Designing a creature believability scale for videogames

Abstract

This paper describes the design, and early evaluation of a scale aimed at assessing the believability of creatures in videogames. These creatures include all zoomorphic entities that do not qualify as fundamentally human-like, whether or not they have characteristics identifiable as anthropomorphic. The work is based on principles drawn from biology, animation, illustration and artificial intelligence. After developing the scale’s 46 original items, it was administrated as a Likert Scale questionnaire. The results were analyzed through Principal Component Analysis and they suggest that 26 items, out of the original 46, spread across 4 dimensions, could be used to evaluate creature believability.