StoryTec: A Digital Storytelling Platform for the Authoring and Experiencing of Interactive and Non-Linear Stories

Recently, within the information society and the up-coming, prospering creative industries, a lot of research has been investigated into Storytelling systems and authoring tools for the creation and representation of Storytelling based scenarios in a broad range of application domains, e.g. marketing and advertisement, training and simulation, E-Learning, edutainment, serious games. Prominent examples are the EU funded projects U-CREATE, nm2 and INSCAPE, whose global aim was to allow even non-specialists the easy and efficient creation of interactive stories for various application domains. Based on the achieved RTD results of these projects, this paper introduces StoryTec as Digital Storytelling platform for the authoring and experiencing of interactive, non-linear stories. Apart from a brief description of the StoryTec platform as a whole and the difference to the INSCAPE approach, this paper focuses on two specific modules: The Story Editor and ICML as standardized descriptive format for any interactive stories.