As work on Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) requires insights from a wide variety of fields, our primary objective for this workshop is to make space for this interdisciplinary work by fostering a welcoming environment that values each field’s expertise and insights. This will help build the foundations necessary for a productive and respectful research community.

For this workshop, we will focus on understanding what story structures and storytelling traditions suit interactive experiences. This is a relatively underdeveloped area compared to advances in technical fidelity (e.g., graphics and audio) and interaction paradigms (e.g., VR/AR). Developing this understand can be difficult, with some individuals framing narratives as non-interactive (e.g., fixed plot points), despite the number of oral and participatory storytelling traditions around the world and throughout time. Tackling this open problem will require insights on digital systems, human behaviour, and how we tell stories. By the end of this workshop, we will make progress towards three objectives:

O1 Develop a working list (e.g., collaborative document) of story structures and storytelling traditions that support audience/user interactions with digital systems

O2 Identify HCI concepts that support audience/user interactions with those structures in digital systems

O3 Identify the next steps for the community to further develop these contributions and identifying related issues for investigation.