Utilising Emotional Response within Dialogue Trees for Game-based Training
Authors: Tang, W., Smith, P., Watson, A. and Sahandi, M.
Conference: The 29th International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents
Dates: 23-25 May 2016
Abstract:Immersion and interactivity are a major focus when creating gaming applications, as technology has improved and enabled the creation of larger and more detailed virtual environments the need for more engaging NPCs (non-playable characters) is also required. Many games utilise a form of dialogue tree when conversing with characters within a gaming application, allowing the user to choose their questions/responses. While this method does provide a dynamic conversation system, it is quite a one-sided level of interactivity with the NPC simply responding to the current question without it affecting the conversation on a whole. We present a novel dialogue system that explores the emotional state of the NPC to provide a more complex form of dialogue tree, termed EDTree (Emotional Dialogue Tree). Based on user actions, the interactions between the user and the NPC are enriched by the emotional state of the NPC. Utilising this system will provide an immersive experience based around improved believability of virtual characters. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we show an example of a training system that explores the use of gaming technology and the proposed EDTree.
Source: Manual