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 volume contains scientific papers and case studies presented at Interactive Sto- telling '08: The First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), held November 26-29, 2008, in Erfurt, Germany. Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) is a cross-disciplinary topic, which explores new uses of interactive technologies for creating and experiencing narratives. IDS is also a huge step forward in games and learning. This can be seen through its ability 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. IDS involves concepts from many aspects of Computer Science, above all from Artificial Intelligence, with topics such as narrative intelligence, automatic dialogue and drama management, 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. As it is currently hardly accessible for creators and e- users, there is a need for new authoring concepts and tools supporting the creation of such dynamic stories, allowing for rich and meaningful interaction with the content.

Interactive Digital Storytelling has evolved as a prospering research topic banding together formerly disjointed disciplines stemming from the arts and humanities as well as computer science. It's tied up with the notion of storytelling as an effective means for the communication of knowledge and social values since the existence of humankind. It also builds a bridge between current academic trends investigating and formalizing computer games, and developments towards the experience-based design of human-media interaction in general. In Darmstadt, a first national workshop on Digital Storytelling was organized by ZGDV e.V. in 2000, which at that time gave an impression about the breadth of this new research field for computer graphics (DISTEL 2000). An international follow-up was planned: the 1st International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE 2003). Taking place in March 2003, it showed a more focussed range of research specifically on concepts and first pro- types for automated storytelling and autonomous characters, including modelling of emotions and the user experience. At TIDSE 2004, an established and still-growing community of researchers ga- ered together to exchange results and visions. This confirms the construction of a series of European conferences on the topic - together with the International Conf- ence on Virtual Storytelling, ICVS (conducted in 2001 and 2003 in France) - which will be further cultivated.