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themes that have emerged in research in NI and provides short theme-specific
descriptions of how the chapters in this topic relate to each of these themes.
How to read this topic
This topic came into being after we organized a symposium on Narrative Intel-
ligence in 1999 (Mateas and Sengers 1999). We were bombarded with submis-
sions, and at the lively and well-attended event itself it was clear that there is a
large but latent interdisciplinary community of researchers out there waiting to
coalesce around the term Narrative Intelligence. This topic is intended to pro-
vide these researchers with a focal point: we include historical documents about
NI for context (Davis and Travers, Agre, Bruner) and in subsequent chapters
attempt to give a feel for the broad range of work, from rhetoric to discourse
processing to computer game design, involving systems from natural language
processors to interactive autonomous characters to story databases, which is
currently happening in and around NI.
Given this plethora of backgrounds, perspectives, approaches, and rhetor-
ical forms, it is important for chapters to be understood in their own contexts.
We provide some of that context here. We highly suggest that you continue
your tour through the topic with Davis and Travers's “A Brief Overview of the
Narrative Intelligence Reading Group,” which explains the range of influences
that form NI and prepares readers for productive engagements with a variety
of disciplinary approaches.
Marc Davis and Michael Travers are two of the founders of the NI group at
the MIT Media Lab, the major catalyst for much of current NI research. Their
“Brief overview of the narrative intelligence reading group” is an intellectual
history of the NI group, giving a historical overview of approaches to Narrative
Intelligence. Davis and Travers describes how NI research came to exist at the
intersection of media theory and artificial intelligence, the difficulties they ran
into in trying to synthesize these two approaches, and the work they drew on
in a variety of areas to develop what became known as the NI approach.
Human narrative
Marina Umaschi Bers is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, who has built sev-
eral “identity construction kits,” which support children in thinking through
and constructing their identities through the use of story-telling. In “We are
what we tell: Designing narrative environments for children,” Bers describes
