Among the goals of research on Autonomous Agents one important aim is to build Believable Interactive Embodied Agents, ones apt to be applied to friendly interfaces in ecommerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment and as pedagogical Agents. A Believable Agent is one able to show (even, may be, to feel?) emotions and one who has a definite personality. An Interactive Agent has to take into account the particular User and the particular Context where the interaction takes place, and therefore has to make up its own model of the User and the Context, and interact with it by following the rules of face-to face interaction, like turn-taking, back-channel and so forth. An Embodied Agent must be able to interact with the User not only through written text, but in all the modalities a human Agent may use: through words, voice, gesture, gaze, facial expression, body movements, body posture (sometimes, maybe, even through touch?). But it also must be able to conceive, represent and convey all the possible meanings that natural language and multimodal interaction may convey in Humans. The list of capacities required by a Believable Interactive Embodied Agent allows us to sketch the outline of the steps to move in this field of research; some of them have already been moved in recent work, and are fairly represented among papers in this workshop. Research must include three phases. First, a phase of empirical research aimed at finding out the regularities in the mind and behavior of Human Agents, and at constructing models of them. Second, a phase of modelling of Believable Interactive Embodied Agents, where the rules found out are formalized, represented and implemented in the construction of Agents. Third, a phase of evaluation of the implemented Agents, aimed at testing how they fit the User’s needs and how similar they look to a real Human Agent. 2. EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

We describe booST and hooPS, two applications targeted toward the youth demographic. These mobile, social applications are designed with the goals of promoting health and wellbeing by engendering and strengthening social relationships among youth. What makes booST and hooPS stand out is that they exhibit sensitivity to their user’s emotional state and support the user in exchanging that state with other users. In this manner, these applications demonstrate how representing and reasoning about emotions can facilitate deeper relationships that promote desirable behaviors and attitudes. We also describe a novel middleware, Koko, upon which booST and hooPS are built, and which facilitates building other such applications. 1

The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and educational games is well recognized. Yet, current techniques for building affect-aware games are limited, with the maintenance and use of affect in essence being handcrafted for each game. The Koko architecture describes a service-oriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect into games, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed games and other applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. Further, Koko is intended to be used as an extension of existing game architectures. We recognize that complex games require additional third party libraries, such as game engines. To enable the required flexibility we define the interfaces of the Koko architecture in a formal manner, thereby enabling the implementation of those interfaces to readily adapt to the unique requirements of game’s other architectural components and requirements.

Abstract The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and educational games is well recognized. Yet, current techniques for building affect-aware games are limited, with the maintenance and use of affect in essence being handcrafted for each game. The Koko architecture describes a service-oriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect recognition into games, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed games and other applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. Further, Koko is intended to be used as an extension of existing game architectures. We recognize that complex games require additional third party libraries, such as game engines. To enable the required flexibility we define the interfaces of the Koko architecture in a formal manner, thereby enabling the implementation of those interfaces to readily adapt to the unique requirements of game’s other architectural components and requirements. Keywords architecture · affect · games · emotion This is a revised and extended version of an article that appears as [35].

Abstract The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and educational games is well recognized. Yet, current techniques for building affect-aware games are limited, with the maintenance and use of affect in essence being handcrafted for each game. The Koko architecture describes a service-oriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect recognition into games, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed games and other applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. Further, Koko is intended to be used as an extension of existing game architectures. We recognize that complex games require additional third party libraries, such as game engines. To enable the required flexibility we define the interfaces of the Koko architecture in a formal manner, thereby enabling the implementation of those interfaces to readily adapt to the unique requirements of game’s other architectural components and requirements.

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The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and educational games is well recognized. Yet, current techniques for building affect-aware games are limited, with the maintenance and use of affect in essence being handcrafted for each game. The Koko architecture describes a serviceoriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect recognition into games, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed games and other applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. Further, Koko is intended to be used as an extension of existing game architectures. We recognize that complex games require additional third party libraries, such as game engines. To enable the required flexibility we define the interfaces of the Koko architecture in a formal manner, thereby enabling the implementation of those interfaces to readily adapt to the unique requirements of game’s other architectural components and requirements. 1