Authoring conversational narratives in games with the Chimeria platform

Conversations between characters are important aspects of many videogames. However, most such conversational interactions in videogames are quite limited in how they take into account the identities of those characters. Conversation in videogames typically varies, if at all, based only on one aspect of the character such as a non-player character (NPC) referring to the character by race, class, or a gendered pronoun. In this paper, we present an approach to developing conversational narratives that addresses such limitations. Toward this end, we present the Chimeria platform, which uses a cognitive science-grounded model of social category membership to customize how conversational narratives unfold. We also present a playable interactive conversational scenario called “Chimeria:Gatekeeper” authored using the Chimeria Platform. This scenario demonstrates how the system considers multiple aspects of a character’s identity and degree of membership with, and between, social group categories in generating conversational dialog between a player character (PC) and an NPC. Using this scenario we illustrate how our approach allows the construction of conversational narratives that convey social identity phenomena such as stigma and discrimination.