More and more games today try to adjust their gameplay to fit individual players; however, little work has been carried out in the same direction towards game presenter characters. Game commentary should take into account players' personalities along with game progress in order to achieve social player-adapted comment delivery that boosts the overall gameplay, engages the players, and stimulates the audience. In our work, we discuss a framework for implementing artificial game presenter characters that are based on game actions and players' social profiles in order to deliver knowledgeable, socially oriented comments. Moreover, the presented framework supports emotional facial expressions for the presenters, allowing them to convey their emotions and thus be more expressive than the majority of the commentary systems today. We prove our concept by developing a presenter character for multiplayer tabletop board games which we further put under usability evaluation with 9 players. The results showed that game sessions with presenter characters are preferred over the plain version of the game and that the majority of the players enjoy personalized social-oriented comments expressed via multimedia and emotions. 1. Introduction Our work on game presenter characters has been motivated by the popularity of television game shows and the lack of an analogy in the domain of computer-based entertainment. A significant amount of games played on TV shows are computer-based tabletop ones (Wheel of Fortune, Power of Ten, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, etc.) with an overall setup emphasizing and amplifying social interaction. Game show presenters are identified as one of the 7 key attributes of appreciation of TV game shows [1]. From a social perspective, they are responsible for keeping the game socially engaging and stimulating. More specifically, presenters provoke social interaction in order to keep the players and the audience constantly motivated and alerted about the game progress. For this purpose, they rely on individual player profiles, current challenge, previous performance, and statistics to provide feedback commonly involving humor, reward, sympathy, surprise, disappointment, enthusiasm, agony, and anticipation. Nowadays, more and more games incorporate artificial commentator systems (Pro Evolution Soccer Series [2], Buzz! [3], etc.). Such systems are based on game events and use prerecorded voices of actors, game commentators, and TV-show presenters in order to feel more realistic to players. Some of these games ask for player names, in order to use them
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