Virtual customers in an agent world

Abstract

The relevance of multi-agent systems (MAS) has been demonstrated in computer simulations or video games where many autonomous entities interact in a complex and dynamic environment. Serious Games (SG) are a new discipline situated at the edge of computer simulation and games. We advocate that a certain category of SG, where the player is immersed in a 3d environment, represents a particularly interesting testbed for MAS, for they introduce novel and inspirational problematics for the community. In this paper, we explore the challenges posed by these immersive SG to the MAS approach. Particularly, we demonstrate that the IODA interaction-oriented MAS approach, answers these new problematics with efficacy. We illustrate our discussion with a SG project developed in our team. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.