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systems that give tours: one takes humans on a virtual tour of a Japanese castle,
the other takes visitors on a tour of a virtual museum.
Sengers employs a cultural-theoretic analysis of the technical assumptions
underlying autonomous believable agents to diagnose why the behavior of such
agents is often incomprehensible to a human observer. The technical practice
of breaking down agents into black-box collections of weakly interacting be-
haviors results in a lack of behavioral coherence, that is, schizophrenia. The
analysis of narrative properties provided by Brunner's narrative psychology
(Bruner 1990, 1991) is then used to inform an alternative methodology for the
design and implementation of believable agents, a methodology that makes
such agents “readable” to a human observer by providing the appropriate cues
for inferring a coherent intentional state.
Andrew Stern is a researcher in interactive fiction and believable agents. He
is a co-creator of Virtual Petz, one of the first games that allows users to play
with (seemingly) intelligent creatures with their own personalities. In “Virtual
Babyz: Believable agents with Narrative Intelligence,” Stern argues that narra-
tives (“mini-stories”) can in fact emerge from the interactions between char-
acters who are modeled as autonomous agents. He describes the engineering
and design techniques that were used in order to support the development of
narrative in the product Virtual Babyz.
Part IV: Analyzing the stories we tell
Philip Agre's essay “Writing and Representation” was an influential early docu-
ment within the NI Group at the MIT Media Lab. Agre argues that much work
in symbolic representation in AI is influenced by a writing or “text” metaphor
which sees representations as effortlessly, without any work on the part of the
possessor of the representation, carrying meaning in a context-independent
manner. This view of representation has created a series of unsolvable techni-
cal impasses within AI. Humanistic critiques (e.g. deconstruction) of the no-
tion of text as a context-independent carrier-of-meaning have revealed that the
meaning of a piece of text is a fresh problem in every new context; this meaning
is actively constructed by the “user” of the text. Agre explores how this alter-
native account of writing and text could be used to inform a new approach to
representation within AI.
In “Stories and social networks,” Sack looks at the interrelationship be-
tween stories and social relationships on the internet: which stories get re-told,
who cites whom and in what way. He aims for a middle ground between com-
putational linguistics, which he argues generally looks only at the utterances of
