The Computation of Self in Everyday Life: A Dramaturgical Approach for Socially Competent Agents

In order to participate in storyworlds with rich social interaction, autonomous characters must be able to participate in social games. A social game is a multicharacter social interaction whose function is to modify the social state existing within and across the participants, possibly concurrently accomplishing a functional (nonsocial) state change. In this paper we present an autonomous character architecture that integrates high-level goal formation and goal refinement in the context of playing social games. Additionally, we present preliminary work on an ontology for describing social games as well as a socialgame-centric ontology for character personality. Both the architecture and ontology are informed by theoretical work in sociology and social psychology.