Reflection

I had accidentally encountered the very interesting dilemma between storytelling and gameplay as I had the story develop. An audience might expect either story-driven gameplay or puzzle-driven gameplay. While crossing this expectation’s boundaries may be interesting, I had considered how distracting one form of gameplay would be from the other. If my schedule allowed for more experimentation and less of a definitive result, I might have dabbled with more standard interactive fiction elements such as an inventory or puzzles—so long as they do not detract from the narrative.

In addition, I feel as though the project was less so derived from the source works and more so inspired. Sure, the narrator of my narrative quips, but the narrator talks to neither the player character nor the player, as per The Stanley Parable. A more standard interactive fiction environment with a text input rather than a decision tree would allow for more interesting narrative-reader interactions, but of course, that requires more planning than what a week would allow—especially for a project that branches extensively. That is where Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle succeeds. It would seem that unconventional storytelling requires unconventional structure to emphasize its point.