SocialCraft: A social NPC framework for Minecraft

November 18, 2021

The ever growing virtual environments existent in increasingly bigger open-worlds in video games create the need for them to be populated with interesting and interactive Non Player Characters (NPCs). This generates a demand for increasingly bigger authoring efforts for developers, artists and scriptwriters who would be tasked with creating these characters and, in particular, their behaviour. This thesis aims to create a system that is able to generate societies of socially capable NPCs into the game Minecraft, and to determine how endowing NPCs with social capabilities and reasoning not only turns them into more believable characters, but also how it impacts the immersion of the player. In order to test the hypothesis that the framework built was able to create credible social behaviour, and demonstrate how expressive it is, we devised a empirical study that had participants watch two different videos created with different versions of the framework to evaluate if the tool showed the capability of endowing agents with differentiated social behaviour, ultimately affecting the player’s game experience. The results showed that most of the people were able to understand that one of the versions was better at producing socially acceptable behaviour. This should not only show the quality of the framework at producing social agents, but also the expressivity it can achieve. We found that the societies launched achieved our initial goals and that this concept could be further explored by gaming companies as a way to ease some of the burden developers have.

Authors in the community:

• 

  M

  Miguel Lourenço Gonçalves

  ist186485

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  R

  Rui Filipe Fernandes Prada

  ist32219

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico