A framework for adaptive game presenters with emotions and social comments

Abstract

More and more games today try to adjust their gameplay to fit individual players; however, little work has been carried out in the same direction towards game presenter characters. Game commentary should take into account players' personalities along with game progress in order to achieve social player-adapted comment delivery that boosts the overall gameplay, engages the players, and stimulates the audience. In our work, we discuss a framework for implementing artificial game presenter characters that are based on game actions and players' social profiles in order to deliver knowledgeable, socially oriented comments. Moreover, the presented framework supports emotional facial expressions for the presenters, allowing them to convey their emotions and thus be more expressive than the majority of the commentary systems today. We prove our concept by developing a presenter character for multiplayer tabletop board games which we further put under usability evaluation with 9 players. The results showed that game sessions with presenter characters are preferred over the plain version of the game and that the majority of the players enjoy personalized social-oriented comments expressed via multimedia and emotions. © 2012 Effie Karouzaki and Anthony Savidis.