Authoring for Interactive Storytelling 2018 (AIS'18)

Workshop to be held in conjunction with ICIDS 2018, Dublin

http://narrativeandplay.org/ais

This call for participation is seeking submitted papers and attendance at the Authoring for Interactive Storytelling workshop held at ICIDS 2018 in Dublin. This workshop seeks to provide a venue for researchers in the area of interactive digital narrative authoring and narrative systems to share early work, new ideas, and identify challenges facing the field, with a view to fostering collaboration and the formation of a coherent research community in this space. In particular, we are focusing on the overarching question: When, why, and do we actually need authoring tools?

Relevant work discussed at recent workshops has evoked a number of more specific questions:

• What is a tool, anyway, in the context of authoring for interactive storytelling? From visual editors to graphs or textual notations including scripting languages and story formalizations, tools can be considered very broadly as any technology intended to assist interactive story creators.
• What are the main merits of graphical or interactive tool creation? In research projects, budget limitations often create a trade-off between sophisticated engine development vs. usable tools. While often the motivation for the latter is a greater accessibility, creative storytellers recently also criticized formal limitations of expressivity in specialized tools, a discrepancy that clearly needs to be addressed.
• Are interactive storytelling tools necessarily specific to inherent interactive modalities? Experimental paradigms of story creation for different settings, such as location-based, language-based or using virtual and augmented reality, add new dimensions for consideration beyond just character and conflict, including interaction design for end-users.
• Can tools be door-openers for non-programmers to AI-based storytelling? While easy-to-learn editors and tools often allowed for creating explicit storylines and simple branching interactivity, there is still very little reported experience with the successful implicit configuration of procedural content for stories.
• Who are the future interactive storytellers and what are their talents? All in all, due to the long-term nature of authoring projects, publications of fully evaluated principles and tools with different target groups (including insights on pitfalls and failures) are not as common as for example in the domain of E-Learning. All of these questions relate to the basic assumptions underlying much existing research on authoring tools for interactive storytelling.

Paper contributions by participants will be expected to in some way address or contribute to exploring the questions and issues mentioned above. Accepted papers will be published online, as in the previous year's workshop. A session at the workshop will be dedicated to collective discussion on the issues and positions presented beforehand. The outcomes of this discussion will be recorded and documented as a white paper after the workshop.

Papers submitted to this workshop should be 3-6 pages long, and in Springer LNCS format. Papers will be peer reviewed, and successful submissions will be presented at the workshop. There is also the potential that papers accepted to the workshop will be published as part of the workshop proceedings. Submissions should be sent to ais@interactive-storytelling.com by midnight (AoE) on 22nd October.

Important Dates:

• 22nd October10th November (note revised date): Paper Submissions Due
• 3rd25th November (note revised date): Notification of acceptance
• 24th30th November (note revised date): Camera ready papers due
• 8th December: Workshop

Organizers:

• Alex Mitchell - National University of Singapore
• Ulrike Spierling - Hochschule RheinMain
• Charlie Hargood - Bournemouth University
• David Millard - University of Southampton

Contact