Abstract
Modern video games have reached a new level of graphic fidelity. Furthermore with the rise of popularity of new technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, gamers are more immersed than ever within virtual worlds and virtual characters. The credibility and believability of Virtual Characters (typically called NPCs) requires them to have basic human traits such as emotions and the ability to make decisions on their own. One of the most defining human attributes is our social ability and awareness. Academic research groups have created numerous different social architectures that can transform video game characters and change their impact on the game’s world. Characters have social desires, complex behaviours and work towards changing the social status around them. However, academic research on AI in games and commercial game AI development efforts are rather disjoint and there is a wide divergence in methods and results. This is the result of academic researchers wanting general solutions to generic problems whereas video game developers want something that works well enough. This project’s goal is to implement a social architecture model, originated from Academic Research, in a modern and commercially successful video game and investigate its feasibility and impact on player experience. We present and describe an implementation of CIF-CK: an agent social architecture: “Comme il Faut” in a commercial videogame “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”. The implementation was distributed as a downloadable Mod, and met with almost instant success in the player community.