This paper presents an implementation of Prendinger and Ishizuka’s [3,4] social filter rules using statecharts. Following
their example, we have implemented a waiter character in a coffee-shop that can interact with a user-controlled customer and
a system-controlled boss. Due to space limitations, all further references to their work will be implicit, instead we refer
to the literature.
The aim with this paper is to show the potential of using Harel statecharts [2] for modelling socially equipped game characters.
The work is based on the assumption that statecharts successfully can be used for designing (game) dialogue managers (see
e.g. [1]). There are also other advantages in using statecharts, e.g. (1) the fact that the world wide web consortium (W3C)
has introduced a new standard for describing (dialogue) flow, StateChartXML (SCXML), that combines the semantics of Harel
statecharts with XML syntax, (2) statechart theory is an extension to ordinary finite-state machines (commonly used in games),
featuring