Very often, centering believable characters in the context of artificial intelligence or architectures for agents goes right over my head (the work of Bates, Kopp, and Perlin). At the heart of it, AI often intersects with emergent play and enriching player to non-player character conversations. I feel as though much of this work is preliminary, since until we have truly emergent and learning AI, all of the options still need to be pre-scripted and anticipated ahead of time. I understand this drive to make characters seem more real, more alive, and therefore overall more meaningful. However, from a writer’s perspective, I find there are other ways to combat this fallout in games until these technologies improve.
Katherine Isbister’s Believable Characters is an extremely helpful and in-depth text on how to design characters that elicit immersive play. But here’s Isbister’s stance: you don’t necessarily need human-level AI for human-level interaction. Instead of focusing on advancing technologies, she emphasizes learning how to leverage human nature for interactive experiences. Ultimately, character responses should serve as feedback to the player about their status in the play. With this in mind, every interaction has a clear purpose.
The Game Empathy blog features a break down of empathy-related research in games (and game characters) that’s being built on by Isbister and other researchers. The hope is to eventually have a taxonomy of helpful techniques for eliciting empathy in games, with special attention paid to cultural interpretations. This is most relevant to my work, since I’m often working with cultural content that may be received and interacted with in a different way depending on the players. I haven’t had a chance to test this, but I do wonder–how would a Native character be perceived by Native players compared to non-Native players? How does the band/tribe/nation affiliation of the character influence the reception in terms of empathy (and interest)?
If only I had a finished prototype to be able to explore this as a related issue in Indigenous game design! I have decided to initiate my own project, which should start paper prototyping in April. I wouldn’t want to overlook making believable characters in the name of only focusing on identifying an Indigenous game design methodology, so looking at interdisciplinary work in character design is essential. So far, I’m leaning mostly towards Isbister’s work rather than trying to develop a new system of interaction.
