What are Characters for?

Children as young as three engage in the art of make-believe exploring the boundaries of the real and the fantastic [9]. One of the most important aspects of drama is that it provides a type of activity where children engage in the play actively, with several senses. Aristotle refers to this as ”enactment”: which means to act rather than to read. Enacted representations involve direct sensing as well as cognition [5]. Based on this premises, we developed a collaborative virtual environment for story creation, Teatrix, which aims at providing effective support for young children (7-9 years old) developing their notions of narrative, through the dramatisation of several situations. To do this, we developed a methodology for the definition of synthetic characters that inhabit a 3D story world. In this approach, the characters have a primordial role on the story creation process, since they are the ones that are really acting out the story. The most important aspect is that they are not acting autonomously, they are acting on behalf of children. To accomplish such task, characters must display a believable behaviour, to engage the children in an entertaining experience, which can meet the children cognitive needs to interpret, understand and interact with the world in term of stories [2]. In the following sections we will focus on the methodology for defining such believable synthetic characters, the children’s role when defining a story and also on an example of how a child can direct her/his character throughout the story creation process. Finally, some future research directions will be presented.