[Commlist] cfp: International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling

With this mail we would like to inform you that the Easychair Submission 
system for ICIDS 2025 is now open. If you would like to submit a paper 
you can do that at https://icids2025.ardin.online/cfp-innerpage  or 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icids2025.

The deadline is 8th of June 2025.

This year’s ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital 
Storytelling) will return to Europe. The hosting country is the 
Mediterranean island of Malta, with a rich history featuring most of the 
European powers and reaching back to some of the earliest civilizations, 
with Neolithic remains dating back to 4000 BC. This history is 
characterized by decisive battles which shaped world history and by 
foreign rule due to the country’s strategic position between Africa, 
Europe and the Middle East. This also led to it both being influenced by 
many cultures while at the same time becoming influential in art, music, 
and architecture, way beyond its own shores. Malta’s future-looking 
economy has attracted iGaming and FinTech companies through early 
regulation and supportive legal frameworks, The island also embraced the 
opportunities offered by the recent wave of AI through its National AI 
Strategy, aiming to position Malta as a testbed for AI innovation in 
areas like healthcare, transport, and public services. We are happy to 
be able to host the conference in such a place and we hope that its rich 
tapestry of the past, the present, and the future will enrich how we 
look at IDN during the conference.

Over the last years we have seen an increasing injection of generative 
AI into the development, performance and analysis of IDNs. Just as 
Malta’s unique cultural identity emerged from the convergence of 
multiple influences, our field had from the beginning on adapted AI, 
among other views and technologies. Now we stand at an intersection 
where AI and human creativity meet to form new patterns of narrative 
expression.

Like  Malta’s architectural and artistic heritage, where diverse 
cultural elements combine to create something uniquely beautiful,  AI 
systems are now collaborating with human creators to generate 
ever-shifting narrative possibilities and story worlds. This situation 
reminded us of Janet Murray’s keynote at ICIDS 2018 in Dublin, where she 
discussed her kaleidoscopic view on IDN research. She described IDNs as 
environments that support the analysis of the same event in multiple 
contexts and at the same time foster the imagination of multiple 
variants of the same scenario. This has inspired the main theme of this 
year’s conference: Kaleidoscopic Machines.

The aim of this year’s conference is rather programmatic: Applying 
retelling we look at the past to understand what worked, why or why not; 
we offer new works to describe the current thinking; and we present 
critical and thought-provoking visionary contemplations to look ahead. 
Through discussion of the resulting views, we hope to gain an 
understanding of what we aim to reach out for in the years to come — 
memory machines, creative post-coding environments that are rooted in 
core human stories, non-human generated multisensorial environments, 
narratives driven by brain-computer interfaces, kaleidoscopic machines, 
or even more new types of IDN that can help to understand an 
increasingly complex world better. All this should help us to reflect on 
our current foundations and on how related methodological issues need to 
be further developed. In this sense, we invite the interactive narrative 
global community to think about our field in the realm of AI, its 
influence on creation and creativity, and see how far we intend to go.

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.


If you need more information than provided on the webpage, please feel 
free to contact Maria ((mcreyes /at/ uninorte.edu.co)) or Frank ((nack /at/ uva.nl)).

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