on writing games

user investment in branching narrative

Some time ago I read a reddit post where the author commented that, for them, games with branches suffer from an inherent design problem:

… the knowledge that a game’s story responds to your choices makes you less invested in the current story, because there’s always the knowledge you can go back and do something else.

I have never experienced this, I disengage from the story if the writing is bad.

But with dynamic writing, good story beats, and a good treatment of agency, I don’t feel this detachment from the story at all.

In fact, good interactive narrative work, makes want to replay to see what other stories there are besides my first run.

It’s possible that there are some players who decide to do option spamming.

But those are not the players we have in mind when we write our stories.

What do you think? Is there any truth to the detachment from stories due to the possibility of “rewind”?