Psychological portrait of a virtual agent in the teleport game paradigm

Abstract

The videogame platform Teleport created earlier allows us to study anonymous social interactions among actors of various nature: human and virtual actor, ensuring their indistinguishability, which implies believable behavior of a virtual actor. The present study found a connection between the human player behavior in the Teleport game and her psychological portrait constructed using the sixteen-factor Catell personality test for empathy. Assuming that this connection is extendable to perception of virtual actor behavior, the game sessions data was analyzed to infer behavioral characteristics of virtual actors. Based on this data analysis, we constructed psychological characteristics of models of a virtual actor (a bot). Partner and emotional characteristics of bots were defined, and their psychological portrait was constructed based on the registered bot behavior. Personal characteristics such as courage, sociability, calmness, balance, and loyalty were attributed to bots and compared to analogous characteristics of human players.