A testbed environment for interactive storytellers

Today there is a number of automatic systems for developing interactive digital storytelling applications. Each one uses its own architecture, data structure and user interface which make practically impossible to create a single universal quantitative metric to compare them. While these differences are intrinsic to the artistic nature of narrative applications, developers of underlying technology could be benefited from some "evaluation standards" for these systems' functionality, interoperability and performance. This paper describes a testbed environment that has been designed as an example scenario for testing how different interactive storytelling systems confront a set of "common challenges" of this kind of applications. In order to avoid additional programming efforts an adapter that allows the connection of this environment with other systems has been implemented and released as open source.