Authoring for Interactive Storytelling 2018

AIS'18 was held on 18 December 2018, at Trinity College, Dublin, as part of ICIDS 2018. This site is an archive of the workshop. For the latest edition, please see here.

AIS'18 will be held on 8 December 2018 from 2-5:30pm at the Lloyd Building, Trinity College, Dublin. Note that you do not need to have a paper accepted to the workshop to participate. We encourage anyone who is interested in taking part to join us! However, you do need to register for ICIDS 2018 and for the workshop sessions. Details of ICIDS 2018 can be found here.

The authoring of interactive stories, and the processes and technology to support it, remains one of the most significant challenges facing narrative systems research. Attempts have been made within both academia and industry to create tools to support the authoring of interactive stories, but few, if any, of these tools have gained widespread acceptance. At the same time, many interesting works have been created either without any specialized authoring tools, or by using more general-purpose authoring tools such as Unity and Twine. This raises the question: When, why, and do we actually need authoring tools? Progressing from previous iterations of this workshop, and in response to discussions at last year's workshop, this year the workshop will aim to answer this question.

The workshop aims to:

• Create a meeting venue for active researchers in this area to come together and share their work
• Foster a community around this work, as a step towards future collaboration, and provide a venue for publication of early work in this space
• Create a white paper summarizing the workshop discussion, and the main positions, regarding the need for and role of authoring tools.

As well as the above aims, this workshop also aims to bridge the gap within the narrative systems research community between the interactive storytelling community (whose natural venue is ICIDS) and the Hypertext Narrative community (whose natural venue is ACM Hypertext). Both communities have been exploring interactive storytelling authorship in recent years, and it is our hope that a workshop organised by researchers from both communities can provide a focal point for dialogue and collaboration.

The workshop seeks to explore the following questions (and more):

• What is a tool, anyway, in the context of authoring for interactive storytelling?
• What are the main merits of graphical or interactive tool creation?
• Are interactive storytelling tools necessarily specific to inherent interactive modalities?
• Can tools be door-openers for non-programmers to AI-based storytelling?
• Who are the future interactive storytellers and what are their talents?