Dragons, Bats & Evil Knights: A Three-Layer Design Approach to Character Based Creative Play

Creative play requires a fertile but well-defined design space. This paper describes a design process for creating three-dimensional virtual reality play spaces that allow the development and exploration of social interactions and relationships. The process was developed as part of a commercial research effort to create an interactive virtual reality entertainment system that allows children to engage in creative and constructive play within an established action/adventure framework. The effort centres on designing AI characters for a constructive narrative. We claim that a behaviour-based architecture is an ideal starting point for developing agents for such a process, but that its full realization requires additional architectural structures and methodological support for the design process. Here we describe an architecture of these characters, relate architectural modularity to the realization of construction and play, and propose a three-layer design process for producing fertile and æsthetic constructive narratives. We also discuss our experience in implementing these ideals in an industrial setting.