Tutorial: Introduction to Interactive Story Creation

In the IRIS network of excellence [1], one work package ("Authoring Tools and Creation Methods") has been tackling accessibility issues of highly-interactive and generative Interactive Storytelling (IS) systems for story creators. While one problem is a current lack of well-designed tools, which needs improvement, the other side of the medal is that nevertheless, prospective interactive storyworld creators need basic knowledge in the currently available approaches. With the vision in mind that in the future, complex IS projects will be accomplished by an interdisciplinary team, future authors do not need to program a story engine, but they would indeed need to know about the characteristics of content conceptualization, knowledge modeling and forms of abstraction, which then are used in a collaborative production process with engineers. The tutorial covers basics of conception and processing of interactive stories. That way, it can also serve as a general introduction to Interactive Digital Storytelling. It focuses on creative principles that are different from traditional ways of storytelling, and further briefly explains specific approaches of selected story engines with short insights into practical examples. This material has been compiled during the year 2010 by the IRIS project, in an attempt to produce educational material for authors of Interactive Storytelling, in particular in genres using highly-interactive and generative story engines. It also draws from experiences of authoring workshops at previous conferences [2, 3]. The practical showcases include story engines with previously created example storyworlds from the IRIS project.