In our dissertation, we investigated three areas in video game characters: believability, a character's sense of beliefs, and designs for moral reasoning. Character believability is an often misunderstood and ambiguous area of research. Literature usually uses “realism” and “believability” synonymously to describe believable characters, whereas the terms include inherent differences in methodology, agent structures, designs, and evaluation techniques. Thus, one agenda item is to clarify and define what constitutes a believable character.

Our research dives deeper into notions of believability. A set of believability criteria is established from the literature to include a character's personality, emotion, context, roles, change, and sociability, among others. By examining the field, we noticed a gap exists in developing a character's sense of change. Furthermore, a gap exists in how agent architectures utilize values and beliefs, especially as they tie to a character's moral judgments.

While morality as a field is extensive, our dissertation limits morality to believable video game characters, focusing on standard methodologies used in constructing moral systems, including linear scales and state machines. In later chapters, we reexamine morality through a faction lens and present a taxonomy of faction characters, including how morality is perceived and conveyed to the player.

Through our examination of morality in games, we argue that standard reputation scales shift moral systems into a somewhat binary state of good or evil with little shades of gray, whereby morality often includes many diverse notions and personal beliefs. We believe that a character’s values and beliefs provide a promising avenue for constructing a multifaceted moral system, especially for background characters.

Thus, we introduce our system and subsequent studies of Argument Box (AB). AB is a system modeled after Lakoff's Moral Politics, a political book that highlights morality as a collection of metaphorical values. In AB, characters often judge others based on surface-level calls and multiple deep-rooted values, held at varying levels.

Our primary goal in AB lies in exploring and understanding the implications of value-based morality and its relationship to notions of believability. Through our studies in AB, we discovered that players can perceive values (in many ways), and that a relationship exists between an NPC's perceived values and believability. Specifically, a strong connection exists between a character's set of values and their perceived personality. We also discovered that a character's values influenced the character's perceived motivation, moral beliefs, and propensity to change.

Event Host: Rehaf Al Jammaz, Ph.D. Candidate, Computational Media

Advisors: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas