2021

Prediciting NPC Dialogue

J. T. Bowey, J. Frommel, B. Piller and R. L. Mandryk, "Predicting Beliefs from NPC Dialogues," 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2021, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619099.

Game designers and developers benefit from gathering data from players; however, interrupting play with questionnaires can harm experience. Previous work has suggested that embedding questionnaires into games, such as through dialogue choices when interacting with non-player characters (NPCs) can help, but there is no evidence that dialogue choices can model the real-world beliefs of players. In this study we demonstrate two methods of successfully predicting responses to validated scales of sexist beliefs from NPC dialogues that do not differ in their resulting narrative engagement. Our findings open opportunities for better tailoring games and game experiences by modeling players through their in-game interactions. Index Terms—questionnaires, survey