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Resner 1998). One of our favorite examples of emergent narrative in Petz is
as follows:
A tired old bulldog won't be able to sleep when a young playful kitten is
bouncing around him. Because the dog has a nurturing relationship towards
the kitten, he will tend to bring the kitten some food. Left alone for the mo-
ment, the bulldog begins to lie down for a nap. However the kitten, by her own
nature and personality, has a short-attention span and quickly returns to jump-
ing around the bulldog. The bulldog expresses his frustration at being tired, but
because the kitten is gesturing for attention, he responds by bringing the kitten
a toy. This cycle continues until the kitten gets tired and takes a nap, allowing
the now disgruntled bulldog to finally get some rest.
Note that the bulldog was never explicitly programmed to “distract” the
kitten so he could sleep - but if you look at these “naturally” unfolding events
as a whole, it comes together as a vignette about a dog trying to distract a kitten
so he can sleep. To be sure, the user's subjective experience is enhanced by the
“Eliza effect” - the tendency for people to treat programs that respond to them
as if they had more intelligence than they really do (Weizenbaum 1966). But
it was clear to us that creating a broad base of richly interactive behaviors for
virtual characters laid fertile ground for interactive narrative - much to the tes-
tament of our users, who posted hundreds of messages on our website bulletin
board describing their experiences and relationships with their individual Petz
(PF. Magic 1998; Stern 2000).
The success of the Virtual Petz (over 2 million copies sold worldwide be-
tween 1995 and 1998), as well as the success of other virtual character products
such as Tamagotchi (Bandai 1996) (10+ million sold), Furby (Tiger Electron-
ics 1998), and Creatures (Grand et al. 1997) is an indication that people are
interested in more than the traditional computer game genres. Our next step
was to create even more intelligent virtual characters, and purposefully endow
them with some narrative intelligence to increase the potential for more explicit
interactive narratives.
Setting the stage for interactive narrative
With interactive narrative as a key design goal for our next product, we set out
to create new characters and environments using the following criteria:
-
that we continue to use our tried-and-true direct interaction interface,
where the user controls a hand-shaped cursor to directly touch and pick
