Btw, browsing the ICT site I found a new paper by Andrew Gordon on interactive comics, I’ll post it here.

My view will be certainly more academic, and less Storytron business oriented thans Chris’ one.

The pre-conference workshop was a great initiative.
The idea was to gather researchers involved in the development of interactive storytelling prototypes, and ask them to prepare a specific demo on the “same”story (the little riding hood). The focus was on the authoring tools, but the discussions concerned the whole systems.
The demos were quite diverse, from chatbots to 3D systems, but interestingly, the issues regarding authoring were shared by many participants.
Some presentations were more focused on the authoring process, without showing the final work, which was a little bit frustrating. In the Interactive Drama field, the two demos were Mark Riedl demo, adapting the Little Riding Hood into a MOO, and my own demo (IDtension), a text-based interactive drama with a menu-based interface (History-based interface). Only one demo used a 3D world, presented by Fred Charles (3D story generation).
Of course the exercise was difficult, and the resulting demos were themselves disappointing, usually of lesser quality than the “regular demos” of the systems. But the goal was less to “promote” our approaches than to share our issues regarding the authoring process. In my case, by starting a new story from the beginning, I could focus on the methodologies for procedural writing, which I consider as an important part of Interactive Drama research.

The rest of the conference confirmed previous trends already there in past conferences (see for example ICVS’05). One the one hand, several talks focused on tangible interfaces and pervasive computing to create digital storytelling environments. On the other hand, there was a very large number of papers which presented authoring tools, including large projects such as Inscape. But the best paper award was still given to some “old players” in the field, Mark Riedl and Andrew.

A demo session was organized, which included several interesting demos from Chris Crawford, Brian Magerko, etc. I could present for the first time to the community my new demo with the new interface, and I could get great feedback. It is probable that in the coming years, we will see more and more interactive playable demos of interactive storytelling systems at TIDSE.

Nicolas