This paper takes a look at narrative forms as of yet unexplored in the field of digital interactive storytelling, and proposes methods for how they can be used in engaging ways for the user. Although the various Digital Interactive Storytelling (DIS) prototypes available produce several different story genres, they stem from the same classic narrative form. With this paper, we aim to introduce narrative techniques that have successfully been used in cinema, literature and the gaming world, and show how they could be adapted to DIS. We believe that by presenting these techniques authors and engineers can gain a better understanding of how to use and extend existing systems.

Abstract. In this paper we investigate a new way to represent the narrative structure in interactive drama models. It consists in explicitly defining generic links between actions, rather than relying on states, as it is the case for other interactive narrative approaches. This new approach is especially promising in terms of authoring.

Abstract. This article introduces OPARIS, an OPen ARchitecture for Interactive Storytelling, which aims at facilitating and fostering the integration of various and heterogeneous Interactive Storytelling components. It is based on a modular decomposition of functionalities and a specification of the various messages that different modules exchange with each other.

Having found it difficult for authors to be creative with current interactive drama systems, we propose an alternative authorcentered approach allowing authors of nonlinear media to express themselves easily and smoothly.At the level of character animation, a bottleneck in Interactive Drama, our idea is to build authoring tools and author-centered engines for interactive drama that make it possible for an author to create virtual worlds, characters and animation instantly. To achieve this goal, a minimalist design for each of those features is proposed. A Use Case is described to better illustrate the approach.