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<Paper uid="W04-2304">
  <Title>The NICE Fairy-tale Game System 1</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The goal of the NICE project is to allow users of all ages to interact with lifelike conversational characters in a fairy-tale world inspired by the Danish author H C Andersen. To make these characters convincing in a computer game scenario, they have to possess conversational skills as well as the ability to perform physical actions in an interactive 3D world.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> What primarily distinguishes the NICE fairy-tale game system from other spoken dialogue systems is that the human-computer dialogue takes place within the context of an interactive computer game.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> However, spoken and multimodal dialogue is not supposed to be just an 'add-on' to the game, but the user's primary means of progression through the story. The rationale for this is the great potential for more natural interaction we see in making methods from multimodal dialogue systems available in controlling gameplay. Potentially, spoken and multimodal interaction will make it possible to create a more engaging and immersive experience, or even facilitate the development of new kinds of computer games.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Secondly, what makes NICE differ from typical spoken dialogue systems is the attempt to move away from strictly task-oriented dialogue. Instead, the interaction with the characters is domain-oriented.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> This means that the dialogue concerns different subplots in the fairy-tales, but without a clear goalorientation and without other demands than it being entertaining to the user. Furthermore, social interaction plays an important role in the fairy-tale world where the game takes place. By engaging in socializing with the animated characters, the user will find out things necessary to overcome various obstacles and enable progression through the story.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Thirdly, a feature that differentiates NICE from other systems is that the main target user group of the system is children and young users. Previous studies have indicated that children employ partly different strategies when interacting with dialogue systems than adults do, and that there are also differences between age groups. For instance, younger children use less overt politeness markers and verbalize their frustration more than older children do (Arunachalam et al. 2001). It has also been shown that children's user experience is improved if they can communicate with a system with a 'personality' and that they benefit from being able to choose from several input modalities (Narayanan and Potamianos 2002).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Furthermore, since many young people have a lot of experience with computer games, the believability of the dialogue characters and natural expressions will be critical aspects for the system's success.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Thus, computer games provide an excellent application area for research in spoken dialogue technology, requiring an advance of the state-of-the-art in several fronts. Perhaps more importantly, game players will have a lot to gain from a successful incorporation of spoken dialogue technology into computer games. Today's computer games are limited by the user's input options, which are often restricted to direct manipulation and simple commands. In the development of the next generation of computer games, we believe that multimodal dialogue has the potential to greatly enrichen the user's experience. For instance, spoken interaction makes it possible to refer to past events and objects currently not visible on the screen. Social interaction, which is already part of popular games such as SIMS, can be improved with spoken dialogue. Furthermore, speech and multimodal interaction supports cooperative games, where the user and character works together in solving a mutual problem.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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