Interactive Drama is often considered as the Graal of the new media. It aims at creating a new dramatic art/entertainment form where the user acts as a main character in a story. S/he is able to perform a large range of actions in the story, interact with other characters in order to influence the story. In this talk, we will review the various existing approaches to reach that challenging goal. A prototype developed by the author will be demonstrated.

We will discuss authoring, a specific issue emerging in the field. Very few works in Interactive Drama have been produced so far, because prototypes are technically quite difficult to handle by authors. What is the point of developing sophisticated technology if it cannot be used by the creative authors? Is it just a temporary problem of a lack authoring tools, or shouldn't we design our systems differently, by thinking in authoring terms first? Finally, this specific debate around Interactive Drama might also be relevant in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general. The future of AI might be neither designer-centred nor user-centred but author-centred.