Theory, History and Foundations -- Interpretation as Play: A Cognitive Psychological Model of Inference and Situation Model Construction -- When has theory ever failed us? -- A Refinement-Based Narrative Model for Escape Games -- Social and Cultural Contexts -- IDNs in Education: Skills for Future Generations -- Centering the Human: Digital Humanism and the Practice of Using Generative AI in the Authoring of Interactive Digital Narratives -- Digital storytelling in women in tech communities -- VR storytelling to prime uncertainty avoidance -- Inclusive Digital Storytelling: Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to re-centre Stories from the Margins -- Decolonizing IDN pedagogy from and with Global South:a a cross-cultural case study -- Fighting Against Hate Speech: a case for harnessing Interactive Digital Counter-narratives -- VR for Diversity. The Seven Lives of a Research Project -- Tools and Systems -- Awash: Prospective Story Sifting Intervention for Emergent Narrative -- Prompt Engineering for Narrative Choice Generation -- The Narralive Unity plug-in: Towards bridging the gap between intuitive branching narrative design and advanced visual novel development -- Interactive Narrative Design -- Discovering IDN Authoring Strategies: Novices Anchor Choice Design through Character Development With Player Feedback -- On the Interactions Between Narrative Puzzles and Navigation Aids in Open World Games -- Lovecraftian Horror in Story-Driven Games: Narrative Design Challenges and Solutions -- Designing Sisters: Creating Audio-Based Narratives to Generate Affective Connections and Material Story Worlds -- Bookwander: From Printed Fiction to Virtual Reality - Four Design Approaches for Enhanced VR Reading Experiences -- Story-without-end: a structure for open-world cinematic VR -- Integrating Narrative Design into the World Economic Forum's Transformation Maps for Enhance Complexity Comprehension -- Full-Motion Video as Parameterized Replay Stories: Emerging Design Patterns from the Timeline Authoring Platform -- From Playing the Story to Gaming the System: Repeat Experiences of a Large Language Model-based Interactive Story-. A Board Game Hootopia: Biodiversity Education through Tangible and Interactive Narrative.

This two-volume set LNCS 14383 and LNCS 14384 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2023, held in Kobe, Japan, during November 11-15, 2023. The 30 full papers presented in this book together with 11 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. Additionally, the proceedings includes 22 Late Breaking Works. The papers focus on topics such as: theory, history and foundations; social and cultural contexts; tools and systems; interactive narrative design; virtual worlds, performance, games and play; applications and case studies; and late breaking works.