Call for Participation: Workshop at ICIDS 2010
Title: “Towards a Shared Vocabulary for Interactive Digital Storytelling”
Organizers/program committee members:
Hartmut Koenitz, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, hartmut.koenitz@lcc.gatech.edu,
Mads Haahr, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, Mads.Haahr@cs.tcd.ie
Gabriele Ferri, University of Bologna, Italy, gabriele.ferri@sumitalia.it
Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen, Istanbul University, Turkey, tongucs@hotmail.com
The organizers were responsible for the preceding workshop at ICIDS 09
Registration
Please register by email to hartmut.koenitz@lcc.gatech.edu
Target audience:
Researchers and Practitioners in the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling interested in improving academic and practical exchange and discussions by working towards a shared vocabulary for the field of interactive digital storytelling.
Topic:
A pressing issue in Interactive Digital Storytelling is the diversity of theoretical concepts and associated critical terminology, which are used to describe and think about digitally mediated forms of interactive narrative. Scholars and practitioners in the interdisciplinary area of Interactive Digital Storytelling come from many different academic backgrounds, each of which has developed its own critical vocabulary with specific definitions. Researchers originally trained in a specific field often continue to use the terminology they are familiar with, sometimes unaware of the potential misunderstandings that may arise. As a consequence, both the internal discussion amongst scholars and practitioners in the field of Interactive Storytelling Design and the external one with researchers from more traditional fields within the humanities and computer sciences have become difficult and prone to terminological misunderstandings.
This proposal is a follow-up to the workshop “Do we need a new narratology for interactive digital storytelling?” held at ICIDS 2009 with 20 attendees. On that occasion, the organizers presented and – in highly interactive sessions with workshop participants and invited experts – put to the test a range of theoretical perspectives on interactive digital storytelling based in semiotics, meta narrative, games studies, and an independent theory of digitally mediated interactive narrative. In their concluding remarks, participants expressed their appreciation of the workshop, but lamented the lack of a shared vocabulary, which would have made discussions more productive. The current proposal picks up at this point to explore and discuss ways towards such a vocabulary.
Format:
The workshop will be a full-day workshop in order to allow ample time for discussion of these complex topics in terms of theory as well as practice.
The workshop will start by reviewing some particularly ambiguous terms – such asstory – and the specialized meaning of such terms according to the disciplinary context: literature, semiotics, game design and research in interactive narrative and artificial intelligence. Other examples of terms to be put before this workshop are:plot, narration, game, process, media, embodiment and point of view. To start the concrete discussion, the organizers will apply the terms to three key works of interactive digital storytelling that will serve as a mini-corpus of works that’s will by which to judge design terminology throughout the workshop.
As a next step the workshop will create a mind map of concepts and disciplines connected to interactive digital narrative and identify areas of overlap and especially contended concepts.
After the lunch break, the workshop will split up in groups led by the organizers and discuss possible avenues for establishing a shared vocabulary. This session will revisit the examples presented earlier and attempt to find common ground amongst the different approaches or argue for a new terminology.
Organizers' short bios
Hartmut Koenitz is a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has recently completed a PhD in Digital Media with a thesis on interactive narrative theory and practice. His research focuses on a combination of an evolutionary approach towards narrative theory and a software tool able to integrate many existing approaches in Interactive Storytelling. He has shown the authoring part of his software tool at ICIDS 08 and was the lead organizer of the preceding workshop at ICIDS 09.
Mads Haahr is a Lecturer in Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin and holds a PhD from that same institution. His academic background is in Computer Science and English Literature and he is currently researching methods for highly immersive location-aware story-driven games. He also has other research interests, most of which are multidisciplinary. He edits Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology.
Gabriele Ferri is a PhD student in Semiotics at University of Bologna, Italy. His ongoing research, an attempt to enrich the notion of narration with algorithms and pragmatisthabits to account for interactive practices, has been recently discussed both at the DiGRA 2009 Conference and at the 10th World Congress of Semiotics (IASS09).
Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen is a PhD student in Communications at Istanbul University Graduate School of Social Sciences, and a Fulbright alumni. His research interests include Cross-Media Narration, Digital Gaming, and Interactive Storytelling. He has presented papers at various conferences, including MiT5 in 2007 and MiT6 in 2009. He is also working with various local institutions including DiGRA Turkish Chapter to improve digital game and digital media research in Turkey.
