An ugly corollary to this argument, advanced by some, was that “real games” shouldn’t be about the disenfranchised. Game stories shouldn’t be about women or queer people—like Dear Esther, like Gone Home, like many of the games the genre would eventually include—nor should such people be included among their creators.

Giving Shape to Anxiety

A linear story, no matter how complex, moves toward a single encompassing version of a complex human event. Even those multiform stories that offer multiple retellings of the same event often resolve into a single “true” version—the viewpoint of the uninvolved eyewitness or the actual reality the protagonists wind up in after the alternate realities have collapsed.

The navigation of the labyrinth is like pacing the floor; a physical manifestation of the effort to come to terms with the trauma, it represents the mind’s repeated efforts to keep returning to a shocking event in an effort to absorb it and, finally, get past it.

The potential of the labyrinth as a participatory narrative form would seem to lie somewhere between the two, in stories that are goal driven enough to guide navigation but open-ended enough to allow free exploration and that display a satisfying dramatic structure no matter how the interactor chooses to traverse the space. (17)