Experience Management with Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions for Virtual Agents

Abstract

Intelligent interactive narrative systems often use an experience manager to govern the behavior of non-player charactersin a way that guides the story towards its author’s agenda, which may be for entertainment, education, training, or other purposes. For such systems, a central challenge is creating believable virtual characters. The Belief Desire Intention framework is often cited as a goal for researchers in this field; for characters to seem realistic, a human audience should attribute beliefs, desires, and intentions to them. Much of my prior work has focused on belief; my goal for the future is to finish the work on belief, and to implement a new model of desire and intention that explicitly reasons about characters’ commitment to certain plans of action.