Creating socially interactive no-player characters: The µ-SIV system

A number of recent, highly successful games have shown that there is a demand for the personalities, moods, and relationships of Non Player Characters' (NPCs) to be made the focus of game-play. In order for this shift of focus to take place, agent architectures used to create NPCs must be augmented with models of these aspects of characters’ personae. These models must then be used to drive characters' behaviour. This paper will present the μ-SIC system, a component of an intelligent agent architecture designed for the creation of NPCs for computer games. μ-SIC uses a number of quantitative psychological models to simulate characters’ personalities, moods and relationships. The values of these models are used as inputs to an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) which drives characters’ social behaviour.