Computational Subjectivity in Virtual World Avatars

Contents

This paper describes subjective avatars, a kind of socially intelligent agent. Such avatars, employed in story worlds, have autonomous emotional reactions to events in the world and keep track of story context. Much of this internal state is concerned with the avatar’s social relationship with other characters in the world. The emotional state and story context are used to provide subjective descriptions of sensory information and to generate a stream of thought. The purpose of such description is to help a user gain a deeper understanding of the role they are playing in the story world.