Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Web guide agents
Narrative context with character
Katherine Isbister and Patrick Doyle
Katherine interface, San Francisco; Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Introduction
According to (Schank & Abelson 1995), the bulk of human knowledge and
memory is communicated and encoded in story form. Although there has been
a long-standing interest in how interface agents might bring social and narra-
tive perspective to information resources (Oren et al. 1990), there is currently
little explicit use of adaptive storytelling in the repertoire of those agents. Most
of the interface agents in use today are only embodied alternatives to tradi-
tional menu- or prompt-driven mechanisms for performing simple tasks such
as searching for files or providing context-sensitive help. Although they possess
bodies and offer some social context, these utilitarian agents ordinarily lack in-
telligent believability (Ball et al. 1997; Rist et al. 1997). There has been active
research on pedagogical agents that do exhibit intelligent behavior, though they
create narratives only in the sense that their pedagogical requirements impose a
structured sequence of behaviors (e.g. (Rickel & Johnson 1997; Lester & Stone
1997)). Finally, there has been work on the creation of stories through the inter-
action between the user and agents that are characters in the story (Bates 1992;
Hayes-Roth et al. 1997), though in these systems story is the sole purpose of
the interaction.
Our work combines our interests in interface agents as characters and char-
acters as participants in narrative. We wish to use narrative and social context
explicitly as ways to help users organize familiar ideas, learn new material, and
engage with content. In searching for a way to explore these ideas, we each
settled on the idea of an interface agent as a “guide” to a digital location. A
human guide's task is to provide information about the nature, content and
