Generating Relaxed, Obvious, and Dilemma Choices with Dunyazad

Abstract

Dunyazad is a system which creates narrative choices à la Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. It attempts to generate choices that achieve specific poetic effects. This paper demonstrates Dunyazad’s ability to manage player expectations by having it generate three distinct choice structures: obvious choices, relaxed choices, and dilemmas. Using answer set programming, Dunyazad’s choice generation system directly encodes a theory of choice poetics, so flaws in its output can inform both the system and the theory itself. Survey data presented here thus not only validate that players’ perceptions match Dunyazad’s intentions, but also have implications for the theory of choice poetics. Statistical analysis of our data indicates that Dunyazad can successfully construct obvious choices, relaxed choices, and dilemmas.

Presenting Believable Choices

“…This study ties into a growing body of work that examines types of situations, choice options, and choice outcomes in interactive narratives and their psychological effects on players (Mawhorter et al 2014). Work in this area has examined the link between choice options, choice outcomes, and a player's feelings of agency (Fendt et al 2012;Cardona-Rivera et al 2014), the link between choice options, player behavior, and story enjoyment (Yu and Riedl 2013;, and a validation of a generative theory of certain pairings of situations and choice options, like dilemmas (Mawhorter, Mateas, and Wardrip-Fruin 2015).…”