Abstract
Serious games offer an opportunity for learning communication skills by practicing conversations with one or more virtual characters, provided that the character(s) behave in accordance with their assigned properties and strategies. This paper presents an approach for developing virtual characters by using the Belief-Desire-Intentions (BDI) concept. The BDI-framework was used to equip virtual characters with personality traits, and make them act accordingly. A sales game was developed as context: the player-trainee is a real-estate salesman; the virtual character is a potential buyer. The character could be modeled to behave either extravert or introvert; agreeable or non-agreeable; and combinations thereof. A human subjects study was conducted to examine whether naïve players experience the personality of the virtual characters in accordance with their assigned profile. The results unequivocally show that they do. The proposed approach is shown to be effective in creating individualized characters, it is flexible, and it is relatively easy to scale, adapt, and re-use developed models.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bevacqua, E., de Sevin, E., Pelachaud, C., McRorie, M., Sneddon, I.: Building credible agents: Behaviour influenced by personality and emotional traits. In: Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research, KEER 2010 (2010)
van den Bosch, K., Harbers, M., Heuvelink, A., van Doesburg, W.: Intelligent Agents for Training On-Board Fire Fighting. In: Duffy, V.G. (ed.) ICDHM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5620, pp. 463–472. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Bostan, B.: Explorations in Player Motivations: Virtual Agents. In: Proceedings of the ICEC Conference, Seoul, Korea (2010)
Brandenburgh, A.: Influence of Personality on the Behavior of Conversational Agents. Master’s Thesis, VrijeUniversiteit, Amsterdam (2012)
Bratman: Intentions, Plans and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1987)
Broekens, J., Harbers, M., Brinkman, W., Jonker, C., van den Bosch, K., Meyer, J.J.C.: Virtual Reality Negotiation Training Increases Negotiation Knowledge and Skill. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), Santa Cruz, CA (accepted for publication)
Cassell, J., Bickmore, T.: Negotiated collusion: Modeling Social Language and its Relationship Effects in Intelligent Agents. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 13(1), 89–132 (2003)
Catrambone, R., Stasko, J., Xiao, J.: ECA as User Interface Paradigm:Experimental Findings within a Framework for Research. In: Pelachaud, C., Ruttkay, Z. (eds.) From Brows to Trust:Evaluating Embodied Conversational Agents, pp. 239–267. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2004)
Core, M., Traum, D., Lane, H.C., Swartout, W., Gratch, J., van Lent, M., Marsella, S.: Teaching Negotiation Skills through Practice and Reflection with Virtual Humans. Simulation 82(11), 685–701 (2006)
Costa, P.T., McCrae, R.R.: Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) manual. Psychological Assessment Resources, Odessa (1992)
Dewaele, J.M., Furnham, A.: Extraversion: the Unloved Variable in Applied Linguistic Research. Language Learning 49(3), 509–544 (1999)
Furnham, A.: Language and personality. Handbook of Language and Social Psychology (1990)
Graziano, W.G., Eisenberg, N.: Agreeableness: aDimension of Personality. In: Hogan, R., Johnson, J., Briggs, S. (eds.) Handbook of Personality Psychology, pp. 795–824. Academic Press, San Diego (1997)
Korteling, J.E., Helsdingen, A.S., Theunissen, N.C.M.: Serious gaming @ work: Learning Job-Related Competencies using Serious Gaming. In: Derks, D., Bakker, A.B. (eds.) The Psychology of Digital Media @ work. Psychology Press, London (in press, 2012)
Lee, K., Ashton, M.C.: The HexacoPersonality Inventory-Revised (2009), http://www.hexaco.org
Mairesse, F., Walker, M.A., Mehl, M.R., Moore, R.K.: Using Linguistic Cues for the Automatic Recognition of Personality in Conversation and Text. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 30(1), 457–500 (2007)
McFarland, R.G., Challagalla, G.N., Shervani, T.A.: Influence Tactics for Effective Adaptive Selling. Journal of Marketing 70(4), 103–117 (2006)
Michael, D.: Serious games: Games that educate, train, and inform. Thomson Course Technology, Boston (2006)
Muller, Heuvelink, Swartjes, Van den Bosch: A BDI model for Open Dialogue, Glengarry Glen Ross (submitted)
Norling, E., Soneberg, L.: An Approach to Evaluating Human Characteristics in Agents. In: Proceedings of the RASTA 2002 Workshop, AAMAS 2002 (July 2002)
Reeves, B., Nass, C.: The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Cambridge University Press (1996)
Shendarkar, A., Vasudevan, K., Lee, S., Son, Y.: Crowd Simulation for Emergency Response using BDI Agent Based on Virtual Reality. In: WSC 2006, Proceedings of the Winter Volume, pp. 545–553 (2006)
Sujan, H., Weitz, B.A., Sujan, M.: Increasing Sales Productivity by Getting Salespeople to Work Smarter. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 9–19 (1988)
de Vries, R.E.: Ashton en Kibeom Lee, M.C.: De Zes Belangrijkste Persoonlijkheidsdimensies en de HexacoPersoonlijkheidsvragenlijst. Gedrag&Organisatie 3 (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Van den Bosch, K., Brandenburgh, A., Muller, T.J., Heuvelink, A. (2012). Characters with Personality!. In: Nakano, Y., Neff, M., Paiva, A., Walker, M. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7502. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_44
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33196-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33197-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)