Using Environmental Annotations and Affordances to Model Culture

Abstract

This paper details the demonstration of an annotation and affordance-based software model intended to introduce cultural and social influences into a non-player character’s (NPC) decision-making process. We describe how recent research has supported the need to begin incorporating the effects of culture into the interactive digital domain. The technical approach is presented that describes the software techniques for embedding and utilizing culturally-specific information inside of a virtual environment, as well as the design and implementation of a deterministic Markov Decision Process (MDP) to model the affects of culture on the AI.