, the player
types out text that is visible on screen; the computer characters’ dialog is spo-
ken speech with simultaneously displayed text. The conversation discourse is
real-time; that is, if the player is typing, it is as if they are speaking those words
in (pseudo) real-time. The system should be very robust when responding to
inappropriate and unintelligible input.
Interactivity and plot. The player’s actions should have a significant influence
on what events occur in the plot, which are left out, and how the story ends.
The plot should be generative enough that it supports replayability. Only after
playing the experience 6 or 7 times should the player begin to feel they have
"exhausted" the interactive story. In fact, full appreciation of the experience
requires the story be played multiple times.
Short one-act play. We want to design an experience that provides the player
with 15 minutes of emotionally intense, tightly unified, dramatic action.
Relationships. The story should be about the emotional entanglements of hu-
man relationships. Our story is a domestic drama in which the relationship of
a married couple, Grace and Trip, falls apart during an innocent evening visit
by the Player.
Three characters. The story should have three characters, two controlled by
the computer and one controlled by the player.
The player should not be over-constrained by a role. The amount of non-
interactive exposition describing the player’s role should be minimal.
Distributable. The system will be implemented on a platform that is reason-
ably distributable, with the intention of getting the interactive experience into
the hands of as many people as possible.
For more details, see [13].

3. Autonomy and Story-Based Believable Agents

Most work in believable agents has been organized around the metaphor
of strong autonomy. Such an agent chooses its next action based on local
perception of its environment plus internal state corresponding to the goals and
possiblytheemotional state of theagent. Usingautonomyasametaphor driving
the design of believable agents works well for believable agent applications in