ABSTRACT
Most of the research within the field of interactive characters has concen trated on generating guidelines or models for believable individual vari ability among characters, often based on psychological personality mod els (such as Nass, Isbister, & Lee, 2000) or biological behaviors (see e.g., Blumberg, 1994). In contrast, we ascribe to Bates' (1994) proposition that "believability will not arise from copying reality," (p. 125) and suggest that recent research discoveries (such as those documented in Reeves & Nass, 1996) point toward a different fundamental orientation in our interactions with computerized systems, given the additional cognitive processing re quired to maintain awareness of the mediated and created nature of the interaction.
