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The term ‘believability’, when referring to game characters, is used in two incompatible ways: realism, meaning human-like, and character believability as used in the character arts (the illusion of life). The same term being used for two different concepts leads to confusion and inconsistent use of language in research communities. This paper examines the different research areas that cluster under realism and character believability, and then performs a deeper exploration of character believability, focusing on characteristics, examples, and evaluation methodologies.
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Aljammaz et al. (2023) studied this question.