1. Introduction
Interactive narratives place players in a position where their actions, explorations, or decisions shape the story. Traditionally, game design has framed this as player “agency,” emphasizing branching paths, dialogue options, and quest structures. As Salen and Zimmerman (2004, p. 2) note, “games are systems in which players engage in artificial conflict,” with agency often framed around how those conflicts branch and resolve. This essay argues that interactive narratives blend player choices with environmental influences to create complex storytelling.
However, two alternative frameworks, New Materialism and Post-Structuralism, propose different ways of understanding how games generate meaning and how agency is distributed. New Materialism shifts focus to environments and objects, suggesting that these elements are not passive backdrops but active participants in storytelling. Post-structuralism challenges the notion of a single authoritative author or narrator, proposing instead that the text, here, the game, develops multiple meanings through the interplay of player interpretation, design systems, and environmental cues.
To illustrate these perspectives, this essay compares three distinct titles: Detroit: Become Human, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Inside. Detroit offers a highly branching narrative where a player’s choices can alter the game’s conclusion and moral tone. Hellblade provides a largely linear path but focuses on immersive psychological elements, heightening the sense that the world itself “talks” to the player through sounds and illusions. Inside employs minimal dialogue or explicit exposition, relying on environmental details to evoke strong emotional and interpretive responses.
2. Agency in Three Frameworks
When considering agency, the traditional perspective centers on the player’s capacity to make choices that significantly affect the narrative outcome. This approach typically manifests in features such as branching storylines, multiple endings, or character-driven dialogues. Aarseth (1997, p. 1) introduces the concept of “ergodic literature,” noting that “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text,” which aligns with how interactive narratives demand active player participation.
By contrast, a New Materialist view portrays agency as shared with the environment, objects, and even game mechanics. Rather than existing solely in the player’s ability to choose, agency also emerges in the physical or digital world itself, whose qualities can compel, restrict, or guide player actions. Post-structuralism broadens the lens further by suggesting that no single “authority” determines the story’s final meaning or direction. Instead, meaning is decentralized among designers, players, environments, systems, and hidden cues.
In practical terms, the traditional approach highlights “what the player can do,” the New Materialist approach studies “what the non-human elements do,” and the Post-Structuralist approach studies “how no single perspective dominates.” Each viewpoint reveals different facets of a game’s narrative construction, from explicit branching to subtle atmospheric guidance. Recognizing these differences helps us see that agency is neither purely a matter of the player’s conscious decisions nor entirely an environmental phenomenon but a dynamic interplay that can unfold in varied ways.
3. Traditional Perspective in Detroit, Hellblade, and Inside
In a traditional lens, interactive narratives hinge on how much control players wield to direct the storyline. Detroit: Become Human exemplifies this by offering multiple endings, character paths, and moral ramifications. Every major decision reverberates through the plot, granting players a distinct feeling that they are actively sculpting the fate of the android protagonists. The game’s dialogue trees and branching scenarios highlight classic forms of interactive agency.
By contrast, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is more linear, yet it retains a degree of traditional agency through puzzle-solving and moment-to-moment combat. Players control Senua directly, guiding her through claustrophobic environments and psychological challenges. While the final outcome remains singular, the real-time decisions in how to fight or navigate still carry the hallmarks of player empowerment, albeit in a more constrained scope than Detroit’s branching paths.
In Inside, players progress through a side-scrolling puzzle world with no alternate endings or moral dilemmas, but traditional agency persists in the form of puzzle-solving. Each obstacle, whether it involves stealth, platforming, or activating devices, demands input and timing from the player. Though the overarching narrative never changes, the act of “successfully proceeding” depends on the player’s skill and ingenuity. Within this narrower structure, players still experience the fundamental notion of agency: their input propels the story forward.
Together, these examples demonstrate how the traditional perspective focuses on the degree of direct control the player exercises. Detroit presents a broad tapestry of branching threads, Hellblade offers tight but impactful control in a linear journey, and Inside showcases puzzle-driven forward motion as a subtler expression of player influence.
4. New Materialism in Detroit, Hellblade, and Inside
From a New Materialist point of view, objects, settings, and atmospheric cues possess agency of their own, actively co-creating the story with the player. Bennett (2010, p. xvi) refers to “vibrant matter,” emphasizing that objects can “act as quasi agents,” suggesting these environments are not mere backdrops but active, co-creative forces in shaping the player’s narrative experience.
In Detroit, beyond the overt branching choices, the game’s environments impose tangible pressures. The “From the Dead” junkyard scene compels Marcus to rebuild himself from discarded android parts, suggesting that the location itself wields narrative force. The city’s prejudice-laden streets likewise shape how players perceive the moral tension between humans and androids, illustrating how material surroundings contribute to narrative momentum.
In Hellblade, the psychological torment of Senua manifests in both the visual design and the soundscape. According to Barad (2007, p. 33), “intra-action” implies that “distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their entangled inter-relating,” mirroring how Hellblade’s environment and the player’s perception co-constitute the narrative. The whispering voices, decaying waters, and shifting illusions not only create an eerie mood but also shape Senua’s and the player’s experience of each space.
Meanwhile, Inside relies almost entirely on its stark aesthetic and ominous architecture to guide the player’s emotional state. Corridors, silhouettes, and flickering lights instill dread and curiosity. Puzzles are embedded into these environments in such a way that they feel born from the physical structures themselves. The player’s forward motion is constrained and shaped by material elements, locking doors, rhythmic sentries, and mechanical contraptions, implying that the space moves the story along as much as any textual narration could.
Each game thus demonstrates how New Materialism recasts narrative agency: not strictly in the player’s volition, but also in the objects, spaces, and material forces that shape the interactive journey.
5. Post-Structuralism in Detroit, Hellblade, and Inside
Post-structuralism asserts that no single author or viewpoint commands absolute control over meaning. In Detroit, multiple branching endings and moral ambiguities disperse authorship between developers and players. Every choice a player makes spawns a different storyline, prompting the notion that there is no “right” path. Barthes (1977, p. 148) argues that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,” underscoring how players, rather than developers alone, finalize the meaning of each branching path. The game’s design fosters numerous overlapping truths, resisting the finality of a single canonical narrative.
In Hellblade, illusions and hallucinations dislodge any stable sense of reality. The player is never sure which events are genuinely occurring and which are distortions of Senua’s psychosis. This fragmentation of perspective situates meaning in the interplay between the game’s portrayal of mental illness and the player’s shifting interpretations. Foucault (1972, p. 45) insists that “there is no single, secret origin” of discourse, suggesting that Hellblade’s layered illusions and multiple voices form a mosaic of competing truths rather than a singular storyline. There is no single authoritative vantage, only a kaleidoscope of possible readings shaped by each new hallucination or puzzle sequence.
Inside pushes ambiguity further by offering no direct explanations at all. Players confront a dystopian environment where motivations, backstories, and final revelations remain elusive. As theories abound, some see commentary on industrial oppression, others find allegories of control or even meta-commentary on gaming, Inside’s narrative remains open-ended. Post-structuralism thus highlights that meaning emerges from the act of playing and interpreting rather than from a definitive authorial statement. The “truth” of Inside resides in the tension between what the game shows and what the player infers.
Across all three titles, Post-Structuralism encourages us to see how stories resist closure and meaning arises from the dynamic interaction between game design, environmental cues, and the player’s interpretative role.
6. All-in-One Perspective: Expanding Our Vision of Interactive Narratives
By integrating these frameworks, traditional, New Materialist, and Post-Structuralist, we uncover a more holistic picture of interactive narratives. Each lens captures a dimension of how games tell stories: the overt decisions in branching dialogue trees, the silent yet forceful interventions of physical environments, and the perpetual openness of interpretive meaning.
In Detroit, for example, a single scene can illustrate all three layers at once: a branching moral choice signals traditional agency, a grim environment exerts material influence, and a fluid sense of authorship emerges as the story branches in unpredictable ways. Hellblade reveals that even without branching endings, illusions and sensory manipulations let the environment function as a co-narrator, while the player wrestles with contradictory signals about Senua’s reality. Inside strips away dialogue almost entirely, leaving an interplay of puzzles and gloom-laden spaces that force players to become co-authors of the story’s meaning.
Together, these perspectives reveal that interactive narratives are powerful—games can focus on player choices, environmental influence, or layered meanings.
7. Conclusion
Interactive narratives need not be understood from a single vantage point. Rather, they thrive on the interplay between player-driven choices, the active role of the game’s environment, and the multiplicity of meanings that arise when authorship is shared among developers, systems, and players. Each inspected games demonstrate different balances of these elements, underscoring that agency does not stem solely from branching paths or linear storytelling but from the joint efforts of players, designed environments, and interpretive freedoms.
From a designer’s perspective, using insights from traditional, New Materialist, and Post-Structuralist theories broadens creative options. Storylines can incorporate explicit decision trees, subtle environmental prompts, and open-ended symbolism, all while embracing the notion that the final “message” is never fully locked down. Interactive narratives become spaces where player choices and design elements work together to shape the story.
8. References
Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Barthes, R. (1977). The death of the author. In S. Heath (Trans.), Image-music-text (pp. 142–148). Fontana Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. Pantheon Books.
Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press.
Key Game Scenes:
Detroit Become Human:
From the Dead Chapter: https://youtu.be/NL7X9m3e4uU
City Streets & Social Tension: https://youtu.be/4ba-ROJ9VH8
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice:
Environmental Soundscape & Whispering Voices: https://youtu.be/ZM-3zi5wzVg
Claustrophobic Environments: https://youtu.be/29f0nXsI8kgt=1901
Inside:
Puzzle-Solving Obstacles, Architectural Aesthetic: https://youtu.be/AmfHLHDgcZg
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