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Figure 1.
Virtual Petz.
Recognizing a dearth of meaningful interactive experiences with virtual
characters, we began the Virtual Petz (Figure 1) products with the design goal
to create the richest interactive “illusion of life” we could on a personal com-
puter, within the framework of a non-goal-oriented play environment. Users
“adopt” their virtual Dogz and Catz as puppies and kittens, and play with, raise
and nurture them in the same manner that one would with real pets, with pet-
ting, toys, food, going places, behavior training, and so on. The Petz characters
are directly interactive, with the appearance of rich personality and emotion,
and the ability to express themselves in a performance-like way through ac-
tion and behavior. To implement these socially intelligent agents we developed
a behavior-based architecture with a model of personality and emotion, all
tightly integrated with an expressive realtime-3D-rendered animation system
and seamless user interface (Frank, Stern & Resner 1997).
In early versions of the Petz products, users interacted with one virtual
character at a time. In later versions, as we put multiple characters on-screen
together and allowed their behaviors to play off of one another (with the user
as an ever-present interactive participant), we found to our surprise that the
interplay between the variety of personalities gave rise to many narrative situ-
ations. Small “stories” seemed to emerge as these complex synthetic characters
acted out their innate personalities. Without explicitly building narrative into
the system, recognizable short-term narratives were occurring (Stern, Frank &
