Designing for Diversity: Multi-Cultural Characters for a Multi-Cultural World

I.-INTRODUCTION: Most of the research within the field of interactive characters has concentrated on generating guidelines, or models, for believable individual variability among characters, often based on psychological personality models (such as Nass, Isbister and Lee, 2000), or biological behaviors (for example, see Blumberg, 1994). In contrast, we ascribe to Bates' proposition that "believability will not arise from copying reality," (Bates, 1994) and moreover, we suggest that recent research discoveries (such as Reeves and Nass, 1996) point towards a different fundamental orientation towards our interactions with computerized systems, given the additional cognitive processing required to maintain awareness of the mediated and created nature of the interaction.