Agneta & Frida - Narrative Intelligence - page 249

tures of the system were described or hinted at by Agneta or Frida when they
were clicked upon.
The Agneta and Frida system explores the possibilities of multiple char-
acters. Having two characters instead of just one made pre-scripted dialogue
possible. This enabled us to introduce personality, humor, negotiation and self-
reflection more naturally than through a single character. In fact, few systems
exploit this design choice with the exception of André & Rist (2000).
We implemented these ideas using JavaScript and Microsoft Agent Tool.
The study
While the entire study covered aspects of narrative, navigation, exploration and
believability (Höök et al. 2000), this paper will concentrate on the narrative
aspect: Did the system succeed in merging the Agneta & Frida narrative with
the web browsing experience?
How to measure narrative experience?
One way to assert 'narrativity' is to investigate whether a reader or user actually
draws inferences, constructs mental models and makes interpretations of the
type discussed in the introduction of this paper. Discourse psychology research
about narratives has developed methods to investigate some of these processes,
especially on the cognitive side of the matter (Graesser et al. 1994). We choose
to develop somewhat other methods.
Our first hypothesis was related to how the user would speak about their
experience. If users merged the Agneta & Frida narrative with the information
browsing on the sites, we reasoned, they would talk about the total experience
as one entity. Thus, after their interaction with the system, we asked the sub-
jects to describe the system as if they were telling a friend about it. Hopefully,
subjects would talk about Agneta & Frida as a natural part of the system and
relate Agneta and Frida's comments and views to the interaction with the sites.
For instance, would Agneta and Frida's comments, jokes and narratives per-
haps encourage the user to construct coherence between nodes on the bases
of events, situations and psychology of the characters? If so, Agneta & Frida
would provide a social context to the web information, which would be per-
sistent, helping the user to 'digest' the information. This ambition we seem to
share with Isbister & Doyle (Chapter 14).