A Player Reputation System Based on Belief Formation Among Non-Player Character Societies in Open-World Role-Playing Games

Abstract

The present work is an attempt to design and implement an artificial game environment that provides infor-mation dissemination among Non-Player Characters (NPCs) of Open-World Role-Playing Game communities. Based on the perspective that an NPC is a mobile, communicating, cooperative agent that has autonomy and learning ability, and shows socialness in its virtual environment, it was possible to experiment and observe the impacts of human player-generated events on NPCs' social learning. By means of introducing different tuneable NPC autonomy and socialness parameter values, it is ensured that information and NPC opinions about the player not only spread over the society, but they also help develop player reputation among NPCs.The defined primitives such as NPCs' self and group-model views; event valuation and reputation models; established learning, memorization, forgetting mechanisms; the introduced information exchange and update protocol; and reputation metric provided for the construction of a tuneable, scalable virtual environment that can be used to investigate the individual and social behavioural aspects of artificial NPC societies. In this virtual environment, it is shown that player's reputation converges to fixed values. This is noteworthy since it is an indicator of societal learning and belief formation through NPC communications in the game environment.