Web guide agents - Narrative Intelligence - page 240

infer from their topics and keywords what other known and annotated loca-
tions might be of interest to his interactors. This sort of simple adaptation to
the user's preferences is a necessary first step in making these embodied agents
relevant and entertaining for their audiences, which is itself necessary if they
are ever going to have real value as a new kind of interface.

Challenges

While interactive tour guides offer the possibility of increased user attentive-
ness, retention, and enjoyment (Lester et al. 1997), these benefits require we
make our agents believable to their users, both as living entities and as expert
guides. Our research suggests that the following four traits are critical for creat-
ing believable and compelling guides. The first three points have emerged from
Doyle's work on annotation-based tour guide storytelling; the last has emerged
from Isbister's investigation of human tour guides leading group tours.
- Intelligent reincorporation . Reincorporation in this context means the rein-

troduction of ideas or entities that have been seen earlier in the tour, with
some reference to how they relate to the topic under discussion. In impro-
visational theater (Johnstone 1992) it is well understood that reincorpora-
tion is a key to building a story satisfying to the audience; a sequence of
unrelated events does not make a story. Similarly, we suspect that a key to
creating an effective tour narrative is reincorporation of earlier material.
This requires that the agent not only track what material has been seen but
also when connections are either pedagogically or dramatically effective.

- Empathy with the content . (Elliott et al. 1997; Elliott 1998) has argued that

understanding of and reasoning about narrative is strongly associated with
reasoning about emotion. If we think of stories as descriptions of sequences
of events that have emotional associations for the listener, then we can en-
hance the significance of our tour content to the user by infusing emotion
into the presentation. Beyond incorporating emotions in the presented
material, we can build our agents to react emotionally to what they present.
This not only heightens the significance of these narratives, it also enhances
the believability of the tour guide. As demonstrated in (Persson et al., in
preparation), clear emotional responses by an interactive character to the
material at hand can be instrumental in creating a satisfying relationship
between user and character(s).