Authoring, its tools, processes, and design challenges are key issues for the Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) research community. The complexity of IDN authoring, often involving stories co-created by procedures and user interaction, creates confusion for tool developers and raises barriers for new authors. This book examines these issues from both the tool designer and the author's perspective, discusses the poetics of IDN and how that can be used to design authoring tools, explores diverse forms of IDN and their demands, and investigates the challenges around conducting research on IDN authoring. To address these challenges, the chapter authors incorporate a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on 'The Authoring Problem' in IDN. While existing texts provide 'how-to' guidance for authors, this book is a primer for research and practice-based investigations into the authoring problem, collecting the latest thoughts about this area from key researchers and practitioners.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2020, held in Bournemouth, UK, in November 2020. The 15 full papers and 8 short papers presented together with 5 posters, were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The conference offers topics in game narrative and interactive storytelling, including the theoretical, technological, and applied design practices, narrative systems, storytelling technology, and humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research and artistic expression.