Stories and story-telling are cultural achievements of significant relevance even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. Recently, computer gaming is also deployed for educational purposes and has proved to be an effective approach to mental stimulation and intelligence development. Many conceptual similarities and some procedural correlation exist between story-telling and educational gaming. Therefore these two areas can be clubbed for research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Many facets of story-telling and educational gaming emulate real life processes, which can be represented either as complex story graphs or as interleaved sub-problems.

While the integration of learning and gaming provides a great opportunity, several motivational challenges must also be addressed to ensure successful realization. Non-linear digital stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational games, since each story addresses a certain problem, so that the story recipient can benefit from other users’ experiences. This leads to the development of more realistic stories providing the kernel for non-trivial educational videogames. These stories cover the instructional part of an educational game, while the game adds the motivation and engagement part.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge. There is a great amount of separate research in these two fields and the celebration of this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage potential synergies.

Workshop topics

* Theories in story-telling and games
* Story and game design paradigms for Web-based Learning
* Augmented story-telling and gaming
* Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
* Mobile story-telling and educational gaming
* Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
* Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative architectures)
* Multimedia story and game authoring
* Story-telling and educational gaming applications