I den här kvalitativa studien har vi undersökt hur spelare uppfattar och visuellt tolkar karaktärer från MOBA-spelen Leauge of Legends och Defense of the Ancients 2, för att utöka forskningen inom visuell karaktärsdesign. Genom sex utvalda karaktärer som slumpmässigt utsågs utifrån respondentens kunskap om de spel vi studerade, presenterades en bild och en videosekvens på en karaktär. Med intervjuer och tematisk analys har vi sammanställt resultat som visar att respondenterna med hjälp av visuella attribut, former, animationer samt förmågor lyckas förklara karaktärens personlighet och roll i laget trots avsaknaden av en bakgrundshistoria. Frånvaron av traditionellt narrativ och ett top-down perspektiv i spelet tvingade spelarna till att bli uppmärksamma på karaktärens förmågor, kroppsattribut, visuellt uttryck samt rörelsemönster. Spelare uppfattade karaktärer annorlunda i videon gentemot hur karaktären presenterades i bild och skapade därmed en skiftning i karaktärens trovärdighet. / This qualitative study analyses how gamers perceive and visually interpret characters from two MOBA games: League of Legends, and Defense of the Ancients 2, to broaden the research of visual character design. Subjects were randomly presented with an image and a video of one of six characters from either game. Interviews and thematic analysis reveal that gamers are able to explain a character’s personality and role in the game with help from visual attributes, shapes, animations and abilities, despite the lack of a presented backstory. The top-down view and the absence of a traditional narrative forced gamers to pay attention to the characters’ abilities, body attributes, visual expressions and movement patterns. Gamers perceived characters in the video differently from the image because of their in-game presentation, which also influenced believability of the character.

NPCs are in many games the foundation on which it operates. NPCs create the illusion of inhabitants or assign purpose to the player. Whatever they do, they represent characters. Introducing a character has a certain margin of error, as a poorly portrayed character may cause more damage than the NPC would add. Without creating a believable environment which would include the NPCs, immersion could be difficult. As such this thesis investigates the effect of different behaviours to NPCs. With the focus on how visual and logical behaviours affect the players’ perception of their believability. The experiment was conducted in a game of the RTS survival genre. With the visual behaviours selected from the games Banished[1] and Frostpunk [2] the logical behaviours were inspired by F.E.A.R [3]. In the experiment testers were used to test three versions of the artifact. The first acted as a default and was used as the starting point for the second version which introduced enhanced visual behaviours. The third continued and added a predictive functionality as logical behaviour. The tests concluded that the visual behaviours had a positive effect on perception but no conclusive evidence to suggest the logical behaviour had the same effect.

Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) help motivate player engagement with narrative-driven games. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions to changing situations, which emotion often drives in humans. Therefore, giving NPCs "emotion" should enhance their believability. For adoption in industry, it is important to create processes for developing tools to build NPCs "with emotion" that fit with current development practices. Psychological validity—the grounding in affective science—is a necessary quality for plausible emotion-driven NPC behaviours. Computational Models of Emotion (CMEs) are one solution because they use at least one affective theory/model in their design. However, CME development tends to be insufficiently documented such that its processes seem unsystematic and poorly defined. This makes it difficult to reuse a CME’s components, extend or scale them, or compare it to other CMEs. This work draws from software engineering to propose three methods for acknowledging and limiting subjectivity in CME development to improve their reusability, maintainability, and verifiability: a systematic, document analysis-based methodology for choosing a CME’s underlying affective theories/models using its high-level design goals and design scope, which critically influence a CME’s functional requirements; an approach for transforming natural language descriptions of affective theories into a type-based formal model using an intermediate, second natural language description refining the original descriptions and showing where and what assumptions informed the formalization; and a literary character analysis-based methodology for developing acceptance test cases with known believable characters from professionally-crafted stories that do not rely on specific CME designs. Development of EMgine, a game development CME for generating NPC emotions, shows these methods in practice. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Video games can deeply engage players using characters that appear to have emotionally-driven behaviours. One way that developers encode and carry knowledge between projects is by creating development tools, allowing them to focus on how they use that knowledge and create new knowledge. This work draws from software engineering to propose three methods for creating development tools for game characters “with emotion”: a process for analyzing academic emotion literature so that the tool’s functions are plausible with respect to real-life emotion; a process for translating academic emotion literature into mathematical notation; and a process for creating tests to evaluate these kinds of development tools using narrative characters. The development of an example tool for creating game characters "with emotion", EMgine, demonstrates these methods and serves as an example of good development practices.

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Fantasy creatures are an essential part of many games, but while there are several studies focusing on body language and how expressive gaming companions may enhance the player’s experience, creatures and animals are rarely the focal points. Personality is closely related to believability, which is what most game developers work towards hence believability may improve the gaming experience. The purpose of this paper was to explore how the personality of a fantasy creature would be perceived by the observer when using different animal motion references. A 3D-model was created and animated in three different styles using motion references from a cat and lizard. A survey with Likert-scales was then formed with the intention to evaluate the animations. The participants in the survey were assigned one of the three animations to rate statements regarding personality and believability. Rather than a certain type of animal being associated with a certain type of personality, the result suggests that it was mainly certain motion cues and postures that affected the participants’ ratings. The study was deemed to be insufficient for a reliable result. In the discussion part, there are ideas on how the study could be improved with the aim of continuing the research to gain a clearer insight into the subject of personality and creatures.

This is a thesis that deals with the norms and rules of players playing online games together. It is also a thesis about believability, the current capabilities of non-player characters (NPCs) and the attitudes amongst game developers towards dynamic and systemic games AI. The primary theme of this thesis considers which means of communication and coordination in terms of norms and rules are present in groups of players and particularly in guilds and clans playing Massively Multi Online Games (MMOGs) and First Person Shooters (FPSs) respectively. The presence of norms in these types of groups has been overlooked in previous research even though guilds have been addressed to some extent. When rules have been discussed in games research, the actual use, meaning and interpretation behind these rules from a player perspective has been omitted. In this thesis rules and norms are interpreted from a guild and clan perspective as important means for coordination, used in order to keep the group together. The implicit rules are further seen as implicit rules made explicit through guild and clan forums where these groups of players express how to preserve the shared game experience. The absence of rituals, norms and rules has also been studied in temporary groups of one MMOG, with the explanation that existing relations with other players are maintained in these game sessions, but new relations are usually seen as too costly to invest in. The second theme is directed at believability and the state of current NPCs, how immersion is influenced by NPCs that do not act in believable ways. The second theme is also influenced by the first theme, whereby rules and norms are seen as valuable tools for creating believability in NPCs, directly targeting the social layer, a slightly overlooked area of research. The last section is directed at applying the results from the first section, how players play by the rules and norms of the group, and how this could foster believability in NPCs. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: In press. Paper 5: In press. Paper 6: In press.</p>

This study examines how costume design is used as a narrative and functional part of video game character design. The purpose being how costume design is currently utilized, what common design trends can be found and in which instances costume design goes against the functionality and believability of the character. One character from each top selling single player third person game between the years 2015-2018 were chosen for the sample. A character analysis and a coding scheme were created to find common design trends used to visually display information to players. The results showed a prevalent use of real-world cues and signs to visually display instant information. Contradicting real-world cues used together can show a divergence from reality, but even with a lack of real world examples a uniform design language can be seen. The results also show the use of objects with contextual meaning being an important part of costume design, giving it more depth. The instances found of contradicting costume design were predominantly used to make the character stand out or to emphasize their attractiveness. / Denna studie undersöker hur kostymdesign används som en narrativ och funktionell del inom design av spelkaraktärer. Syftet är att se hur kostymdesign nuvarande används, vilka vanliga design trender som kan hittas och vilka instanser som finns där kostymdesign går emot trovärdighet och funktionalitet. En karaktär från varje toppsäljande spel med enspelarläge och tredjepersons perspektiv mellan år 2015-2018 valdes. En karaktärsanalys och ett kodschema skapades för att hitta gemensamma design trender som används för att visuellt förmedla information till spelare. Resultatet visar en övergripande användning av signaler från verkligheten för att visuellt förmedla omedelbar information. Motsägande verkliga signaler som visas tillsammans kan påvisa en avvikelse från verkligheten men även scenarion med en avsaknad av verkliga exempel kan ett uniformt designspråk ses. Resultaten visade även den vikt som läggs på användningen av objekt med kontextuell mening för att ge kostymdesigner mer djup. Instanser där kostymdesign sågs som motsägande var mestadels för att få karaktären att stå ut eller för att framhäva attraktiva drag.

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<p dir="ltr">With the recent virtualization of our everyday lives and the development of intelligent AI technology, realistic virtual agents are becoming a useful tool for research, education, and entertainment. With virtual agents customized content can be created and individualized for specific users. However, virtual agents are only effective tools if they can form a connection with the individual. To form a connection the virtual agent must be believable.</p><p dir="ltr">The literature review evaluates topics of virtual agent believability, appeal, and naturalness and how they relate to asymmetry in facial expression animation. The literature suggests that asymmetries can affect the perception of virtual agents. Additionally, it suggests that emulating human behavior is beneficial to increasing perception of believability, appeal, and naturalness.</p><p dir="ltr">In this study we evaluated the effects of facial expression asymmetry on the believability, appeal, and naturalness of virtual agents. To do this we ran an online perception study with students at Purdue University. We found, in brief, that facial expression asymmetries do have significant effect on the believability, appeal, and naturalness of a virtual agent compared to animations that do not include facial expression asymmetries.</p>

Under de senaste decennierna har datorspel etablerats som ett legitimt forskningsområde. Inom denna forskning har den artificiella intelligensen (AI) varit av stort intresse framförallt i relation till de karaktärer inom spel som kallas för non-playable characters (NPC). Fokus har legat på att göra dessa karaktärer mer trovärdiga och på så sätt göra spel mer engagerande och potentiellt främja immersion. I och med detta bör alla aspekter av NPC:er utforskas för att säkerställa att alla bidragande faktorer har identifierats och kan därefter användas för att ytterligare utveckla dessa. Då social interaktion inom datorspel har tidigare kopplats till en spelares immersion är det viktigt att förstå alla komponenter som uppgör denna. Den mänskliga kommunikationen är grundad i både verbala och icke-verbala uttryck vilket tillsammans skapar den sociala interaktionen. Därför undersöker denna studie de aspekter av en karaktärs beteende som kan kategoriseras som icke-verbala uttryck. Detta utförs med hjälp av en kvalitativ observationsmetod för att identifiera vilka variationer som existerar, hur de uppfattas, samt om de påverkar karaktärers trovärdighet och därefter spelarens känsla av immersion. / In recent decades, computer games have been established as a legitimate area of research. In this research, artificial intelligence (AI) has been of great interest especially in relation to the characters in games called non-playable characters (NPCs). The focus has been on making these characters more believable and thus making games more engaging and potentially more immersive. In doing so, all aspects of NPCs should be explored to ensure that all contributing factors have been identified and can then be used to further develop them. As social interaction in computer games have previously been linked to a player's immersion, it is important to understand all the contributing components. Human communication is based on both verbal and non-verbal behaviors, which together create social interaction. Therefore, this study examines the aspects of NPC behavior that can be categorized as non-verbal expressions. This is achieved using a qualitative observation method to identify what variations exist, how they are perceived, and whether they affect the believability of characters and the player's immersion.