Scheherazade's Tavern: A Prototype for Deeper NPC Interactions

Abstract

In many games, NPC-player interactions play a vital role in gameplay. Previous literature has successfully shown how NPC interaction focused on social simulation is an effective means for creating dynamic characters such as in the games Prom Week and Versu. We believe that social simulation is a key element in the creation of complex characters, which is further aided by natural language interaction and knowledge modeling. In this work, we propose an architecture for player-NPC interactions built on top of the Ensemble engine that additionally incorporates chatbots and knowledge modeling technology, with the objective of making craftable and interesting NPCs more easily authorable.