Context

At the intersection of interactive fiction and postmodern metasubversion is The Stanley Parable. The game technically simple; the player character can walk around an office building while a narrator describes events. There are multiple paths the player can take, and many of them lead to unique endings. Why the work was acclaimed was for applying postmodernism to a novel medium and going all out in breadth. The game creates the illusion the reader has a choice and that these choices are meaningful in some way, and it manages to entertain all the while.

Another inspiration for this project is another piece of interactive fiction called Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle. It could hardly be called a game, in that it ends after the player’s first move. It is more Schrödinger’s Narrative, in that the story—and the expectations the player makes—is only decided upon executing an action. We have the technology to produce stories that exist conditionally depending on the reader’s actions. I find that at least a bit innovative.

Hence, the project here is cut from the same cloth as the two works mentioned, in how it deconstructs how the expectations of how narratives themselves develop.