Towards Educational Video Games With Enhanced Virtual Players

VVirtual players, or so-called non-player characters (NPCs) play an important role in educational video games, as they help designers create a more engaging, realistic, and effective learning environment. Realistic and believable NPCs applied in appropriate ways are able to enhance both user experience and game learnability. The paper presents results from the development of an educational video maze game dedicated to the medieval history of the Bulgarian Kingdom and applying both simple and enhanced NPCs as assistants for the real player. While simple NPCs use a predefined tree-based dialog for communication with the real player and have non-adaptive emotions, the enhanced NPCs apply a smart conversational agent for answering player questions and possess an adaptive emotional behavior based on the emotional state of the real player recognized by neural networks. The preliminary results show that players report an improved game experience for the game version that has NPCs, especially for enhanced NPCs. The paper discusses unsolved issues in building realistic, believable, and effective NPCs and outlines directions for further studies.