"I need to play three times before I kind of understand"

Abstract

Replay of interactive stories is an essential characteristic of the medium, enabling players to both see whether their choices impact the narrative, and work towards an understanding of the story and underlying system. Despite the centrality of replay to the form, little work has been done to investigate what motivates people to replay interactive stories, or when and why they stop replaying. In this paper, we report on the results of an exploratory qualitative observational study of 12 participants (aged 22 to 28) replaying the visual novel The Shadows that Run Alongside Our Car, a short work that presents a post-apocalyptic survival story from the perspective of two different playable characters and involves four dialogue choices leading to one of three possible endings. Unlike previous models of rereading, our observations suggest that players' reasons for deciding whether or not to replay change fluidly as their sense of closure changes, and players are deciding based not just on whether they have reached closure, but also on their estimate of the likelihood of seeing something new or moving closer to closure versus the effort required to replay. This suggests a need to rethink earlier, more simplistic models of rereading in interactive stories.