A Trust and Reputation Framework for Game Agents: Providing a Social Bias to Computer Players

This work presents the application of trust and reputation models in the context of interactive games. This type of application aims to avoid that other players (humans or computers) can easily predict the behaviour of non-human players, and consequently loose interest in the game. In our approach, trust and reputation are mechanisms used to bring a social bias to non-human players, with the intention to emulate different types of social profiles. The main idea is to combine the social profile with the rationale the agent has regarding the game rules and game state, so that the agent uses both these traces (social profile and intelligent reasoning) in order to decide the next action to take. In this paper we present the conceptual model and the architecture of the proposed framework, and also report the results of a case study based on a game played by non-human players with different social profiles.