On the construction of synthetic characters with personality and emotion

Abstract

An important challenge in the development of interactive systems for digital entertainment is to build immersive virtual environments inhabited by synthetic characters that feature an illusion of life. Such characters should be adaptive to unforeseen situations, and therefore less predictable than deterministically scripted characters. In many cases, the adaptive behavior can be based on models of personality and emotion. In this paper we introduce an architecture for the construction of synthetic characters with personality and emotion based on the BDI model, to which is added an Affective Module. This module consists of three sub-modules, namely Personality, Mood and Emotion, and is used to characterize and influence the cognitive activities of perception, memory and decision making of characters. Our goal is to contribute to the design and implementation of believable synthetic characters for digital entertainment. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.