Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) has enjoyed much interest within both academic research and industry, especially in the gaming sector. IDS aims at an intensified experience and increased meaningfulness of story in simulated computer-generated story worlds and interactive applications, for example through dynamic adaptation of the story flow and of virtual actors' behaviors to user inputs and the unfolding of the events. IDS draws on a number of fields, such as storytelling, theory of gaming and game technologies, virtual reality, mobile computing, the arts, artificial intelligence, drama theory, and human-computer interaction.

IDS has already been applied successfully to edutainment and related interactive digital applications. In particular, IDS has proved effective in the extremely hot area of soft skill learning and experience based learning in general. At the same time, many opportunities to materialize the potential of meaningful narrative experience in private and societal contexts remain to be discovered.

For this special issue, we invite contributions that address IDS in the broader context of education, training, as well as therapeutic or interventional settings. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to: 

  *  Interactive digital storytelling theories, methods, and concepts
  *  Emotion design for interactive storytelling
  *  Narrative in digital games
  *  Story generation and plot management
  *  Story and game design paradigms
  *  Game design for narrative architectures
  *  Tools for interactive storytelling
  *  Virtual Actors and believable virtual characters
  *  Novel narrative forms inspired by new technology
  *  Applications and concepts for engaging education, training, and therapy
  *  Real-time techniques
  *  Storytelling and educational gaming with social software
  *  Collaborative environments for interactive storytelling
  *  Storytelling and educational gaming with mobile technologies
  *  Cross-media storytelling and gaming
  *  Multimedia story and game authoring
  *  Evaluation and user experience reports

Only original and previously unpublished material will be considered.
All submissions should be not longer than 7000 words and should follow the Lecture Notes in Computer Science
(LNCS) format.
Submissions should not exceed 7000 words including references and should comply with the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)formatting guidelines.

Author information on the LNCS format may be found at
 http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. Papers must be in English. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered for review.

For the final print-ready version, the submission of source files (Microsoft Word/LaTeX, TIF/EPS) and a signed copyright form will be required. Submissions should be made via the Springer submission system, http://senldogo0039.springer-sbm.com/ToE/servlet/Conference.

Important Dates
 February, 14th, 2011 Paper submission deadline
 March, 14th, 2011 Authors notification
 March, 31th, 2011 Camera-ready version

Contact
 IDS-ToE@ofai.at