Page 248 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

The Cooperative Contract 231

relies heavily on inferences made by a reader about the author’s intent. Consider
the following passage, suggested by the experiments in [9]. James Bond has
been captured by criminal genius Blofeld and taken at gunpoint to his hideout.

James’ hands were quickly tied behind his back, but not before he deftly slid
a rather plain-looking black plastic men’s comb into the back pocket of his jump
suit. Blofeld’s man gave him a shove down the hallway towards the source of the
ominous noises that he’d heard earlier.

In the passage above, the author makes an explicit reference to the comb in
James’ pocket. As readers, we assume that this information will be central to
some future plot element (e.g., the comb will turn out to be a laser or a lock
pick or a cell phone) - why else would the author have included it? So we set
to work at once anticipating the many ways that James might use the "comb"
to escape from what seems a serious predicament. When the comb later turns
out to be as central as we suspected, we’re pleased that we figured it out, but
the inference that we made was licensed only by our assumption that the author
was adhering to the Maxim of Relevance. In fact, Relevance comes to play so
often in narrative that its intentional violation by an author has a name of its
own: the red herring.
This type of co-operative agreement exists in other, less conventional com-
municative contexts as well. Film, for instance, also relies on the same com-
municative principles [2]. As one example, when the location of action in a
film changes from Place A to Place B, filmmakers often insert an external shot
of Place B after the action at Place A ends. Called an establishing shot,this
inserted footage acts as a marker for the viewer, helping her to understand the
re-location of the action without breaking the narrative flow by making the
transition explicit.

3. A Cooperative Contract for Interactive Stories

For the designer of a narrative-oriented game that allows substantive user
interaction, thegreatestdesignchallenge revolvesaroundthemaintenanceof the
co-operative contract, achieved by the effective distribution of control between
the system and its users. If a game design removes all control from the user, the
resulting system is reduced to conventional narrative forms such as literature or
film. As we’ve discussed above, well-established conventions in these media
provide clear signals to their audience, but provide for no interaction with the
story. Alternatively, if a game design provides the user with complete control,
the narrative coherence of a user’s interaction is limited by her own knowledge
and abilities, increasing the likelihood that the user’s own actions in the game
world will, despite her best efforts, fail to mesh with the storyline.
Most interactive games have taken a middle ground, specifying at design-
time sets of actions from which the user can choose at a fixed set of points