Discrete versus ordinal time-continuous believability assessment

Abstract

What is believability? And how do we assess it? These questions remain a challenge in human-computer interaction and games research. When assessing the believability of agents, researchers opt for an overall view of believability reminiscent of the Turing test. Current evaluation approaches have proven to be diverse and, thus, have yet to establish a framework. In this paper, we propose treating believability as a time-continuous phenomenon. We have conducted a study in which participants play a one-versus-one shooter game and annotate the character’s believability. They face two different opponents which present different behaviours. In this novel process, these annotations are done moment-to-moment using two different annotation schemes: BTrace and RankTrace. This is followed by the user’s believability preference between the two playthroughs, effectively allowing us to compare the two annotation tools and time-continuous assessment with discrete assessment. Results suggest that a binary annotation tool could be more intuitive to use than its continuous counterpart and provides more information on context. We conclude that this method may offer a necessary addition to current assessment techniques.