Challenging reality using techniques from interactive drama to support social simulations in virtual worlds

Simulations of social situations have great potential to be applied to many of the social problems that we find in society and organisations. Social simulations can do more than provide experience and transfer current best practice; they may be used to transform current social realities. As many educationalists, organizations and researchers are finding, Virtual Worlds (VWs) provide an environment for conducting person to person social simulations. In this paper we consider a more challenging form of social simulation in VWs involving intelligent social interactions between humans and computer-based non-player characters in VWs, known as intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). However, using IVAs to simulate social behavior requires some reconsideration of the role that reality plays and challenges the definition of a simulation as a representation of reality. By bringing in the element of fiction (non-reality) often associated with drama, narrative and storytelling together with virtual worlds, we can relax some of the constraints associated with reality and go beyond reality. In beyond reality simulations, we actually use simulations to exaggerate aspects of the real world in order to emphasize a particular learning concept or even to break the rules, strategies, roles and operators which apply in the real world.