"The Spaghetti Strategy" Published in IEEE Computer

Stephen Erin Dinehart IV’s essay “The Spaghetti Strategy” was published in IEEE Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, in 2025.

The piece tackles a fundamental challenge in AI-assisted narrative design: how to manage the combinatorial explosion of emergent story possibilities that generative systems produce — without over-constraining the output or losing coherent narrative shape.

The essay introduces the “spaghetti strategy” as a design philosophy: embracing the messy, tangled nature of emergent narrative as a feature rather than a bug, and giving designers a framework to work productively within it rather than against it.

IEEE Computer is one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed publications in the computing field. Publication there represents recognition of Dinehart’s work at the intersection of narrative design and computational systems — a body of research that spans his academic career and directly informs Wonderfilled’s approach to AI and emerging media.

Full text available to IEEE members and through institutional subscriptions.