We are whatwe tell - Narrative Intelligence - page 122

Figure 3. A personal home designed by a thirteen-year-old.
Cities”: “This city is like a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things
we want to remember... So the world's most wise people are those who know Zora.”
(Calvino 1972).
Users are graphically represented by avatars and can communicate via text
or gestures. They can navigate around the 3D virtual city, converse with others
in real-time and construct the city's private and public spaces: personal homes,
community centers and temples. Temples are shared public spaces represent-
ing cultural traditions or interests. Users can populate these virtual spaces with
computational objects and interactive characters representing role models and
anti role models, which can be programmed to engage in storytelling interac-
tions with other users (see Figure 3). Both personal homes and temples become
autotopographies or spatial representations of identity composed by artifacts
symbolizing intangible aspects of the self (Gonzalez 1995).
Zora is an object-oriented environment, meaning that users can make new
objects by cloning existing ones and inheriting its attributes. Users can create
the following attributes for their objects: (1) presentation attributes, graph-
ical appearance and motion ; (2) administration attributes, ownership ,which
determines who owns the object and therefore can edit it, and permissions ,
which set if the object can be cloned; and (3) narrative-based attributes, tex-
tual description , stories , values and conversations . Zora is implemented using