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Autonomous Avatars?From Users to Agents and backMatthias Scheutz1and Brigitte R¨ ommer21University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA2Universit¨ at Wien, Vienna, A-1010, AustriaAbstract. We describe the architecture of an interactive, “believable”agent with personality, called user agent, which can act on behalf of auser in various multi-user game contexts, when she is not online. In afirst step, information about the personality of the user is obtained froma questionnaire and then, in a second step, integrated in the reactivesystem of the user agent, part of which implements a primitive affectivesystem. User agents can interact with their users through a simple affec-tive natural language generation system (SARGS), which is integrated inthe deliberative system of the user agent and can recount what happenedto the user agent in the game while the user was not present.1IntroductionRecently, agents with personality have become a new area of interest in AI re-search (e.g., [17,10,8] and others). The rapid increase of multi-user dungeons(MUDs) and other kinds of online multi-user games provides novel territorityfor the application of agent technology: in virtual worlds autonomous agents cantake on roles, which usually are of little to no interest to human players, eitherbecause the role is boring or short-lived (e.g., “the shoemaker down the corner”or “the soldier in the first row of the formation”). Agents may also functionas “tour guides” and “sources of information” within the simulation (e.g., see[6]). To make games with agents exciting and entertaining, the “believability”of computer controlled characters [2] is crucial. Synthetic characters that alwaysbehave in a repetitive, clearly predictable way, are typically perceived as boringand users might not only loose interest in them, but mutatis mutandis in thewhole game.In MUDs, which are not solely text oriented, but based on 2D or 3D simu-lations of some virtual world (that may or may not have a graphical represen-tation), users need to be present (or online) to control their avatar, i.e., theirrepresentation in the simulated world. However, since it is not possible for usersto play the game all the time, the user’s character will not be able to takepart in all events. While this does not matter in some contexts, a continuationof the character’s interactions can or may be possible and desirable in certaingame contexts (e.g., when several players have to cooperate and coordinate theirmoves to attain a goal).