PUPPET: a virtual environment for children to act and direct interactive narratives

This paper presents findings from an evaluation of an autonomous agent populated virtual environment called PUPPET, that allows children to play multiple roles in the creation of an interactive narrative: audience, actor, scriptwriter, and editor. The speech of children playing with the PUPPET system was analysed to determine their ability to understand the behaviour and motives of the autonomous agents, to take on the role of an avatar character, to script dialogue for the characters, and to reflect upon and edit the recorded dialogue.