Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Opinionated Virtual Characters

A number of recent models for empirically-grounded social simulation have emerged recently from games and interactive narrative research, generally exploring models of trust, emotion, and social graph changes that occur in the process of inter-character interactions. However, these models so far failed to provide realistic models of opinion change and predisposition to new knowledge. Equipped with such a notion, these emergent social simulations can express both real and fictionalized depictions of modern phenomena like adverse media influence, the spread of “fake news,” and the polarization of ideological sects. We present a preliminary computational investigation into modeling opinion change in virtual characters with this goal in mind.

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