in a game like Gone Home or Tacoma, the world is inert until you have an effect on it. The fact that you are opening a cabinet and picking up an object and rotating it isn’t important to the game world… What’s important is that through affecting the game world, you’re creating (p. 131) your understanding of it. Through changing the game world, you are changing your consciousness of what it contains and what it means. There isn’t a lot of, “Walk through a door, hit a trigger, and watch this thing happen.” Everything that changes your perception of what the game means is through you interacting with what’s there and having an effect on the state of the world that in turn affects you. (qtd. in Suel-lentrop 2017)
In a game like Gone Home, I found it interesting that some items you were able to pick up even if it didn't change the trajectory of the story in the game. Even though these random objects and actions don’t actually change the game, they are important in the way the way the player interacts with the game and how it reshapes the player’s personal understanding and perspective of the story. In addition, I like how these random objects gives you more freedom to explore in a game that has reduced player agency as the game follows a specific path for the story.