December 7, 2006
A View of TIDSE06
This year’s TIDSE conference just ended, and the always outspoken Chris Crawford just wrote up his take on it; bring a few grains of salt with you as you read :-)
(Update: Nicolas Szilas added his description of TIDSE06 in the comments.)
One of the cool things they did this year was a workshop where attendees came with their own interactive version of Little Red Riding Hood (known in German as Little Red Cap), implemented in each participant’s particular architecture; here’s the original call for participants (pdf). That would have been instructive to see. (Although, even I had time to attend, sadly I wouldn’t have had time to implement my own version.)
December 11th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Another view on TIDSE…
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
December 11th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Nicolas refers to one of two papers at TIDSE by Mark Riedl and myself (Mark is a full-time research scientist at ICT/USC, I consulted on his research project).
Btw, browsing the ICT site I found a new paper by Andrew Gordon on interactive comics, I’ll post it here.
March 14th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
[…] made sure to let Uli Spierling know about their project, since she recently organized the Little Redcap symposium on interactive stories based on Little Red Ridinghood. Fin […]