Will You be Happier?: Designing a Game that Employs Gifting to Non-player Characters

Giving presents can have a positive impact upon the giver's mental well-being [1-4]. We wonder whether giving a present to an AI agent could have the same effect. We investigate this question in the context of video games with non-player characters (NPCs), because the rapid expansion of the game industry makes NPCs one of the most common ways in which we experience AI agents. We seek to understand whether players benefit mentally by giving gifts to NPCs in video games. We intend to observe the behaviour of players and measure their psychological changes through a specially designed video game providing them with mechanisms for gifting to NPCs. We have taken an understanding of gifting from the real world and applied this understanding within a game. The game development has been an iterative process of design-build-playtest. Such a process helps us better understand the research space and to better describe the questions. This article reports the latest findings from the game development after playtesting with 12 participants.