The majority of interactive narrative games allow the player to save their progress as the game unfolds. These save game options are either automatically enforced or manual. However, there is an increasing trend for interactive narrative games to be ‘irreversible’. In such cases, this makes it difficult for the player to load or access previous save games. As a result, the player’s sense of agency changes within the game, as the stakes and consequences of their story decisions are more difficult to reverse, and thus take on a feeling of permanence. Through close readings of The Walking Dead: Season One, Sorcery! and Undertale, this paper aims to provide an initial framework for irreversible storygames by (i) defining the different types of irreversibility by analyzing three games in which the form of irreversibility differs, and (ii) exploring subjective factors of the user experience that may be impacted by the different types of irreversibility.
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This research is funded in part under the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 grant FY2018-FRC2-003, “Understanding Repeat Engagement with Dynamically Changing Computational Media”.
Author information Authors and AffiliationsNational University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Kenneth Tan & Alex Mitchell
Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore, Singapore
Kenneth Tan
Correspondence to Alex Mitchell .
Editor information Editors and AffiliationsUniversity of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Anne Sullivan
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
R. Michael Young
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper Cite this paperTan, K., Mitchell, A. (2019). Choose Your Permanent Adventure: Towards a Framework for Irreversible Storygames. In: Cardona-Rivera, R., Sullivan, A., Young, R. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11869. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_16
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Published: 22 October 2019
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33894-7
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