Peter Mawhorter will discuss his current work on a system called 'Dunyazad' that generates interactive narratives, paying special attention to the structure of the choices offered to players. Dunyazad's goal is to leverage knowledge about choice poetics (i.e., how choice structures affect audiences) to deliberately construct choices that create specific effects by dynamically assembling framing, options, and outcomes. Peter will discuss the theory of choice poetics and the design of Dunyazad, and he will give a demo of the system.

Peter Mawhorter is a PhD student studying with Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter is interested in intelligent narrative systems and generative methods. He's previously collaborated with Ben Weber on a Starcraft: Broodwar bot and with Brandon Tearse on a rational reconstruction of Scott Turner's 1993 'Minstrel' case-based story generation system.