AUSTROPOLIS

Barbara Neumayr

Austropolis is a political multi-user web-game where avatars—artificial creatures representing the users—act and interact independently in their predefined environment. They live in Austropolis, a cyber democracy run by the avatars who make new laws, organise demonstrations, opinion polls or plebiscites and elect a new president once a week. The ultimate aim of every avatar is to make a successful career as a politician and maybe even become the president of Austropolis. The avatars depend on the users’ advice in order to succeed, but they don’t always do as they are told.

As a first step, each user creates his own avatar and gives him a specific personality and political orientation by answering several psychological and political questions, and taking a certain attitude toward his avatar in three scenes representing the latter’s childhood, as well as a specific visual styling.

Once the user has created his avatar, his virtual alter ego starts living an independent life. He goes to demonstrations, votes in the elections and talks to his fellow avatars. The avatar’s actions are determined by his personality and political orientation, as well as by external influences, the user’s advice and needs like hunger, thirst, boredom and so on.

The application is active 24 hours a day in order to simulate the life-processes of its virtual creatures and keep the environmental model going. This means that the avatar continues to take actions while the user is off-line and every time the user logs in, he will find an account of the events that have happened to his avatar in the meantime. Whenever two avatars meet and talk to each other, their profiles are matched and one of them might make the other one change his mind about a specific political issue, thereby slightly altering his personality.

The game includes features like a daily newspaper reporting on the current political, economic and social situation in Austropolis, an in-built mail-box that allows users to contact each other and a discussion forum for direct multi-user interaction.

Austropolis is based on the NetLife platform, which has been developed by sysis in order to implement web-based multi-user simulation games. NetLife is a Java-based platform, which draws on a variety of scientific approaches to simulate social systems and artificial life, including psychological models based on the works of C. G. Jung and Eysenk and artificial intelligence solutions. Unlike most Al solutions, the focus of sysis NetLife is on the individual psyche and social behaviour in the interaction of such artificial beings rather than on their bodily organism.

Austropolis was launched at http://www.Austropolis.at or http://www.profil.at/Austropolis.