Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In “Agneta & Frida: Merging web and narrative?,” Persson, Höök and
Sjölinder create an interface plug-in which is intended to help people create
a narrative understanding of a non-narrative interface, i.e. the Web. In evaluat-
ing the system, they develop new HCI methods for evaluating narrativity based
on metaphor analysis.
In “Web guide agents: Narrative context with character,” Isbister and Doyle
construct interface agents as characters who guide users through unfamiliar
locations, providing both social context and narrative content.
Narrative agent design
The HCI argument that systems will be more understandable with narrative
presentation extends to systems involving artificial agents. Since, as narrative
psychologists argue, humans use narrative in particular for understanding in-
tentional behavior, several researchers argue that agents will be more compre-
hensible if their visible behavior is structured into narrative (Sengers 1999;
Lester & Stone 1997). This generally involves the construction of agent archi-
tectures that allow agents to make behavioral choices based on the narrative
structure of the resulting behavior, often including transition behaviors that
knit the agent's various activities into a coherent, narrative whole.
In “Schizophrenia and narrative in artificial agents,” Sengers describes such
an architecture for narratively understandable agents.
In “Virtual Babyz: Believable agents with narrative intelligence,” Stern de-
scribes agents that are designed to allow a narrative structure to emerge from
theirbehaviorastheyactovertime.
Agents that use narrative structure
If narrative is one central component of human intelligence, then it should
also play an important role in artificial agents which model aspects of human
intelligence (Schank 1990; Dautenhahn & Nehaniv 1998). Roger Schank, for
example, has developed a model of the interrelationship between stories and
memory, describing how stories are understood and how they are recreated
from the remembered “gists” of stories. Elsewhere and in “Stories of lemurs
and robots: The social origin of storytelling ,” Kerstin Dautenhahn argues that
human (and possibly animal) experience in the world is shaped by our auto-
biographies, narratives we tell ourselves about our past and the pasts of other
agents (Dautenhahn 1998).
