Dragons, bats and evil knights: a three-layer design approach to character-based creative play

Abstract

Creative play requires a fertile but well-defined design space. This paper descriPes a design process for creating three-dimensional virtual reality play spaces that allow the development and exploration of social interactions and relationships. The process was developed as part of a commercial research effort to create an interactive virtual reality entertainment system that allows children to engage in creative and constructive play within an established action/adventure framework. The effort centres on designing AI characters for a constructive narrative. We claim that a behaviour-based architecture is an ideal starting point for developing agents for such a process, but that its full realization requires additional architectural structures and methodological support for the design process. In this paper, we describe a character architecture called Spark of Life (SoL). We also propose a three-layer design process for producing fertile and aesthetic constructive narratives. Finally, we describe our experience in implementing these ideals in an industrial setting. © Springer-Verlag London Ltd References.