The player has to go through the boring process of walking about in order to make a mental picture of the surroundings. If they don’t, they cannot possibly know what the realm of their possibilities are.
Outlandish: I'm surprised that someone defending walking simulators would admit that they're boring to their critics. It seems impossible to deny that they aren't as excited as action-based games, so most of the debate centers around the strength of their message instead.
Sam’s words, though addressed to Katie, are also aimed at the player, serving as an invitation to connect and respect Sam’s choice. The request not to “hate me” is particularly poignant, given that the essential absence goes unfixed.
While I was playing Gone Home, I found it hard to see what the protagonist's role in the story was. Ultimately, I think their main purpose was to serve as a judge for the family's situation, since they are the most separated from Sam's issues with her parents. Similarly, our job as a player is to assess whether or not Sam made a good decision, which is why this ending is so impactful to the player.
Reading it we feel sympathy with all of them, and we see how they appeared to one another.
I find it interesting that this form of storytelling can lead people to have strong reactions despite lacking a clear narrative. Reading something as a news story or interview feels more direct than having it narrated, so even in fictional stories this format may allow us to feel more connected with characters than we would in a more structured story.
But the navigational software designed specifically for this purpose and celebrated by many proponents of literary hypertext is anything but empowering to the reader, even in comparison to the earliest Web browsers.3 For instance, it offers the navigating reader no way to mark links as having been already taken, and no way to mark a lexia so it can be easily jumped back to. Many of the stories written in this framework do not even mark which words are hot links within the lexia text. Instead, the reader has to click on a pop-up display of cryptic link names.
This represents the conflict between narratives and functionality that interactive games face. While the inderterminate text was created to free the reader from narrative, it may make it even harder for them to get any meaning from a story because it lacks any clear direction. Because of this, I think it is generally helpful for stories to have a clear narrative that give readers a way to start looking for meaning.