For the first time, ICIDS will be held in a Latin American country inviting us to position ourselves and the conference in this territory and to finally acknowledge the continents’ research and accomplishments in interactive digital storytelling.

The host city of this year is Barranquilla, a city surrounded by different kinds of waterbodies: the Caribbean Sea, the Magdalena river, and the Mallorquín Swamp: an ecosystem where migratory species from both hemispheres mingle. The oceanic and earth forces that led to the formation of the city’s landscape provided the inspiration for the main theme of the conference: STREAMS or CORRIENTES in Spanish. With this topic we aim to draw attention to constant movement, exchange, convergences and divergences within the various systems that we inhabit and are part of. In this sense, we invite the interactive narrative global community to think about our field within posthumanist, multispecies, and pluriversal contexts.

STREAMS ~ CORRIENTES looks into the collisions of different streams of thought that converge into and extend the Interactive Digital Narratives field. What epistemologies are shaping the IDN landscape and enriching our understanding of the interconnectedness among humans, but also with other species and machines? This topic also invites us to revisit the current streams that carry us forward in IDN research and practice. How can and will IDN as a discipline respond to rapidly changing sociopolitical movements, especially concerning issues of identity, representation, and social justice? How do IDNs incorporate and push back against technological currents such as generative AI?

We extend a special invitation to Latin American and Global South scholars and practitioners to submit to any area of the conference. The language of submissions and presentations is English, with simultaneous translation offered during the conference between English and Spanish to facilitate a global and inclusive dialogue. As it is vital for our community to give space to historically marginalized epistemologies, we invite you to reflect how alternative views and applications from the so-called Global South deepen our understanding of interactive digital narratives, narrative structures, themes, audiences, and applications?

We encourage authors to consider possible connections to this theme and we will foreground contributions that focus on the topic. But we also emphasize that there is no requirement that papers or workshops reflect the theme, either implicitly or explicitly – it is meant only as inspiration and is not intended to impose a constraint on other possible contributions and topics relevant to the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling. To that end, we also suggest other areas and modes for presentation, including late-breaking works, a new category introduced last year.

Please review the following areas of interest and descriptions of types of contributions for more consideration:

Areas of Interest

Paper submissions are invited into one of the main conference areas listed below. Please note that the defined areas are intended to be general and we invite authors to interpret them broadly. They are meant to help us find appropriate reviewers and design a program that reflects a diverse range of interests on the topic of Interactive Digital Storytelling.

• Interactive Narrative Design
• Social and Cultural Contexts
• Theory, History, and Foundations
• Tools and Systems
• Virtual Worlds, Performance, Games, and Play
• Applications and Case Studies

Workshops, Art Exhibition, and Doctoral Consortium

ICIDS will also host a series of workshops, demos, an exhibition of creative works, and a doctoral consortium for student researchers. The calls for these will be available separately on the website.

Submission categories

Papers may be either long or short but must present interesting and novel work at all stages of completion. The appropriate length should be determined by the author(s) to best represent the material they choose to foreground. All papers may contain images and/or figures. However, note that any images or figures not produced by the authors will require copyright clearance. 

• Full papers (4000-6000 words, excluding references, to be published in the proceedings).
• Short papers (2000-4000 words, excluding references, to be published in the proceedings).
• Late Breaking Work (2000-3000 words, excluding references, to be published in the proceedings) describing works in progress, working, presentable systems, or brief explanations of a research project. Late Breaking Work will be presented at the conference in the form of a demo or poster session, not a full presentation, and should be selected if the full or short paper formats are unsuitable for representing the proposed research, due to their unfinished nature.. 

Submissions are accepted through Easychair. 

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Author Guidelines

Abstracts and references do not count toward the word limits. Authors must anonymize their papers before submission as the peer-review process is double-blind.

Please note that papers must be written in English, and only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered for review. Publication is conditional on a minimum of one author registering for the conference to present the work to the community. Successful submissions will be included as part of the conference proceedings published by Springer. All submissions must follow the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format, available at: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs.

Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ instructions and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer’s proceedings LaTeX templates are available in Overleaf. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.

The best experience of ICIDS is by attending in person, but this is a fully hybrid conference so remote attendance is possible if none of the authors of a paper can travel to the conference. In this case, publication of the contribution in the proceedings is conditional on registration and remote presentation (either live or as a pre-recorded video, depending on the final arrangements). Remote participants need to be aware that the conference will take place in the COL time zone (GMT +5).