A Virtual Agent Toolkit for Serious Games Developers

The design of serious games requires developers to tackle pedagogical challenges calling for advanced solutions that the entertainment industry might deem too risky to pursue. One such challenge is the creation of autonomous socially intelligent characters with whom players can practice different social skills. Although there are several architectures in the field of virtual agents that are designed specifically to enable more human-like interactions, they are still not widely adopted by game studios that develop serious games, in particular for learning. In this paper, we present a virtual agent toolkit that was specifically developed with the intent of making agent-based solutions more accessible and reliable to game developers. To this end, a collaborative effort was established with a game studio that has used the toolkit to develop two different serious games. Among other advantages, the toolkit facilitated the inclusion of a dynamic model of emotions that affects not just how the character looks and acts but also how the player's performance is determined.