Composing Social Interactions via Social Games

This paper addresses the problem of enabling non-scripted social interaction with virtual characters, and of authoring the underlying behavior in reusable form. We hypothesize that social behavior can be decomposed into social games, which are collections of affordances surrounding social state, and claim that non-scripted player interactions can be generated by the execution of social games in various combinations. We describe three social games (for alliance, authority, and threat management), the implementation architecture that executes these games, and the resulting behavior, which is set in a military house-search scenario. The architecture consists of a decision process that selects motivations appropriate to the games, selects social moves appropriate to the motivations, and finally performs behaviors that implement social moves, all in a situation-responsive, dynamic fashion. We show that social games form a loosely coupled system that generates a space of possible interactions.