ABSTRACT
More progress has been made creating NPCs that engage in purely autonomous activity or small-group behavior organized around combat (e.g., squad behavior) than creating NPCs that participate in ongoing social activity. Social activity often has no explicit functional goal, but rather involves social actors responding to, displaying, and changing social state. Social action strongly depends on the history of previous social acts. Complex social actions are often best done through dialog, making use of the full richness of natural language to refer to feelings, relationship states, and history. Finally, social action is embedded in a rich social context-actions often have ramifications across multiple social actors. These features of social action are not easily satisfied by NPC architectures that emphasize individual decision making focused on moment-by-moment action selection to accomplish primarily functional goals.
