Agents with emotional intelligence for storytelling

Abstract

One core aspect of engaging narratives is the existence and development of social relations between the characters. However, creating agents for interactive storytelling and making them to be perceived as a close friend or a hated enemy by an user is an hard task. This paper addresses the problem of creating autonomous agents capable of establishing social relations with others in an interactive narrative. We present an innovative approach by looking at emotional intelligence and in particular to the skills of understanding and regulating emotions in others. To that end we propose a model for an agent architecture that has an explicit model of Social Relations and a Theory of Mind about others, and is able to plan about emotions of others and perform interpersonal emotion regulation in order to dynamically create relations with others. Some sample scenario are presented in order to illustrate the type of behaviour achieved by the model and the creation of social relations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.