Believable Emotion-Influenced Perception: The Path to Motivated Rebel Agents

The new Rebel Agent paradigm is meant to help achieve character believability in various forms of interactive storytelling. Rebel agents may refuse a goal or plan that they assess to be in a conflict with their own dynamic motivation model: we call such conflict situations “motivation discrepancies”. We are currently in the process of implementing a Rebel Agent prototype in eBotworks, a cognitive agent framework and simulation platform. In order to identify motivation discrepancies in the environment in a believable way, eBotworks agents need to be able to perceive the environment in ways both influenced by emotion and capable of eliciting emotion, as the relationship between emotion and perception has been theorized in psychology literature to be bidirectional. We explore ways in which such emotion-influenced perception might be achieved in the eBotworks framework for the purposes of implementing believable Rebel Agents.