PONTiFF - PersONaliTy Framework For Companion Characters

Personality has been a key feature in the creation of companion characters for digital games. These characters cooperate with the player to overcome obstacles and progress through the game. In this work, we present a generic framework and a personality model inspired by Cloninger's psychobiological model of Temperament and Character to convey a companion character’s personality in the context of the cooperation between the companion character and the player. Our framework is comprised of the character's personality, a decision system based on the character's personality, and a tag system to keep track of the character's experience, knowledge, objectives, etc. We conducted a two-stage experiment to better understand (1) if the character's graphical design has an influence on personality reporting and (2) if the companion's personality conveyed by our model is adequately perceived by the player through interaction. Our results suggest that (1) in-game behaviour is more important than first impressions induced by the character's design and that (2) two of our traits (Harm Avoidance and Cooperativeness) were easily understood by the participants.