Role of understandability in how players evaluate the believability of NPCs’ behaviors

Sammanfattning

This bachelor thesis suggests an approach to evaluating non-playable characters (NPC) believability through the use of heuristics. Believability of an NPC is how befitting the players perceive an NPC within the context of the game’s world. The purpose of the heuristics is to attempt to formalize the evaluation process of NPCs’ believability through relating behavior to context. Research was conducted by gathering data from playtests where players interacted with and observed NPCs in a game designed to test believability. Believability was tested through the lens of three individual papers, each researching one or more aspects related to NPC believability, that later was compiled comprehensively in the larger paper. The main findings suggest that there is a prerequisite to the believability evaluation process in the form of understandability. Without understanding, which required the behavior or context to be observable, the evaluation process becomes less informed, leading to a change in perceived believability. However, this evaluation approach acts on the premise that the player accepts the existence of different behaviors in different NPCs. The players’ perceived collective sense of believability, also known as social immersion, remains unchanged while the perceived believability of the current NPC can increase or decrease. Additionally, context surrounding the NPCs seems to contribute to the evaluation process when the player acknowledges its existence. What the context entails does not have to be only about the NPC themselves, but the behaviors accompanying this context have to be befitting of the game’s world.