Information Technology Reference
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the dynamism of the original source materials. He argues that maintaining
this dynamism is particularly appropriate for documenting youth cultural
phenomena.
Carol Strohecker, Kevin Brooks, and Larry Friedlander are builders of the
interactive fiction system “Tired of Giving In,” which tells the story of the US
civil rights battle that began with Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat to a
white man. Interaction in this system is based on the notion of the Greek cho-
rus: different characters have different perspectives on unfolding events, and
users can ask different characters to tell part of the story. In “Experiments with
the theatrical greek chorus as a model for interactions with computational nar-
rative systems,” Strohecker, Brooks, and Friedlander describe “Tired of Giving
In,” and give psychological justification and design sketches for future systems
which allow users to shape an interactive fiction and take on different roles
through the use of tangible, shared objects.
Agents and narrative
In “Agneta & Frida: Merging web and narrative?,” Kristina Höök, Per Persson,
and Marie Sjölinder describe the design and evaluation of a concept system for
weaving narrative through Web surfing, normally a disjointed series of jumps
from page to page. While accompanying users along their Web surf, the char-
acters Agneta and Frida engage in a narrative banter: making (usually sarcas-
tic) comments about what they see on the Web page, commenting on error
messages, but also discussing (and living!) their own lives in soap-opera-like
vignettes: complaining about the annoying poodle that lives next door or go-
ing to the kitchen (off-screen) to make a cup of coffee. The hope is that playing
a narrative alongside and connected to the Web browsing experience will help
to provide an overall sense of cohesion to the user's experience of Web surf-
ing. Höök, Persson, and Sjölinder designed new user interaction techniques to
evaluate such a system, which is not focused on optimizing user functionality,
but on providing users with new kinds of experiences.
Katherine Isbister and Patrick Doyle, researchers with roots in Barbara
Hayes-Roth's Virtual Theater Project, argue in “Web guide agents: Narative
context with charachter” that agents can give human users richer experiences
of virtual environments and the Web by telling users stories about the virtual
sites they visit together. They analyze the behavior of human tour guides - what
sorts of stories they tell, how they decide when and when not to tell stories, how
they respond to the cues audiences give them in response. They describe two
