Web guide agents - Narrative Intelligence - page 230

purpose of an environment. Good guides do this by interpreting the environ-
ment for a visitor. Interpreting is providing a social context for understanding,
often bringing a place to life by using one's own perspective and the artifacts
at hand, and usually involves telling the visitors situated stories - stories tied
closely to the environment - to make the experience more vivid and emotion-
ally engaging for them (Pond 1993). Thus the guide's task is explicitly a social
and narrative one.
In this paper, we will discuss two independent projects that have built so-
cial, storytelling agents. Isbister's agent is tightly integrated in an online 3-D
Website tour. Her project explores ways to make an agent effectively adapt its
narrative to different groups who take the tour, as an expert human tour guide
does. Doyle's agent, rather than being bound to a particular site, instead ex-
plores different Websites as a persistent companion to a user. One of the intel-
ligent behaviors he is examining is narrative guidance through these sites, guid-
ance assisted by an annotation mechanism that extends standard Web markup.
By comparing these projects we have been able to identify some common qual-
ities that a narrative agent should possess, and common issues their designers
must address.
How character interactions improve the web experience
One can think of communication as comprising three elements: context, struc-
ture, and content. The Web is a vast and growing body of content, but has seri-
ous deficiencies in the other aspects of communication. Character interactions
can help address these problems by providing a social context and a narrative
structure.
Research suggests that people already unconsciously treat computers as so-
cial entities (Reeves & Nass 1996). This is a strong justification for social in-
terfaces. In addition to the benefits of flexibility and error-tolerance, social
interactions bring with them a well-understood context for communication.
Providing a character with a personality and a social role (such as a museum
tour guide) allows us to take advantage of peoples' social strategies for estab-
lishing context - their goals for interaction, the relationship between their in-
terests and the character's, the range of appropriate responses, the relevant and
valuable information in a dialog - that is, their social filters.
Characters can also provide a consistent narrative structure to the inter-
action. Not only can a character reinterpret the contents of a single page in a
narrative style, but the persistence of the character means that the whole course