Scope of the Conference

Interactive entertainment, including novel forms of edutainment, therapy, and serious games, promises to become an ever more important market. Interactive Digital Storytelling provides access to social and human themes through stories, and promises to foster considerably the possibilities of interactive entertainment, computer games, and other interactive digital applications. ICIDS also identifies opportunities and addressess challenges for redefining the experience of narrative through interactive simulations of computer-generated story worlds.

Interactive Storytelling thus promises a huge step forward for games, training, and learning, through the aims to enrich virtual characters with intelligent behavior, to allow collaboration of humans and machines in the creative process, and to combine narrative knowledge and user activity in interactive artifacts. In order to create novel applications, in which users play a significant role together with digital characters and other autonomous elements, new concepts for Human-Computer Interaction have to be developed. Knowledge for interface design and technology has to be garnered and integrated. Interactive Storytelling involves concepts from many aspects of Computer Science, above all from Artificial Intelligence, with topics such as narrative intelligence, automatic dialogue- and drama management, cognitive robotics and smart graphics. In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models, by drawing from narratological studies, and by taking into account the characteristics of programming. Consequently, due to its technological complexity, it is currently hardly accessible for creators and end-users. There is a need for new authoring concepts and tools supporting the creation of dynamic story models, allowing for rich and meaningful interaction with the content. Finally, there is a need for theoretical foundations considering the integration of so far disjunctive approaches and cultures.

Before ICIDS, two European conference series had been serving as main platforms for these topics:

• ICVS (International Conference on Virtual Storytelling)
• TIDSE (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment)

While the venues of these events were traditionally bound to France and Germany, ICIDS is set to overcome also this geographical limitation.

ICIDS 2009 will be held in the Centro Cultural Vila Flor, in Guimarães, Portugal, EU. It is organized by the University of Minho and the CCG Centro de Computação Gráfica, supported by several partners.

The proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag in the "Lecture Notes of Computer Science" series.