Emotions in Drama Characters and Virtual Agents

Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior

Volume

Papers from the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Notwithstanding the differences displayed by drama criticism for what concerns the theoretical stance and the aims, the key role played by emotions seems to be a common aspect to most definitions of drama. Although the field of computational drama has acknowledged this trend, we argue that the role of emotions in character design deserves more attention, as it is the key to establish a distinction between autonomous agents and drama characters. In this paper, we analyze a fragment of drama, taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet, to show how characters can be construed from agents as an outcome of drama, through the manipulation of their emotional qualities.