Page 251 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

234 Socially Intelligent Agents

The basic building blocks of story and plot — autonomous characters, ac-
tions and their causal relationships — are not new to researchers in Artificial
Intelligence. These notions are the stuff that makes up most representational
schemes in research that deals with reasoning about the physical world. Much
of this work has been adapted in the Mimesis architecture to represent the hi-
erarchical and causal nature of narratives identified by narrative theorists [1].
The idea that Grice’s Co-operative Principle might be put to use to characterize
interactions between people and computers is also not new [5]. But the question
of balance between narrative coherence and user control remains an open one,
and will not likely be answered by research into human-computer interaction or
by modification of conventions carried from over previous entertainment me-
dia. It seems more likely that the balance between interactivity and immersion
will be established by the concurrent evolution (or by the co-evolution) of the
technology of storytelling and social expectations held by the systems’ users.

References

[1] Mieke Bal. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. University of Toronto Press, Toronto,
Ontario, 1997.
[2] Edward Branigan. Narrative Comprehension and Film. Routledge, London and New York,
1992.
[3] H. Paul Grice. Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, editor, Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics, pages 113–128. Academic Press, New York, 1975.
[4] Patrick Doyle and Barbara Hayes-Roth. Agents in Annotated Worlds. In Proceedings of
the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 35–40, 1998.
[5] R. Michael Young. Using Grice’s Maxim of Quantity to Select the Content of Plan De-
scriptions. Artificial Intelligence, 115:215–256, 1999.
[6] R. Michael Young. An Overview of the Mimesis Architecture: Integrating Intelligent
Narrative Control into an Existing Gaming Environment. In The Working Notes of the
AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, Stanford,
California, pages 77–81, 2001.
[7] R. Michael Young and Martha Pollack and Johanna Moore. Decomposition and Causality in
Partial Order Planning. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence and Planning Systems, pages 188–193, 1994.
[8] Clifford Reeves and Byron Nass. The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, England, 1996.
[9] Richard Gerrig. Experiencing Narrative Worlds. Yale University Press, New Haven, Con-
necticut, 1993.