Will You be Happier?: Designing a Game that Employs Gifting to Non-player Characters
Authors: 
Sha Li, Marian Ursu, Doug Williams, and Ian KegelAuthors Info & Claims
Sha Li, Marian Ursu, Doug Williams, and Ian KegelAuthors Info & ClaimsDecember 2018
Pages 338 - 340
Abstract
Giving presents can have a positive impact upon the giver's mental well-being [1-4]. We wonder whether giving a present to an AI agent could have the same effect. We investigate this question in the context of video games with non-player characters (NPCs), because the rapid expansion of the game industry makes NPCs one of the most common ways in which we experience AI agents. We seek to understand whether players benefit mentally by giving gifts to NPCs in video games. We intend to observe the behaviour of players and measure their psychological changes through a specially designed video game providing them with mechanisms for gifting to NPCs. We have taken an understanding of gifting from the real world and applied this understanding within a game. The game development has been an iterative process of design-build-playtest. Such a process helps us better understand the research space and to better describe the questions. This article reports the latest findings from the game development after playtesting with 12 participants.
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Index Terms
- Will You be Happier?: Designing a Game that Employs Gifting to Non-player Characters
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Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
December 2018
402 pages
ISBN:9781450359535
DOI:10.1145/3284432
- General Chairs:
- Michita Imai,
- Tim Norman,
- Program Chairs:
- Elizabeth Sklar,
- Takanori Komatsu
Copyright © 2018 Owner/Author.
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Publication History
Published: 04 December 2018
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- EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI)
- British Telecommunications
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HAI '18
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HAI '18: 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
December 15 - 18, 2018
Southampton, United Kingdom
Acceptance Rates
HAI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 92 submissions, 43%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 121 of 404 submissions, 30%
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