Using rituals to express cultural differences in synthetic characters

There is currently an ongoing demand for richer Intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs) populated with social intelligent agents. As a result, many agent architectures are taking into account a plenitude of social factors to drive their agents’ behaviour. However, cultural aspects have been largely neglected so far, even though they are a crucial aspect of human societies. This is largely due to the fact that culture is a very complex term that has no consensual definition among scholars. However, there are studies that point out some common and relevant components that distinguish cultures such as rituals and values. In this article, we focused on the use of rituals in synthetic characters to generate cultural specific behaviour. To this end, we defined the concept of ritual and integrated it into an existing agent architecture for synthetic characters. A ritual is seen as a symbolic social activity that is carried out in a predetermined fashion. This concept is modelled in the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Samuel Mascarenhas, João Dias, Nuno Afonso, Sibylle Enz, Ana Paiva
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ATAL 2009, Different Cultural Behaviour, Rituals, Synthetic Characters