One of the biggest needs in the serious games field is for sims and simulated experiences where the player is interacting with synthetic humans. Be it a virtual patient, a troubled employee, or other human contact, there is a growing need for games that allows the practice of both: the macro (i.e. running a system) and the micro (dealing with specific personal situations) responsibilities many people face in their work and life.

Yet, for all the amazing macro-simulation gains games have achieved, human-to-human interactions are of unequal fidelity. There are two core ways around this issue: New technologies that amp-up the "Turing Curve," provided higher fidelity interactions; or design tricks and smart interfaces and play-styles that instill the learning and experience, but do so by avoiding some major issues (e.g. THE SIMS), both of which have their merits and detractions.

In this session, key serious game community members -working on projects that deal with virtual humans and human-to-human interfaces- discuss the state, and state-of-the-art in a wide variety of efforts aimed at improving the ability to provide rich human-to-virtual-human interactions in games. Topics discussed include conversation systems, role-playing approaches, human modeling and animation, user interfaces, and more.