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Games and Culture

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Examining Poetic DOI: 10.1177/1555412019853372
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Gameplay Devices
in Interactive Life Stories

Evelyn C. Chew1 and Alex Mitchell1

Abstract
A life story’s ability to evoke the emotion experienced by a protagonist is crucial to
its success. Authors of interactive life stories sometimes strategically alter the
interactive feedback loop to help convey this subjective experience. Using Mitchell’s
conception of defamiliarizing poetic gameplay, this study identifies poetic gameplay
devices, which creatively alter the feedback loop for emotional narrative impact. The
article suggests extending the term “poetic gameplay” beyond interactive devices
whose primary goal is critical appreciation of aesthetic form, to techniques directed
at deepening a player’s narrative involvement, via alterations to interactivity
designed to evoke emotions that mirror a protagonist’s experience. Close readings
of 19 interactive life stories identified 13 devices, which fall into two categories:
alterations to manipulation rules (involving local agency) and alterations to goal rules
(involving higher level agency). The findings reveal some of the expressive possibi-
lities of interactivity in digital narrative.

Keywords
interactivity, life stories, poetic gameplay, interactive feedback loop, agency

1
National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Corresponding Author:
Evelyn C. Chew, Department of Communications and New Media, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences,
National University of Singapore, Blk AS6, #03-41, 11 Computing Drive, Singapore 117416, Singapore.
Email: evelyn.chew@u.nus.edu
2 Games and Culture XX(X)

Recent years have seen video game research move past the debate on whether
games can tell stories (Frasca, 2003; Murray, 2005) to focus on how games can tell
stories and how they can be more human and emotive—more of an art form.
Ebert’s (2010) provocation that “video games can never be art” helped to galvanize
the impetus to create video games with emotionally complex characters; games
designed to evoke nuanced reactions of nostalgia, tragedy, guilt, regret, and so on,
rather than the superficial excitement of early shooters and platform games. How-
ever, as Anable (2018) argues, the fact that “plenty of games make plenty of people
cry” (p. x) is not enough to provide games with a degree of cultural legitimacy. As
the medium matures, video games and other interactive media are becoming vehi-
cles not just for entertainment, or even aesthetic contemplation, but also for non-
fiction storytelling.
“Interactive life stories” are stories created for the digital interactive medium,
which profess to be about a human person’s life experience. Some interactive life
stories represent a concrete person’s life, either literally or symbolically; others are
more abstract, representing a particular aspect of the human condition such as
mortality, addiction, or rejection. Formally, what makes an interactive life story
unique is that it is presented through a computer medium in such a way that it
requires significant user interaction to move the story forward. Computer-
mediated interactive life stories are highly diverse among themselves (see Chew,
2017), ranging from multimodal hypertext narratives to interactive videos and video
game narratives, among others. Of late, many life stories have appeared as small
playable games, which closely approximate conventional video games, but differ
from them in privileging the life narrative and subjective experience over the ludic
goal of achieving the winning condition; for instance, The Cat and the Coup (Brin-
son & ValaNejad, 2011), Dys4ia (Anthropy, 2012), Gravitation (Rohrer, 2008), and
That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016).
If, as Smith and Watson (2010) assert, “the materiality of a medium is constitu-
tive of the subjectivity rendered” (p. 168), then the subjective expression of some-
one’s life in an interactive life narrative is necessarily colored by the qualities of the
medium. Life story authors consciously choose the digital interactive medium
because there is something in this medium that other media cannot do, or at least
not in the same way (Herman, 2004; Ryan, 2006). Many interactive life stories do
indeed push the known boundaries of the digital interactive medium as an expressive
and aesthetic literary form, especially by their strategic alterations of the interactive
feedback loop within the story. In the more compelling stories, these alterations
often seem designed to recreate a sense of “what it’s like” to be in the protagonist’s
place at a particular moment.
In the context of discovering the expressive capabilities of the interactive medium
for storytelling, this article therefore argues for taking the interactive feedback loop
seriously as a poetic literary device that conveys emotional information. The present
study mainly focuses on video game narratives, as games are arguably the form of
interactive media where alterations to the interactive feedback loop have the most
Chew and Mitchell 3

pronounced impact. Rather than seeing works as either categorically games or not-
games, however, Ensslin (2014) argues for a “literary-ludic continuum” (p. 44)
along which works are more or less gamelike. The works we examine here can be
considered a form of what Ensslin refers to as literary games, “a particular type of
game that embeds literary elements but has conceptual and interactive emphasis on
the ludic structures of the artifact at hand in addition to the aesthetic effects and
processes it evokes” (p. 41). In poetic gameplay devices in life stories, we argue, the
ludic structures of the interactive life story form an essential component of “the
aesthetic effects and processes” evoked, which are directed toward conveying a
subjective experience. In this article, we are focusing on the relationship between
the poetic literary devices and emotional responses. The notion that the process of
evoking emotions can potentially inculcate empathy for the life protagonist is a
complex and contentious one (Pozo, 2018) and is beyond the scope of this article.
For a detailed discussion of the issues involved, see Chew and Mitchell (2015) and
Chew (2017).

Poetic Gameplay and the Meaning-Making Process

To explore the impact of alterations to the interactive feedback loop, we start with
Mitchell’s (2016) concept of poetic gameplay. Poetic gameplay serves to draw
attention to the form of the game, creating an aesthetic effect through defamiliariza-
tion. Poetic gameplay is the

structuring of the actions the player takes within a game, and the responses the game
provides to those actions, in a way that draws attention to the form of the game, and by
doing so encourages the player to reflect upon and see that structure in a new way. (p. 2)

Mitchell is building on Shklovsky’s (1965) notion of defamiliarization and the use of

literary devices to “make one feel things, to make the stone stony” (p. 12). This is
somewhat different from, for example, Brecht’s (1957) Verfremdung, which uses the
process of making strange to distance the audience from a performance and encour-
age political reflection (Pötzsch, 2017).
What Mitchell is describing here is very much focused on alterations of the
interactive feedback loop which forms the core of gameplay, and the impact this
can have on the player. In this article, we extend this concept, applying it to artgames
that are also life stories. We show how certain defamiliarizing techniques in addition
to those Mitchell earlier identified are indeed applied as literary devices. As literary
devices, however, their role is not only to draw attention to the form of the work
through defamiliarization but also to subsequently draw the player back into the
narrative by foregrounding the emotions provoked as part of the story (i.e., part of
the life protagonist’s experience).
Although there has been extensive previous work exploring emotions and games,
the existing literature does not investigate the ways that various kinds of deliberate
4 Games and Culture XX(X)

manipulation of the interactive feedback loop can be used to elicit emotional

responses. In the present article, our purpose is to initiate a systematic, work-in-
progress framework in which the alterations of the interactive feedback loop may
be categorized according to the associated emotions they evoke. It is envisaged
that this framework will function as a useful tool for interactive storytellers to be
better able to craft narratives that evoke the desired emotion in the player. It is
important to note that we are not claiming that the poetic devices we identify, on
their own, determine the player’s emotional responses. We acknowledge that, as
Sicart (2011) argues, the meaning of a game emerges not just as the result of the
rules, but rather from the player’s engagement with the rules through play, in a
particular context, taking into consideration the player’s own background and
personal experiences.

Related Work
Interactivity, Agency, and Emotion
Research on emotions in video games has a history too broad to cover in detail here;
worth mentioning however are Isbister’s (2016) book-length study How Games
Move Us and various essay collections on the topic, including Perron and Schröter
(2016), Tettegah and Huang (2016), and others. Also of note are Perron’s (2005),
Frome’s (2006, 2007, 2016), and Frome and Smuts’s (2004) work on the different
ways video games can evoke emotion, as well as Grace’s (2013, 2015, 2016) work
on affect in games (see also Shinkle, 2008; Bopp, Mekler, & Opwis, 2016). Some of
these studies focus on the narrative aspect of the story (Ip, 2011; Schneider, Lang,
Shin, & Bradley, 2004) or character complexity (Lee & Mitchell, 2018); others take
a formal approach focusing on the characteristics of the medium (e.g., Callele,
Neufeld, & Schneider, 2006).
The present article aligns with the latter approach, considering the interactive
feedback loop—an essential component of interactive digital media (Murray, 1997;
Ryan, 2004) and, indeed, of all human–computer interaction—as central to the
discussion. We define the interactive feedback loop as “a cyclic process in which
two actors alternately listen, think and speak” (Crawford, 2003, p. 3). That is, user
input into the system is processed and stimulates a response from the system back to
the user, who reacts in turn.
In narrative video games, the interactive feedback loop not only provides ludic,
goal-directed interaction, it also moves the story forward. An interactive story can-
not progress except through input from the player. Arsenault and Perron (2009) have
proposed a model for how the basic feedback loop related to gameplay combines
with other processes such as narrative and meta-narrative hermeneutical meaning-
making. Their model involves a cycle consisting of three interwoven spirals of
gameplay, narrative and hermeneutic meaning-making. Interactivity is seen as con-
tributing to the overall meaning-making process.
Chew and Mitchell 5

In contrast with Hocking’s (2009) concept of ludonarrative dissonance—which

occurs when players engage in actions that are not believably aligned with the player
character’s goals and values—the present research looks for ways in which player
actions are designed to facilitate identification with player character values and
emotions. Arguably, it is not enough for gameplay interactions to merely not inter-
fere with the storyline. Instead, these interactions can and should contribute posi-
tively to enhancing the player’s experience of the story or game by promoting
ludonarrative resonance or harmony, as Toh (2016), Brice (2011), and Pynenburg
(2012) argue. For life stories, this means evoking an emotion in line with the
protagonists’ original experience. Thus, although the alterations to the feedback
loop may initially disconcert, they ultimately prove meaningful when the player is
able to understand the emotion evoked as part of the narrative experience (see also
Mitchell, Sim, & Kway, 2017) and is able to weave it into the overall meaning-
making process (see Chew & and Mitchell, 2016, for further discussion on this).
The meanings the interactive feedback loop produces within a particular inter-
active work are bound by conventions regarding human–computer interaction.
Thwarting these assumptions, or otherwise manipulating player expectations, can
produce surprise, anger, frustration, disgust, and other emotions. Over the years,
increasing awareness of the emotion-provoking capabilities of the interactive feed-
back loop has drawn attention to the artful manipulation of player agency and control
in order to shape meaning in interactive narrative situations.
For instance, Wysocki and Schandler (2013) explore the moral dilemma and
emotional disquiet a game can cause players by presenting difficult ethical choices
(see also Tulloch, 2010). Heckner (2013) discusses how a “passive player” is con-
structed in a game, producing a sense of illusory freedom that conveys an existen-
tially fatalistic mood.
Wilson and Sicart (2010) list some manipulations to conventional game feedback
as characteristics of “abusive design,” such as having players endure 8 hours of
tediously navigating a bus through a desert, only to be awarded 1 point of 99,999.
The five “modalities of abuse” they identify are physical abuse, unfair design
(including “masocore” games with near-impossible levels of difficulty), lying to the
player (by playing with player expectations), aesthetic abuse (generally audiovi-
sual), and social abuse. As their focus is on critical play rather than emotion, how-
ever, the emotions elicited as such are not identified.
Two well-known games that elicit emotion by purposeful alterations to the inter-
active feedback loop are Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Starbreeze Studios, 2013)
and Journey (thatgamecompany, 2012). In Brothers, the player controls two brothers
simultaneously, with each brother’s movements controlled by one of the two analo-
gue sticks on a console game controller. As the game progresses, the player becomes
accustomed to this unusual control scheme. Later in the game, the player kinesthe-
tically feels the older brother’s absence after his death, as the player can no longer
use the left set of controls. However, when the younger brother later faces an
insuperable obstacle, using the controls associated with the older brother
6 Games and Culture XX(X)

unexpectedly works, hinting that the older brother’s spirit continues to watch over
the younger brother (May, Bizzocchi, Antle, & Choo, 2014; Sim & Mitchell, 2017).
Through interactive feedback, the player comes to appreciate the siblings’ bond as
something that transcends death. In Journey, feedback from player character move-
ments provide “‘direct’ corporeal access to know how the character feels (in the
sense of bodily awareness) as an embodied agent in the virtual world” (Schröter,
2016, p. 209), including experiences of empowerment and disempowerment.
Harrer (2013) also studies the experience of emotional loss in three video games
and how this experience is conveyed partially through gameplay. Yet this—and
other studies dealing with particular emotions—focus on specific instances rather
than principles underlying interactive gameplay that map specific techniques on to
particular emotional responses. While individual case studies provide useful insights
into the role of the feedback loop in eliciting emotions within a narrative, further
development requires theorizing on a wider scale.
In this line, Rusch (2009) puts forward fictional alignment, procedurality, and
experiential metaphor as three devices useful for the “purposeful design of games”
(p. 1). Although helpful for analysis and design, these devices are pitched at a higher
level of abstraction than the present study, which seeks to link specific techniques to
effects.
In short, most of the current research at present dealing with emotions and video
games do not descend to the level of the relationship between strategic, deliberately
designed alterations to the feedback loop and the emotions that are provoked, in a
systematic way across games.

Poetic Gameplay and Agency

Having introduced poetic gameplay as part of the player’s meaning-making process
in interactive life stories, and in light of the related work, we now consider how the
present study fits into existing work on poetic gameplay and its relationship with
agency.
As mentioned above, this study extends Mitchell’s exploration of “poetic
gameplay.” Mitchell (2016) identifies three techniques for defamiliarization, elicited
from close readings of artgames. In Mitchell, Sim, and Kway (2017), these are
refined into five techniques for poetic gameplay, namely, disrupting the player’s
expectations for control, disrupting the chronological flow of game time, blurring
the boundaries between different forms, breaking the fourth wall, and the presence of
an “unnatural narrator” (p. 4). Focusing entirely on alterations to the interactive
feedback loop, the present study is concerned with the first of Mitchell’s poetic
gameplay techniques, namely disrupting player expectations of control.
When meaningfully used in interactive digital works, such alterations to expected
control and feedback not only defamiliarize, by putting the player cognitively out-
side the anticipated schema (Douglas & Hargadon, 2001); as previously mentioned,
they subsequently also draw the player back into the narrative, with a renewed
Chew and Mitchell 7

understanding of the game narrative. As Mitchell et al. (2017) point out, defamiliar-
izing techniques only succeed as poetic gameplay when they are made “unfamiliar in
a meaningful way” (p. 15). In this study, we consider cases in which interactivity
clearly communicates something through an alteration to the standard feedback loop
mechanic, for the purpose of conveying or eliciting a particular emotion.
Stretching the concept of poetic gameplay further, we propose here that poetic
gameplay does not arise only from disrupting or removing player control: Occasion-
ally, other surprising and unpredictable feedback responses to player input may also
produce surprise and/or result in defamiliarization. This article therefore expands the
concept of poetic gameplay beyond previous delineations of the five techniques
listed. It expounds on the first of the five and extends it beyond direct control, to
include choices and outcomes.
Before proceeding further, however, it is worth considering in greater detail what is
meant by agency and its relationship with alterations to the feedback loop character-
istic of poetic gameplay. To examine the various ways agency can be limited (or
enhanced), we have drawn from Wardrip-Fruin, Mateas, Dow, and Sali’s (2009)
definition of agency, with modifications that we discuss further on. According to
them, agency is “a phenomenon, involving both the game and the player . . . that
occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa)
as supported by an underlying computational model” (p. 1). From the player’s point of
view, this can be paraphrased as “the expectation and the ability to act by carrying out
the desired action.” These expectations for acting, according to Mawhorter, Mateas,
Wardrip-Fruin, and Jhala (2014), are set up by framing (through narrative, audiovi-
sual, and other input) and options presented. Moreover, for the player to have a sense
of perceived agency, outcomes must be “to some degree predictable” (“Dimensions of
player experience”).
Framing and options thus give rise to “choice idioms” within a framework of
“choice poetics” (Mawhorter, Mateas, Wardrip-Fruin, & Jhala, 2014). Many of these
choice idioms are a result of limitations on player agency, but they are not the whole
story as far as poetic gameplay is concerned. As we show later on, other kinds of
limitation on or unexpected system responses to player action, such as limitations on
duration and unexpected feedback, can also provoke emotional responses in players.
To wrap up the discussion on poetic gameplay and agency, in their earlier work,
Chew and Mitchell (2016) considered the role of the interactive feedback loop in
evoking emotion to (re)create the lived experience of a character in a nonfictional
video game narrative. Their close readings of indie games Gravitation and Akrasia
(Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab, 2008) showed how these games used coordinated
audiovisual and kinesthetic feedback in order to convey a character’s inner emo-
tional and cognitive state (Chew & Mitchell, 2016). Abrupt removals of player
agency and impossible-to-win scenarios in Numinous Games’s That Dragon, Can-
cer were also identified as being used to prompt feelings of helplessness, disappoint-
ment, and futility in the player, which echo the original protagonists’ emotions
(Chew & Mitchell, 2019).
8 Games and Culture XX(X)

Table 1. List of Life Stories Analyzed.

Interactive Life Story Format

89 Steps Interactive within-browser mini-story

Akrasia Video game
Dear Mother Video game
Depression Quest Hypermedia
Dys4ia Video game
Explain Menstrual Periods to Me Like IAMA [Cis] Man Twine hypertext
Gravitation Video game
How to Overcome Performance Anxiety with Drugs and Twine hypermedia
Alcohol
Hush Video game
Memoir En Code: Reissue Video game
Migrant Trail Video game
My Computer Video game
Spent Interactive text-based narrative
That Dragon, Cancer Video game
the.domestic Video game
The Cat and The Coup Video game
The Competition Video game
The Writer Will Do Something Interactive narrative
Why Must I Feel So Ill Video game

However, these individual comparative close readings, while elucidating some

general principles, stop short of proposing a more comprehensive framework that
would allow different techniques to be mapped against the emotions produced. The
present article does not attempt to present a full-fledged framework, only to draw
common principles from close readings of various games that initiate the outlines of
such a framework.
Based on the foregoing discussion, the research questions we seek to answer in this
article may be stated as: “What are some ways the interactive feedback loop is altered
in poetic gameplay in order to evoke an emotion? What sorts of specific emotional
responses are generated, and how can these techniques and devices be categorized?”

Method
Nineteen interactive life stories of various formats were selected from a larger pool
of 194 interactive works on or about people’s lives (see Table 1 for a list of the works
analyzed). Interactive life story narratives were chosen because they are more likely
to explicitly seek to convey a range of subtle emotions compared to conventional
video games, given that the desire is often to replicate for the player the protagonist’s
own life experience (Chew & Mitchell, 2016). Nevertheless, many interactive life
stories (particularly biographies and interactive documentaries) take a factual rather
Chew and Mitchell 9

than an affective tone, and few of them succeed at (or even attempt to) convey the
life protagonist’s emotions. Works that did not convey a life protagonist’s emotions
were excluded from the study. Other life stories that rely solely on audiovisual cues
to evoke emotion were likewise excluded. The criterion for selection was, therefore,
whether the standard interactive feedback loop was in some way altered to provoke
emotion directed at causing an aesthetic response (such as reflecting the emotional
tenor of the narrative), resulting in poetic gameplay.1
Close readings were used, inspired by Bizzocchi and Tanenbaum’s (2011) appli-
cation of literary close reading methods to video games. Predefined analytical lenses
based on the research question were applied to focus the close readings (J. G.
Tanenbaum, 2015; J. G. Tanenbaum & Bizzocchi, 2009). Repeated playthroughs
focused on, firstly, understanding which emotions were elicited in the life story;
secondly, which of these emotions were elicited by variations to the interactive
feedback loop; and, thirdly, how those emotions were elicited. In close readings,
the researcher takes on a dual role of “imagined naive player” and informed scholar,
which entails oscillating between interacting with the work as if for the first time and
self-reflexively observing the whole process from the outside through a scholarly
critical lens (J. G. Tanenbaum & Bizzocchi, 2009). It is this dialectical back-and-
forth that allows a researcher “to excavate previously hidden qualities of [the] media
artifact” (Bizzocchi & Tanenbaum, 2011, “Introduction”.; J. G. Tanenbaum & Biz-
zocchi, 2009). Our close readings were also informed by Bardzell’s (2011) method
of interaction criticism, which promotes repeated interaction with an artifact as a
way for the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) critic to gain a “holistic, non-
reductive understanding” (p. 606) of the artifact (see also Bardzell, 2008).2
Following the initial close readings, elements of a grounded theory approach (Char-
maz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) were used at the later stage of theorizing from the
immediate findings. In grounded theory, data collection and analysis are done concur-
rently through constant comparisons, in order to build theory. This process demands a
constant back-and-forth movement between data and analysis (Willig, 2013). Through
repeated interactions with each work, specific poetic gameplay devices and the emotions
they elicited were identified. A process of constant comparison among the poetic game-
play devices led to tentative categories. Finally, the devices were sorted into a taxonomy.
Frasca’s (2003) distinction between manipulation rules and goal rules was found to be
helpful in differentiating the levels on which alterations to the feedback loop take place.
Manipulation rules refer to “what the player can or cannot do within the
simulation,” that is, direct and instant control of the player character or other system
input. Poetic gameplay techniques on this level tend to involve restrictions to player
agency on a local level (Mateas & Stern, 2005), with respect to the immediate
system response to input rather than on the level of task or goal achievement. By
contrast, goal rules refer to the larger picture, indicating “what the player must do in
order to win” (Frasca, 2003, p. 232). Poetic gameplay that involves alterations to
goal rules generally thwart player expectations of what it means to win or to lose, in
order to highlight a narrative or meta-game point.
10 Games and Culture XX(X)

Figure 1. Summary of poetic gameplay devices relating to alterations to manipulation rules

and goal rules.

Results
From the close readings, a total of 13 poetic gameplay devices were identified
(Figure 1): 9 on the level of manipulation rules and 4 in the category of goal rules.
The devices in the “manipulation rules” category were further sorted according to
whether they involved limitations to agency along the dimensions of duration,
choice, or output.

Manipulating the Manipulation Rules to Alter Local Agency

Poetic gameplay devices involving manipulation rules affect local agency.3 These
devices fall into three broad categories (Figure 1), within which are subsets of
limitations to agency. Different emotional effects occur when a time limit for acting
is known, compared to when it is unknown: Choice limitations include: Merely
apparent choices (“false choice”) which result in only one “true answer”; a forced
choice among undesirable options; a lack of any choice at all (“unchoice”); or even
the ability to move the player character, but in a way that the player does not desire
(“irrelevant agency”). Likewise, variations to expected system response might be
movement-related, ineffectual, or otherwise surprising or disconcerting.
Table 2 presents the different devices along with some examples of where they
appear and the emotions they were found to elicit. Although the differences between
each poetic gameplay device are subtle, they can be distinguished and potentially
used to different effects. Each device is further discussed below.
Chew and Mitchell 11

Table 2. Poetic Gameplay Devices (Alterations to Manipulation Rules Affecting Local

Agency).

Limitation on Poetic Gameplay

Player’s Agency Device Example Effect

Duration Known time limit Gravitation Tension, nervousness,

(limited) Hush anxiety
Unknown time The Writer Will Do Shock/surprise,
limit Something disconcertment,
powerlessness

Choice False choice My Computer Powerlessness, constraint

(limited) How to Overcome
Performance
Anxiety with Drugs
and Alcohol
Depression Quest
Explain Menstrual
Periods to Me Like
IAMA [Cis] Man
All undesirable Spent Constraint
options Depression Quest
Unchoice Dys4ia Constraint, powerlessness
Irrelevant agency That Dragon, Cancer Constraint, boredom,
Dys4ia impatience, annoyance

System Speed/degree of 89 Steps Enthusiasm, energy, joy/

response to response the.domestic irritability, aggression
user input Dys4ia versus sadness,
Gravitation sluggishness, fatigue
Akrasia
Ineffectual agency That Dragon, Cancer Frustration, helplessness,
Dys4ia futility
Surprising or Dys4ia (health Confusion, difficulty,
disconcerting insurance) increased cognitive effort,
outcome ironic exasperation, injustice
Akrasia (reversed
controls)
Why Must I Feel So Ill

Duration: Known time limits. Known time limits for acting are a staple of games and
can be considered the unmarked default case. (It is even arguable if they can be
considered poetic devices.) Foreseeable, time-limited restrictions on agency occur
when the player is made aware of a time window for acting through a countdown
timer (Gravitation) or through the game rules (in Hush, Antonisse & and Johnson,
12 Games and Culture XX(X)

2007, the player must press a key as the relevant letter appears—neither too soon nor
too late).
The emotions evoked by known time limits are those conventionally linked to
video games—tension and nervous anxiety as the player attempts to succeed at the
task before the window closes. Arguably, what constitutes known time limits as
poetic gameplay, however, is the way the games listed (Hush and Gravitation) make
use of the time limit to draw player attention to a larger message. Known time limits
become a poetic gameplay device when they seek to provoke particular emotions at
the service of the narrative; for instance, causing the player to experience the tension
felt by a young nursing mother in a war-torn zone, in the case of Hush.

Duration: Unknown time limits. Unlike known time limits, unknown time limits typi-
cally catch the player unawares. This abrupt and unexpected removal of player
control creates a sense of dismay, shock, and helplessness. As a poetic gameplay
device, it is used to convey to the player the character’s surprised dismay at finding
himself or herself powerless in a particular situation.
For example, in The Writer Will Do Something (Burns, 2017), an interactive
narrative that traces the professional life of a video game scriptwriter, the writer
feels scapegoated for the imminent failure of a project. Thoughts flood his mind
about how he should respond; these appear in long wordy paragraphs, but before the
player can decide on an option, the words disappear and are replaced by the sentence
“‘I vote cold open,’ Shawn answers, before you can speak.”
The player, expecting to make a decision, has the choice suddenly taken out of his
hands, mirroring the protagonist’s experience of being rendered powerless when his
colleague shortcuts his thought process with a final decision.4
The second set of limitations on local agency are limitations on choice. They may
involve: False choices (in which options are only apparent since there is eventually
only one option that “works”); choices involving only undesirable options; agency
without choice; or irrelevant agency. The distinctions between the subcategories are
subtle, but significant, and reveal different aspects of how agency may be restricted.

Choice: False choice. In the first case, options are presented, but no matter what option
is chosen, there is only one real option, in the final analysis. Mawhorter et al. name
this false choice in their list of choice idioms. This device often appears in Twine
games and branching narratives.
For instance, in the autobiographical My Computer (Gibson, 2017), the author’s
computer desktop is represented. If players click on the “Game” icon, the represen-
tation of a game appears, along with the options: “Play” and “Quit.” Clicking on
“Quit,” however, hilariously causes a new word to appear in response: “Nope.” The
player, having chosen to enter the “Game,” is now unable to leave it and is left with
no choice but to click on “Play.” This encapsulates the author’s experience of being
unable to say “no” to the lure of a computer game once it is opened: The experience
Chew and Mitchell 13

of lack of agency in being able to freely choose to quit the game is translated into a
refusal to allow the player to choose a different option.
Similarly, in How to Overcome Performance Anxiety with Drugs and Alcohol
(Turpin, 2017), the author faces peer pressure from his friends persuading him to
down a tequila instead of a beer. If the player chooses “beer,” the scene keeps being
replayed until the player chooses tequila. Other examples appear in Depression
Quest (Quinn, Lindsey, & Shankler, 2013) and in the Twine game Explain Men-
strual Periods to Me Like IAMA [Cis] Man (Smyth, 2013; see Chew, 2017, for
further discussion on this device).

Choice: All undesirable options. In the second case, real options are presented, leading
to different outcomes, but none of the options present a desirable outcome for the
player character. The result is a feeling of frustration and constraint which differs
slightly from the first case. In false choice, alternative options appear to be available
but turn out not to be. The outcome is undifferentiated (and typically negative), to
promote the idea that “no matter what you do, the result is the same”; it creates a
sense of fatalism. In the second case, the sense of constraint and pressure appears as
a result of having to choose between two undesirable options; pressure on the player
arises more from the difficult choice between the proverbial “devil and the deep blue
sea.” An emotional and cognitive burden is placed on the player who is in a
dilemma, knowing that either outcome is not likely to be positive. This produces
a form of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), where conflicting elements of
knowledge cause emotional discomfort, which in turn encourages the person experi-
encing the dissonance to seek ways to resolve this discomfort. This is used in
Depression Quest and Spent (McKinney, 2011), to portray situations in which the
character faces a choice that she does not want to make, because none of the options
or likely outcomes that present themselves are optimal.
Spent, for instance, presents players with dilemmas faced by low-wage Amer-
icans: should you spend US$10 of your meager income on a gift for a birthday party
for your child’s friend, send your child to the party with no gift, or refuse to let your
child attend the party? The first option strains financial resources, the second causes
shame, and the third risks deteriorating the relationship with the child. In Depression
Quest, too, sometimes the only options available hint at an unfavorable outcome (see
Chew, 2017).

Choice: Unchoice. In the third case, which Mawhorter et al. call unchoice, no alter-
natives are presented. The player’s only option to proceed with the game is to carry
out the action presented. K. Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum (2010) argue that agency,
even without choice, can best be understood as a player’s act of committing to
meaning. Agency without choice occurs often in games; however, it only enters the
ambit of poetic gameplay when used to create a sense of constraint.
In Dys4ia, the player inhabits the role of a gender-dysphoric person. Players must
move the character along a straight line toward “home,” bearing with nonplayer
14 Games and Culture XX(X)

characters who address the player character as “Sir.” The life protagonist’s unease
with the situation is conveyed by the feeble correction “Ma’am” that emerges in
response to each “Sir,’” while the player, much like the protagonist, has no choice
but to continue along the same path, as there is no other.5
We earlier described agency as the “expectation and the ability to act by carrying
out the desired action.” In the above scenarios, the expectation and the ability to act
are present, but the only course of action presented is not desirable. By thwarting this
aspect of agency, the player feels forced and not entirely free. Unwilling cooperation
is demanded of the player, who wants the game to progress but does not relish the
only option presented. The setup is calculated to produce internal tension and dis-
sonance as an aesthetic response that also serves a narrative purpose.
In order to evoke a sense of psychological constraint, this device hinges heavily
on psychological and narrative framing (see also Mawhorter et al., 2014). Without
adequate framing, a sense of constraint may not result. Thus, unchoice only becomes
a poetic gameplay technique when it is meaningfully framed with the purpose of
provoking a specific emotion or emotions.

Choice: Irrelevant agency. The fourth “choice” limitation is that of “irrelevant” agency.
As with unchoice, the player has only one option for acting, but what differentiates
irrelevant agency from unchoice is a curious mix of freedom to act and the unavail-
ability of the action desired. Thus, the system allows the player to act, but the only
action available is not in line with the action the player desires to take, exasperating
the player.
Whereas unchoice highlights control by the game system limiting the player’s
ability to choose otherwise, irrelevant agency is more likely to cause frustration by
allowing the player to act freely (thus respecting the freedom to act), but in a
different direction from the one the player wants to take (thus allowing the player
some agency, but negating the ability to influence the outcome).6 Actions thus taken
become meaningless on the immediate level and only make sense in the context of
the larger narrative or meaning-making process.
For instance, in the waiting room scenes in Dys4ia and That Dragon, Cancer, the
player must wait. The player characters can be made to walk in any direction, but
this action does not help them move toward achieving the goal. There is the expec-
tation of being able to act, as well as (to some extent) the ability to act, and even in
the way desired, but in such a way that the action has no bearing on the outcome.
Options for acting are available but restricted, such that the actions available are
simply irrelevant to achieving the goal. This is likely to produce frustration, bore-
dom, and a sense of impotent impatience, as the player is able to carry out actions in
the game world, but not in a way that would contribute to the desired outcome.
The third and final category of poetic gameplay devices relating to local agency
and manipulation rules involve variations on system response, which come in three
subcategories: Variations in the speed or degree of response to player input, inef-
fectual agency, and a surprising or disconcerting outcome.
Chew and Mitchell 15

System response to user input: Speed/degree of response. Changes to player character

response in terms of speed or degree of responsiveness are common in video games
(such as receiving a speed boost when one gains bonus points). However, when
harnessed as poetic gameplay devices, they are used within a context that gives
narrative meaning to the enhanced or dampened system response by helping convey
a character’s subjective experience.
Slowness or decelerating speed (increasingly retarded response) is often used to
express fatigue, as in Dys4ia, where the character’s tiredness is shown by the player
character covering increasingly less ground with each press of the key. Similarly, in
“89 Steps” (UnionDocs, 2014), players have to click on the “Go” button 89 times.
The physical action of pulsing the button, along with the frequent halts in the
narrative as the player is made to wait for “Marta” to catch her breath before hitting
the “Go” button again, mimics the experience of climbing the stairs with someone
who is slower. The repetitive tedium of pushing the button makes the action a mirror
for the represented activity of climbing steps, which is tedious and requires patience
for both the protagonist in the narrative and for the player.
Conversely, enhanced movement response from a player character usually
denotes energetic dynamism, as in conventional video games when a character is
given extra strength. In Gravitation, when the player character is inspired and happy,
his jumps reach several times beyond physically realistic limits, simulating a feeling
of mild euphoria which is reflected to the player. In both Gravitation and Akrasia, a
game about drug addiction, player characters’ movements mirror their emotional
and cognitive states (see Chew & Mitchell, 2016).
In the.domestic (Houlden, 2012), too, changes to player character movement
reflect the player character’s emotional state. The player character moves more and
more rapidly and agitatedly as stress levels at “work” build up. The rapid movement
here reflects anger, tense energy, and irritability. Eventually, the player character’s
movement goes out of control—every press of the key, no matter how short or
gentle, sends the player character reeling off and after a particularly strong clash
with the nonplayer character who represents the spouse, this character dies and the
player character is taken off to jail.

System response to user input: Ineffectual agency. Ineffectual agency appears when the
player sends a command to the system, but the system appears to reject the input, and
this is reflected as part of the system feedback to the player. The action is executed
by the player, but the system does not acknowledge this input (or sometimes it
acknowledges the action but denies the player any progress toward the goal). As a
result, the player experiences failure and frustration from the ineffectual action (Juul,
2013), and this is used to mirror life experiences of disappointment and of failure.
For instance, in Dys4ia, when the player character attempts to put on a dress,
pressing the “Down” key causes the garment to bounce (mimicking an attempt to put
on the dress), but no progress is actually made toward the goal. The player’s wasted
efforts seem designed to reflect the life protagonist’s sense of futile endeavor. In
16 Games and Culture XX(X)

That Dragon, Cancer, the protagonist, Ryan, is determined to sink into a metapho-
rical sea of despair. The player attempts to push him upward out of the water, but
repeatedly pressing the button never gets him any nearer the surface.
The effective use of ineffectual agency relies on clear framing in terms of what
action is expected and then the explicit denial of the accomplishment of the action
leading to the desired outcome. The main emotions provoked by ineffectual agency
are usually frustration and helplessness.

System response to user input: Surprising/disconcerting outcomes. The third and final
subcategory of variations to system response includes surprising or disconcerting
outcomes. Three devices were identified from the close readings: disparity
between expectation and outcome, reversal of navigational controls, and unpre-
dictable mappings. The primary emotion elicited is likely to be surprise, along with
a secondary emotion of frustration or confusion, depending on the narrative
framing.
In Dys4ia, the protagonist pays her medical bill using health insurance. After
pushing the card across the table, the player’s expectation is to gain a discount on the
$100 bill. However, as the health insurance card reaches the cashier, the bill is
reduced by just one dollar—from $100 to $99. The disconnect between the expected
outcome and the actual outcome produces disappointment and ironic exasperation in
the player, likely reflecting the protagonist’s experience.
In Akrasia, a disconcerting outcome related to player character movement occurs
when the character runs into a “demon” (possibly symbolizing cravings or fears).
Postcollision, player controls are suddenly reversed—pressing the left arrow takes
the character to the right and pressing the “up” arrow moves the character down. The
player’s navigational commands produce a system response that is the inverse of
what was expected, causing bewildered confusion in the player which mimics the
confusion felt by the character (see Chew & Mitchell, 2016).
In Why Must I Feel So Ill (Leigh, 2016), the keyboard controls mapping specific
actions to outcomes are constantly changing, so that the player feels the confusion
and disorientation of someone feeling sick. In this case, the unpredictability of the
system response to the same player input creates a sense of disorientation, which
supports the visual text in conveying a sick person’s subjective sense of being
disconnected from ordinary, predictable daily realities.
The above discussion relates to poetic gameplay devices that alter local agency;
they work on the level of manipulation rules, to elicit emotion. The next section
discusses gameplay poetic strategies that work on the larger level of the game, that
is, strategies relevant to goal rules. Most goal rule poetic gameplay devices toy with
conventional player expectations of global agency, in that they encourage the player
to question the meanings of winning and losing outcomes on a larger scale. Never-
theless, not all goal rule manipulations actually affect global agency, in the sense of
changing game outcomes.
Chew and Mitchell 17

Table 3. Poetic Gameplay Devices (Alterations to Goal Rules).

Poetic Gameplay Device Example Emotions Evoked

Winning is difficult Migrant Trail Tension

The Competition

Winning is impossible Dear Mother Dismay, frustration, injustice,

(insuperable obstacles to Memoir En Code: Reissue helplessness, exasperation
attaining the goal) the.domestic (can be humorous
That Dragon, Cancer (Joel the depending on framing)
Baby Knight)

Winning is losing (undesirable
outcome)
The Cat and the Coup Dismay, disappointment,
Dys4ia (shaving cut lip) injustice, unpleasant
That Dragon, Cancer (go-kart surprise
race)
Gravitation

Losing is winning (unexpected That Dragon, Cancer Surprise, confusion

positive outcome from (“drowning”) (unintended)
expected failure)

Rewriting the Meaning of Winning by Altering Expected Goal Rules

Apart from the alterations to manipulation rules, which affect local agency by
altering what the player can or cannot do, other poetic gameplay techniques elicit
emotions by changing the rules on a larger level. At the level of goal rules, it is not
the immediate choices or feedback that causes an emotional reaction in the player,
but changes to what winning and losing mean. Although local agency is unhindered,
accomplishing the task set by the game’s goal rules proves difficult, if not impos-
sible; or, alternatively, achieving the game’s goals unveils unexpected negative
implications, recasting the apparent win as a loss.
The four poetic gameplay devices identified on the level of goal rules, as shown
in Table 3, are discussed below.

Winning is difficult. “Winning is difficult” is the conventional challenge of many video

games. Like the “known time limit” discussed earlier, it is the default case in games
generally; indeed, balancing difficulty against player skill is central to video game
design. When used as a poetic gameplay device, however, the difficulty of play is
framed to mirror the challenges of a character’s situation. Thus, in the docugame
Migrant Trail (Williams & Gigantic Mechanic, 2014), multiple obstacles represent
the dangers illegal immigrants face while attempting to cross into the United States.
Similarly, The Competition (Smith, 2017), an autobiographical game about a twin’s
compulsion to eat exactly the same amounts of food as her sister without being
18 Games and Culture XX(X)

caught at it, mirrors the difficulties of life with a compulsive disorder. A key
observation is that whereas in conventional video games, the difficulty level needs
to be carefully calibrated and adjusted, so that the player is not overwhelmed by
difficulty (Hunicke, 2005), here the gameplay seems to be designed just a notch
above comfort level, so as to elicit a certain amount of tension that almost borders on
frustration and giving up, and thereby giving the player a sense of the overwhelming
odds faced by the protagonist. This feeling is backed up by a storyline that works
together with the poetic gameplay device to heighten the player’s tension.

Winning is impossible. Some games make it completely impossible to succeed.

“Winning is impossible” typically represents a subjective experience of futility and
impotence in the face of a situation. In Dear Mother (failnaut, 2013), the author
expresses frustration and hopelessness in the struggle to “avoid sin” as his mother
instructs him. However, “enemy” figures fall so quickly that the player cannot avoid
them. A humorous version of the same mechanic occurs in Memoir En Code:
Reissue (Camillieri, 2016), where each time the protagonist raises his umbrella, the
rain stops, whereas putting down the umbrella causes it to rain again. This
conveys the storyteller’s impression that it is impossible to outdo the weather
in the Netherlands. Another example is the.domestic, which is a no-win situa-
tion. Despite player efforts, “you” always end up in prison, either for domestic
abuse caused by work-related stress or for debt from not working hard enough.
Likewise, in the game-within-the-game “Joel the Baby Knight” in That Dragon,
Cancer, neither Joel nor Tim can ever beat the dragon representing cancer (see
Chew, 2017, for further analysis).

Winning is losing. “Winning is losing” is the interactive incarnation of the dramatic

plot twist: The player is led to think she has won, but a negative outcome ensues
instead. In The Cat and the Coup, after successfully completing various “levels,” it is
revealed that the player, by taking the role of Mossadegh’s cat, has been in cahoots
with Mossadegh’s enemies all along. In Dys4ia, successfully shaving off a mous-
tache results in a cut, bleeding lip, while in That Dragon, Cancer, a go-kart race
simulation ends with a score board listing cancer medicines instead of high scores
(see Chew & Mitchell, 2019). In Gravitation, the player thinks that to win is to get a
high score but then, in a devastating moment, he discovers that in the process of
chasing a high score, he has lost his child.

Losing is winning. The final category, “losing is winning,” is something of an anomaly.

In the previously discussed “Drowning” scene in That Dragon, Cancer, the player
must help the player character out of the water, but pushing him upward fails to
succeed (ineffectual agency); the player later discovers that the character must be
pushed down into the water, symbolically letting the protagonist wallow or “drown”
in his grief, in order for the game to proceed. This surprising discovery is an instance
of “losing is winning,” where an action expected to cause failure instead leads to
Chew and Mitchell 19

Table 4. Summary of Life Stories Analyzed and Poetic Gameplay Devices Identified in Each
Work.

Interactive Life Story Devices Identified

89 Steps Speed/degree of system response to user input

Akrasia Speed/degree of system response to user input,
surprising or disconcerting outcome
Dear Mother Winning is impossible
Depression Quest False choice, all undesirable options
Dys4ia Unchoice, irrelevant agency, speed/degree of system
response to user input, ineffectual agency, surprising
or disconcerting outcome, winning is losing
Explain Menstrual Periods to Me Like False choice
IAMA [Cis] Man
Gravitation Known duration limitation, speed/degree of system
response to user input, winning is losing
How to Overcome Performance False choice
Anxiety with Drugs and Alcohol
Hush Known duration limitation
Memoir En Code: Reissue Winning is impossible
Migrant Trail Winning is difficult
My Computer False choice
Spent All undesirable options
That Dragon, Cancer Irrelevant agency, ineffectual agency, winning is
impossible, winning is losing, losing is winning
the.domestic Speed/degree of system response to user input, winning
is impossible
The Cat and The Coup Winning is losing
The Competition Winning is difficult
The Writer Will Do Something Unknown duration limitation
Why Must I Feel So Ill Surprising or disconcerting outcome

success. The discovery is an “Aha!” moment for the player, a mini-triumph that sits
at odds with the character’s depressed emotional state. This causes an emotional
disjuncture, a moment of “wrong” defamiliarization for the player (see Mitchell
et al., 2017). Here, the poetic gameplay device fails to evoke an emotion that reflects
the character’s experience. Nevertheless, this remains an interesting poetic device,
and its not having been successfully used so far does not preclude it from potentially
being used effectively in future.
We have considered poetic gameplay techniques on the level of local agency—
where manipulation rules are altered, affecting what the player can and cannot do
(and how she can or cannot do it)—and on the level of goal rules, where traditional
notions of winning and losing conditions are employed—and sometimes over-
turned—in service of the narrative. At a still broader level, sometimes the rules
of the entire game are revealed to be deceptive: The winning condition either does
20 Games and Culture XX(X)

not exist or is determined by other rules. For instance, in Akrasia, following the
apparent goal rules by eating the energy-boosting rods leads to the rapid demise of
the player character. Through subsequent replays, the player teases out the game
logic and discovers the real goal rule, which is the opposite of the apparent
goal rule.
In Gravitation, apparent goal rules are in tension with each other: gaining points
versus keeping a child happy by playing ball. Playing to maximize points results in a
“winning is losing” scenario in which the player character’s child suddenly disap-
pears. However, in the game as a whole, Gravitation combines “winning is
impossible” with “winning is losing”: Game outcomes vary between losing the child
and not losing the child, but not losing the child does not constitute an actual winning
situation. Ultimately there is no winning scenario, as the screen fades to black when
the time limit is up and returns to the title screen.
Both Akrasia and Gravitation apply alterations to the interactive feedback loop in
intricate ways. More than one poetic gameplay device is used: Manipulation rules
and goal rules are crafted to support a deeper narrative point that is revealed to the
player as she teases out the game’s procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007) through
gameplay (for further discussion on these games, see Chew & and Mitchell, 2016;
Chew, 2017). Poetic gameplay devices such as alterations to manipulation rules and
goal rules, then, are not necessarily used in isolation but can work together to support
the conveying of emotional experience.

Conclusion
We began by suggesting that poetic gameplay devices, which include strategic
alterations to the interactive feedback loop, may be used not only to promote critical
appreciation of the art form through defamiliarization (Mitchell, 2016) but also to
draw the player back into the narrative. In life stories, this occurs when the alteration
to the feedback loop contributes meaningfully to the narrative, by provoking an
emotion in the player akin to the protagonist’s experience related in the life story.
The 19 stories reviewed (see Table 4) show that the techniques used to evoke
emotion can be categorized along the lines of alterations to local agency and altera-
tions to higher level goal rules; moreover, these devices can work in tandem, sup-
porting one another in an attempt to convey the life experience more deeply.
It is anticipated that future work will greatly expand the range of gameplay poetic
techniques. Most of the poetic gameplay devices discovered so far express negative
emotions, perhaps because of the subject matter of the life stories; future research
could investigate other feedback loop alterations that support positive emotions. It is
also worth exploring the parallels between the tendency for interactive life stories to
deal with issues of trauma, illness, and misery, and similar trends in the wider field
of auto/biographical writing (see, e.g., Gilmore, 2001). Further work in this line
could contribute to broader discussions of games’ cultural legitimacy (Anable,
2018). A methodological limitation is that close readings are subjective, which may
Chew and Mitchell 21

influence the labeling of emotions associated with each poetic gameplay device.
There is also the possibility that some of the responses we have reported are the
result of repeated play, something that is inherent in the close reading process, but
that may not be representative of how most players would approach the work. We
also need to acknowledge, as Sicart (2009) points out, that “players are beings
who come to a game experience with the cultural baggage of previous game
experience” (p. 65). It is not clear whether all players would bring with them the
degree of gaming literacy that many of these games depend on for their poetic
techniques to be effective. Future work should confirm the emotions judged to
be elicited from each work by triangulation with other players, as well as
covering a broader range of works.
In this study, we have proposed to extend the ambit of poetic gameplay beyond
its original focus—as a defamiliarizing aesthetic device used to draw attention to
the art form—by showing that such devices also serve a narrative purpose in some
situations, such as in interactive life stories. The initial moments of defamiliariza-
tion indeed draw the player’s attention to the form, but the reader subsequently
integrates the moment of defamiliarization and the emotion elicited into an under-
standing of the overall narrative, producing a deeper appreciation of the life story.
Despite our focus on life stories, the findings are relevant to poetic gameplay as a
whole, as well as for any forms of storytelling that involve computer-mediated
interactivity. For example, our findings suggest that concepts such as ludonarrative
dissonance, which are normally seen as disruptive to the experience of narrative
within a game, could instead be used deliberately as a poetic device, where the
player weaves the initial discomfort into a larger experience, so that what was
initially experienced as dissonance results in ludonarrative resonance when the
player realizes that the poetic device is part of a larger meaning-making mechan-
ism. This insight provides a new perspective on the relationship between gameplay
and narrative. The interactive feedback loop as a mechanism of artistic expression
is still in its infancy, and so too are interactive life stories as a genre. Much of their
expressive potential remains to be explored, and this article represents but an early
step in this exploration.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This study has been funded by Singapore Ministry of
Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 grant FY2015-FRC2-004, “Exploring ‘Literary’
Devices for Poetic Interactivity.”
22 Games and Culture XX(X)

ORCID iD
Evelyn C. Chew https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3837-2195
Alex Mitchell https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7849-7262

Notes
1. Not all poetic gameplay involves alterations to the interactive feedback loop, although
many of them do. In this study, the focus is on the subset of poetic gameplay devices that
do make use of these feedback loop alterations, often also playing with expectations.
2. Being wholly subjective, this methodological approach, like Bardzell’s (2008) inter-
action criticism, is open to critique about the generalizability of interpretations but has
the advantage of accessing nuanced interpretations at a level unavailable to the posi-
tivistic researcher.
3. Although it is tempting to associate alterations to manipulation rules with local agency and
change to goal rules with global agency, such an association would be unwarranted. While
alterations to manipulation rules usually do affect local agency, not all goal rule alterations
effect changes at the level of global agency—in many of the life narratives, no alternative
outcome exists, so that global agency is absent. Goal rule alterations cannot therefore be
equated with global agency; yet they affect agency at a level beyond the local level.
4. Although no other instance of this device occurred in the life stories examined, the device
as such is not unknown. A non-life story example occurs in the well-known scene of
Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy VII (Square Enix, 1997), where agency is abruptly taken
out of the player’s hands and the enemy Sepiroth kills her.
5. A similar mechanism occurs in the fictional video game The Walking Dead (Telltale
Games, 2012), where the player is forced to hack at and kill his character’s zombified
brother in order to progress in the game.
6. This also differs from “false choice” in that the accent is not on the ability to choose
options with likely consequences but on the availability of different kinds of actions.

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28 Games and Culture XX(X)

Author Biographies
Evelyn C. Chew received her PhD from the Department of Communications and New Media
at the National University of Singapore, where she previously majored in English literature
and psychology. She also holds an MA in international communications (Macquarie, Sydney).
Her research interests include life story narratives and empathy, and she is particularly
interested in how interactive digital media and affords new ways of communicating a lived
experience.
Alex Mitchell is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications and New Media
at the National University of Singapore. His research investigates computer-based art and
entertainment, focusing in particular on games and interactive stories. Recent publications
include “Making it Unfamiliar in the Right Way: An Empirical Study of Poetic Gameplay”
(DiGRA 2017) and “Antimimetic Rereading and Defamiliarization in Save the Date”
(DiGRA 2018). He is a member of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Story-
telling steering committee.