Formulate, Formalize and Run! How Narrative Theories shape and are shaped by Interactive Digital Narrative

What are the links between narrative theories and computing? Narrative works are countless in the digital world: narrative hypertext and hypermedia, interactive fiction, video games, blogs, location-based narrative, etc. They not only form new analytical objects for narrative theories, but also may extend existing narrative theories. One specific type of digital narratives, AI-based Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), plays a special role in this landscape because it makes use of narrative theories to build the algorithms for the dynamic management of narrative. In return, these algorithms are formal computational models of narrative that are of interest for narratological research. The main feature of these models is that they are “runnable models”, adopting the well known modeling & simulation approach in Science.