Next Generation Conversational Characters for Serious Games

Speakers: Andrew Stern, Michael Mateas

Track: SGS: Game Design

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: Intermediate

Description: The serious games community has an ongoing need for design and technology solutions that allow for the creation of deeply interactive, expressive characters capable of conversing in natural dialog integrated with physical action. This presentation begins by highlighting the core challenges in creating such characters, including the need for procedural behavior, pragmatic and robust natural language understanding, and authoring solutions usable by designers with light programming experience. This is followed by an in-depth case study of a working architecture and authoring system, developed and applied over the past several years by the authors, to create characters for both the critically-acclaimed interactive drama Facade as well as military training prototypes at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. The session concludes with a discussion of further serious game application directions.

Idea Takeaway: Developers gain insights into concrete technical and design approaches for next generation procedural characters for serious games.

Intended Audience: Developers (designers, engineers, producers) who are seeking to create deeper, more character-focused interaction in their serious games find this presentation useful. Interdisciplinary experience building character-rich games a plus, but not required.