Characters with Personality!

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.