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Synthetic group dynamics in entertainment scenarios: creating believable interactions in groups of synthetic characters

Published: 15 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Today, many interactive games and virtual communities engage several users and synthetic characters, all interacting in the same virtual environment. In addition, these interactive scenarios, often present tasks to the participants that must be solved collaboratively. However, to achieve successful and believable interactions between users and such synthetic characters, the latter must be able to show a coherent and set of behaviours. Thus, in scenarios where users and syn-thetic characters interact as a group, it is very important that the interactions follow a believable group dynamics. Focusing on this problem, we have developed a model that supports the dynamics of a group of synthetic characters, inspired by theories of group dynamics developed in human social psychological sciences. The dynamics is driven by a characterization of the different types of interactions that may occur in the group. This characterization addresses socio-emotional interactions as well as task related interactions.We have implemented the model into the behaviour of synthetic characters that collaborate with the user in the resolution of tasks within a collaborative game. This game was used in an evaluation experiment which showed that the model had a positive effect on the users' social engagement in the group, namely on their trust and identification with the group.

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  • (2011)Creating interactive driver experiences with the scenario markup languageProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology10.1145/2071423.2071474(1-7)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2011
  • (2007)Social puppetsProceedings of the 2nd international conference on Online communities and social computing10.5555/1784297.1784320(192-201)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2007
  1. Synthetic group dynamics in entertainment scenarios: creating believable interactions in groups of synthetic characters

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      ACE '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology
      June 2005
      511 pages
      ISBN:1595931104
      DOI:10.1145/1178477
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 15 June 2005

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      Author Tags

      1. autonomous synthetic characters
      2. callaboration
      3. group dynamics
      4. human-computer interaction

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      • (2011)Creating interactive driver experiences with the scenario markup languageProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology10.1145/2071423.2071474(1-7)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2011
      • (2007)Social puppetsProceedings of the 2nd international conference on Online communities and social computing10.5555/1784297.1784320(192-201)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2007

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