Raven Serenity Glover
MFA Digital Animation and Interactive Media, 2024

Project Description:
This project investigates the development of a theoretical framework for using behavioral animation to digitally create autonomous entities, referred to as “social creatures”. These creatures are designed to develop distinct personalities influenced by their interactions with the environment and other co-existing social creatures. Such personalities significantly affect their desires and behavioral patterns. The project highlights the role of scarce resources within the digital environment as a crucial factor in fostering social interactions among the social creatures, thereby affecting their gathering points and interaction dynamics. A key feature is the creatures’ ability to form memories, enabling them to establish positive and negative relationships based on past interactions. This memory function enriches the creatures' experiences and interactions, leading to the creation of emergent narratives that are unique to each creature. 

A video prototype has been developed to demonstrate the practical applications and potential outcomes of this theoretical framework. This prototype showcases the diverse possibilities and complex dynamics of the social creatures’ personalities, social interactions, memory formation, and emergent storytelling within the digital environment.

Committee Members:
Yvette Shen (Advisor), Shadrick Addy, Jesse Fox

Keywords:
Procedural Animation, Behavioral Animation, Emergent Narrative, Artificial Intelligence, AI