Using rituals to express cultural differences in synthetic characters

There is currently an ongoing demand for richer Intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs) populated with social intelligent agents. As a result, many agent architectures are taking into account a plenitude of social factors to drive their agents’ behaviour. However, cultural aspects have been largely neglected so far, even though they are a crucial aspect of human societies. This is largely due to the fact that culture is a very complex term that has no consensual definition among scholars. However, there are studies that point out some common and relevant components that distinguish cultures such as rituals and values. In this article, we focused on the use of rituals in synthetic characters to generate cultural specific behaviour. To this end, we defined the concept of ritual and integrated it into an existing agent architecture for synthetic characters. A ritual is seen as a symbolic social activity that is carried out in a predetermined fashion. This concept is modelled in the architecture as a special type of goal with a pre-defined plan. Using the architecture described, and in order to assess if it is possible to express different cultural behaviour in synthetic characters, we created two groups of agents that only differed in their rituals. An experiment was then conducted using these two scenarios in order to evaluate if users could identify different cultural behaviour in the two groups of characters. The results show that users do indeed identify the differences in the two cultures and most importantly that they ascribe the differences to cultural factors.