Abstract
Providing experiential training in complex tasks on an any-time anywhere basis—whether for individual or team tasks—often requires simulating interaction with non-player characters (NPCs): co-workers, superiors, subordinates, opponents, subjects, stakeholders, consultants, tutors, peers etc.
Simulating all aspects of human behavior is overwhelmingly complex. Pursuing full human simulation is also needlessly costly and distracts from the task at hand, which is providing a learner with prompts and reactions supporting experiences that promote mastery of learning objectives and appropriate transfer. The question then is, What techniques can be used to create relevantly realistic NPC agents to support desired learning outcomes?
Rather than advance a one-size-fits-all silver bullet for instructional system NPC modeling, we advocate a flexibly configurable bag-of-tools approach. Using example systems that the authors have worked on, we discuss several different approaches to building NPCs for pedagogical effect. Choices of technologies to employ should be based on application requirements, considering issues such as: (1) content/authoring costs—both for achieving short term capability and for longer-term maintenance and scalability; (2) pedagogical approaches; and (3) relevant aspects of realism in behavior and interaction methods.
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Domeshek, E., Ramachandran, S., Jensen, R., Ludwig, J. (2020). Realistic and Relevant Role-Players for Experiential Learning. In: Sottilare, R.A., Schwarz, J. (eds) Adaptive Instructional Systems. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50788-6_5
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