A Formalization of Emotional Planning for Strong-Story Systems

Abstract

Characters that are capable of expressing emotions seem more lifelike to a human audience. Interacting with emotional characters may cause a human user to feel empathy and to care for their fate. In turn, the audience may feel more engaged in the story. We take a step to address the lack of computational models of emotions for strong-story systems and propose to extend strong-story state-space narrative planners, already equipped with intentionality and belief, to reason about character emotions. Our proposed system is multi-agent, highly domain-independent, and focused on reasoning and decision making. In this paper, we evaluate to what extent our system can accurately model a set of emotions and in doing so, improve the believability of story characters.