Proceedings of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) Conference, 2003

The story, as a directed way to communicate information from one person to several other persons, has a long and successful tradition in the human history of entertainment. Stories were originally invented to give a social closure amongpeople, to help them understand and manipulate their rough and undomesticated environments in the dawn of humankind. This has remained unchanged through today. Stories are still involved in communicating various kinds of information, whether serious or humorous, vital or simply entertaining. The information is relayed orally or visually, instantly or recorded, via a teller or by interaction (e. g. while gaming) on several media like TV, CDs, Movies or Game Consoles, the Computer and the Internet. Since the days of Aristotle, it has been common knowledge that stories should be structured in such a way that people are enabled to engage in and listen to, or play with, as well as to understand the transferred information (e. g. the morals of a tale). The personal engagement of the audience in a story, the 'thrill' and 'suspense' people feel when listening to a story, is a good indicator of the level of immersion in a story and the quality of the story's structure in regard to the perception of the story's content. Therefore, it is up to the audience of the story to finally decide whether a story has been adequately told or not. This conference proceeding contains contributions to the research in the interactive storytelling and entertainment field. It focuses on practical approaches and gives insights into applications and developments to enable the practitioner to develop storytelling and entertainment applications.