Personality and Emotion in Strong-Story Narrative Planning

Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware, Lewis J. Baker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Believable characters are core elements of a coherent story. Qualities that make story characters more believable include goals, beliefs, personality, and emotion. We propose computational models of emotion and personality by adapting the Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC) model of emotion and the Five-Factor personality model. Our models are formulated into multiagent strong-story narrative planning with the promise of being highly reusable and domain independent. We evaluate these models using multiple human subject studies. We show that our model's reasoning about character emotions matches the expectations of human readers, and using our emotion model, we can generate a larger set of stories than precedent narrative planners. We also demonstrate that human readers can perceive and recognize the personalities of story characters through their consistent behavior generated by our model. Our final experiment supports that human readers significantly find the behavior generated by our models of emotion and personality more believable than behavior that lacks either or both.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)669-682
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Games
Volume15
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-1647427. The authors would like to thank Rachelyn Farrell for her intellectual contribution to our model of belief.

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation (NSF)IIS-1647427

    Keywords

    • Emotion
    • interactive narratives
    • narrative planning
    • personality
    • strong-story systems

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Software
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
    • Control and Systems Engineering

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