telepathy and narrative agency

A few days ago, Tony Howard-Arias (writer of Slay the Princess) wrote an article talking about details of the game.

Some of the things he mentions are what I discussed in the list: the use of variables to reduce combinatorial explosion, that narrative is enough to make a game fun, etc.

But there’s something that caught my attention:

[…] we as game writers don’t have a direct pathway to our players’ thoughts, which put us in a difficult position where we could either ask our players for those thoughts (a big, immersion-breaking no-no in our book) or to find a way to vocalize thoughts that were at least tangential to whatever decisions the player has just made.

While Stephen King gave us the image that writing is a form of telepathy, when it comes to video games, misused telepathy can break the immersion.

The attempt to force the designer’s ideas onto the player is the main criticism that is made to graphic adventures as a genre.

That kind of telepathy, the one that takes away agency, is the one we have to avoid.

I hadn’t realized that The Voices of Slay the Princess were a design element to solve the problem of communicating ideas to the user without taking away agency.

Genius 👏