Towards a narrative mind: The creation of coherent life stories for believable virtual agents

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to create coherent life stories for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) in order to achieve long-term believability. We integrate a computational autobiographic memory, which allows agents to remember significant past experiences and reconstruct their life stories from these experiences, into an emotion-driven planning architecture. Starting from the literature review on episodic memory modelling and narrative agents, we discuss design considerations for believable agents which interact with users repeatedly and over a long period of time. In the main body of the paper we present the narrative structure of human life stories. Based on this, we incorporate three essential discourse units and other characteristics into the design of the autobiographic memory structure. We outline part of the implementation of this memory architecture and describe the plan for evaluating the architecture in long-term user studies. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.