Share your Emotional Models

[NotVeryProfessional]

I've searched a bit but found nothing, so I'm starting a topic for everyone to share and discuss emotional models. I'm fairly new to this all, so I'll start ("If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."). I'd be happy to see how other people used the system.


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I wasn't happy with what OCC or temperaments gave me. Possibly I didn't understand it completely, possibly it didn't work in my specific game. So I did some research, found various OCC to PAD mappings, but also the alternative Circumplex Model of Affect. That seemed like it contained the emotions that I want my characters to have, so I adapted it. Here is my version:

Circumference Model(1).png (86.87 KiB) Viewed 4160 times

Note that while the theory behind this model also contains dominance, its actual applied versions drop that dimension. I've done a simplified attempt at bringing it back in as can be seen above. If a space is empty in the low or high dominance graphs, it will take the middle one instead.

My goal was to cover as much of the spectrum with interesting emotions as possible. "neutral" should be a fairly exceptional state.

The little testing I've done so far works ok. For example, I have an inkeeper who starts out as bored, but if you insult him, he becomes annoyed. Since his dominance starts out reasonably high (it's his inn, after all), it would most likely turn to anger if you keep it up (game doesn't allow you to keep it up, though).

If you want to play around with it, I've attached it as a unity package.

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Let's see yours! I'd like to learn from others.

[Tony Li]

Great idea for a thread! I suspect most people use extremely simplified models with just a few states. (I just use Temperament.) As for OCC, I just realized that I failed to cite the paper where I got the numbers, but I believe they're from Ortony, Clore, and Collins' original 1988 proposal.

[NotVeryProfessional]

It all depends on how it's used. For logic, I mostly query pleasure, happiness, etc. directly. But I also show the NPCs attitude here and there, and for that it's good to have - what I have here, 41 or so - different texts.

But yes, maybe I will make a simplified model and use that for logic as well. Something like 6 or 7 base emotions should do it.

[Tony Li]

Good point! If you're showing the emotion to the player as feedback, more variety is better.